The Horizon of Decolonial Communism 9781304785725

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To Mumia Abu-Jamal and all prisoners of Empire.

The Horizon of Decolonial Communism M. Sanchez

Universal Press 2024

The Horizon of Decolonial Communism © 2024 by M. Sanchez is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

Published January 2024 Book design by M. Sanchez Cover photo by Giuseppe Nifosi ISBN 978-1-304-78572-5

Imprint: Lulu.com

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for all who have known me, and who have spoken to me over the years. The gift of your perspectives have been incredibly important to my work. I could not write this without that gift. I cannot become anything without your association. I deeply appreciate your company and insight. You are all my Beloved.

Table of Contents

Foreword—Horizons……………………………. 1 Part I: Beginnings 1. Lived Experience………………….………….… 23 2. Dialectic of Freedom………………………..….. 41 3. Communalism and Communism.……………. 85 4. Americanism….…………………….……….… 109 Part II: Ancestors, Descendants, Kin 5. Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques.…….… 153 6. New Unity………………………………….…. 205 7. Revolution of the Everyday………………….. 221 8. Fascist Decoloniality.…….………….………… 275 Part III: Reinterpretations 9. Bourgeois Civilization…………………….….. 317 10.Abolition of Property……………………….… 351 Conclusion—Universal History…..……….… 369 Bibliography…..……………………………………. 381 Index…….……………………………………..……. 415

Horizons

We need a Party. But to be We, the We that expresses ourselves in the Party, We need to stand as We. To act as We demands a decision. Modern capitalism proliferates choices (for those with the money to spend). Particularly if you live in the United States, you can choose between seemingly infinite brands of shampoo, chips, shoes, cigarettes… But these choices are mere quantities. They can quite unproblematically be assigned a barcode, and they are literally interchangeable. When we go to the supermarket, we compare choices by quantified measures like price, sodium composition, best-by date… These choices are not decisive. The emergence of We cannot be but a product of decision —qualitative, creative, even destructive decisions. This decisiveness is both an exercise of freedom in the name of freedom—as opposed to that exercise of unfreedom in the name of freedom which we are used to in everyday life—and it is an acceptance of loss. Loss of what exists, loss of the old self that we know in this world, loss of the quantified plans we make for our future. But that loss is also a creation, a revolutionary struggle of transformation. We cannot make peace with capital, which subordinates collectivity and cooperation to regimes of accumulation. But we also cannot act beyond society. We are too much of its products, and it is too dense to grow a new world within its gaps. The gaps of capitalism are breathing room and sites to mount resistance, but they are not revolutionary destruction. Modern communism, where it has acted as a mass political force, has always been a faction within bourgeois society. Early communists like Robert Owen and Étienne Cabet may

Horizons have tried to escape capital into their Utopias, but their very attempts to escape into the borderlands of North America1 merely became a handful among many fronts in the colonization of the continent for the exploitation of land and labor.2 The present immanence of communism within capitalism itself is true, whether we admit it or not. But communism cannot become actualized as a civilization unto itself without the participation of a We. We communists must constitute ourselves into an autonomous political faction of capitalist society, a bloc which positions itself relative to the entire field of political alliances, balances of power, trickeries, integrations, expressions, violence...3 We must be our own. We must be Communism as a united and coherent force unto itself, but we can only be so in a conscious relationship to the social totality as a whole.4 To be such a force means to be a Party. But not a party in the bureaucrat-media-NonGovernmental-Organization sense. like the United States Democratic Party, or in the parliamentary sense, like the German Die Linke. This is a question of the Party in a broader, yet also more exclusive sense. Karl Marx spoke of it as the “historical party,” which is distinguished from formal organizations—those “ephemeral parties” which come into being and pass away as formal groups of people with member lists, constitutions, procedures, etc.5 The historical Communist Party is not identical to a formal party organization. This Communist Party is rather that movement which expresses itself in forms.6 It is whatever embodies the active force of communist revolution in a given historical situation.7 The Communist Party might be described as the Zeitgeist , the radical truth of the moment.8 The Communist Party expresses the temporally-spatially (historically) defined universal. It expresses what is universal and revolutionary within a juncture. Form is necessary for the self-articulation of this Communist Party. But these must be organizational forms which are fit to ensure political continuity and to sustain this presence of the universal across moments and across generations.9 The Communist Party is an active decision, it is putting I in We. The Party is not many I’s melted down into one big I, but the universal within and between the multitude of I’s in their becoming a We. No I is closed—it is not self-complete or even self-coherent. The I is open, and its openness is what enables it to constitute the Party. The Party does not absorb the I. Where a

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez formal party attempts homogeneity, it extinguishes its own vitality in the gray sludge of bureaucracy. Rather than crude formal unity, it is what is universal, politically revolutionary in the I that constitutes the universal We of the Communist Party. But there are limitations of the We in our world . Everywhere, We are fragmented and blocked by atomization, consumerism, coloniality, patriarchy, domination, integration, retreat… The old forms of mass politics which the old formal Communist Parties acted through have been gutted since the tail end of the 20th century.10 If there are to be mass politics again, rather than episodic explosions of social media-centered activity, then We must compose ourselves by excruciating effort. We cannot limit this We to a rebirth of democracy, however. We are much more than that. Democracy confines itself to the interstices of atomized individuals, measuring the quantities of their polled opinions and votes to count up majorities and minorities.11 But the communist revolution’s heart cannot be found beating amidst these measured masses, who can be expressed even in percentages of majorities and minorities. Communism cannot spring forth from the interchangeable, from majority opinion, from citizenship.12 Communism cannot be said to embody true democracy, since it does not premise itself on the political self-determination of that abstraction, “the people.” We are not the People. We are freely associated, unique individualities, who desire to transform everything so that individuality may freely flourish. While democracy has traces of communism, as bourgeois mass society as a whole does, communism cannot be defined simply as true democracy.13 The development of communism from out of bourgeois society can in fact be measured by how far we manage to pull ourselves beyond democracy, even if through democratic means of organizing proletarian political rule.14 The majoritarianism associated with democracy leads to complacency and conservatism in normal conditions, particularly as political majorities are formed by the mechanisms of state power, media, and bureaucracy rather than being ready-made.15 This is even more true in those countries where citizen-majoritarianism leads to genocidal ends, such as Israel. Communism must be a mass movement, but need not be a majority. The Communist Party furthermore cannot be identical to the mass proletarian movement as a whole—such an aspiration would lead to

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Horizons marginalization, bureaucracy, or dogmatic commandism.16 The Party does not mandate, nor does it educate from outside, but expresses what is universal and revolutionary immanently within proletarian mass politics.17 The Communist Party articulates, it does not speak for or speak over. We can and must use the forms and ethics of democracy, but We transcend it. We live neither as a majority nor a minority. Communism cannot be true democracy, but what is true in democracy points towards communism. Democracy is a means for us to express ourselves, to coordinate ourselves, to act, but it is not our end. We defend and fight to expand democratic rights, but we are not primarily democrats. Democracy is only one among many tools for our self-articulation, right alongside the most iron of discipline, the most sovereign of force, and the most individual of actions. The question of revolution is not one of constituting a majority, but of reaching a critical mass. It is a question of whether We can seize a revolutionary situation.18 The question is not the fetishism of a form, but whether the forms are appropriate means in a given situation for the self-articulation of the Party. The Communist Party cannot be subordinated to any form or measure. It is the seed of a fundamentally new civilization. It builds that new civilization by embodying proletarian political hegemony over bourgeois society, forcibly struggling to smash the old and build the new. Communist civilization will be a society where all are the blossoms of the free association cultivated through the Communist Party.

Genealogies and Horizons But the historical Communist Party, if it is to express the universal horizon of a new world, can only do so by struggling against the grain of the present world order. To struggle against the grain, one must know what one is tearing apart—intimately. We are not confronting the world from outside, but trying to tear our way out from within it. And that world is a Eurocentered one. It is a system arranged with all roads leading to Europe. This does not mean that the prime moments of value production occur in the West. Quite the opposite. Instead, capital accumulation is centered in the West, as is the linear historical narrative of world history. The West is supposed to be the culmination of history and the center of the world. In a way, this is true—but it only reveals the necessity for the destruction of the world order. Eurocentered bourgeois civilization is the culmination of a universal history of class

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez societies, and the struggle against capital is also necessarily a struggle against Eurocentrism. In other words, communism must be decolonial in order to be thoroughly opposed to the world as it presently is. The modern world is that of 1492, and so communism must be the transcendence of 1492. I do not mean 1492 as a chronological year on the Gregorian calendar, but 1492 in the sense of a historical break—the premiere emergence of a truly global system out of the European project to colonize the “Americas.”19 1492 was not the emergence of coloniality as such, but the beginning of a world premised fundamentally on the coloniality of power.20 There are many forms of domination across the history of class societies, but these coagulate into the forms of colonization in the modern class society of capitalism. It is not that capitalism conjures class society and colonization, but that it consummates it.21 The proletariat, the negativity of the system itself, has always also been the wretched of the earth. What G. W. F. Hegel called the rabble, those who find themselves in the ghettos of civil society, Marx called the modern proletariat.22 This dispossessed class is not confined to national systems, but exists in the world order as a whole. As the Marxist Eric R. Wolf noted, the narrow Eurocentric sense of the proletariat falls away in the face of the fact that “[r]acial terms mirror the political process by which populations of whole continents were turned into providers of coerced surplus labor.”23 Capital is bound up in and articulates itself through the coloniality of power. Living labor, the labor of the wretched of the earth, finds itself as the underside of capital. For this reason, Marxism and decolonization have never been so far apart as we may think today. The two red threads cut deep into the world, revealing sedimentations of butchered viscera and misery beneath its sleek exterior. Marxism emerged from the most principled current of the European worker’s movement, and decolonization emerged as a response to the spread of Euro-bourgeois civilization. The two have never been identical perspectives. Importantly, Marxism’s historical development into a global movement saw Marxists wrestle with a key problem—the fundamental internal differentiation of the modern world. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the fathers of modern communism, made great miscalculations on this issue during their careers. They considered the establishment of modern, bourgeois nations as a rite of passage for capitalist development.24 The constitution of national

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Horizons systems with national citizenries, a bourgeois-democratic task, went hand in hand with the maturing of capital. As the Marxist Robert Biel argues, they initially considered capital to tend towards a homogenous, flat world-system of more-or-less identical units for capitalist production.25 In content, nations were emptied of difference, while in form, their national security, territory, and populations became mere means for the coordination of a global capitalist system. The most advanced capitalist countries, such as England, thus offered a model of development which the backwards countries would, more or less, follow unproblematically. Colonization could serve as a means for the unification of the world into a homogenous, single general capital, preparing the way for global revolution. However, the pair began to realize the illegitimacy of this analysis in the course of their political activity and study. The national struggle of Ireland in particular moved them to deeper consideration. Over the course of the 19th century the English workers proved to be backwards owing in part to this colonial relation. Rather than the advanced English workers liberating the backwards Irish colony, it looked as if Irish self-emancipation would have to be the spark that would jolt English workers into revolutionary action.26 The differentiation of the world was not immaterial in relation to the articulation of a unified global capitalist system, but instead essential. Capitalist development did not occur along a single line, but variously. The general capital, or capitalist system as a whole, could only operate on the level of the global system rather than being replicated in miniature within each national unit.27 Colonization was not something which unified the world homogeneously, but unified it in its differentiation itself. Colonization was thus an impediment to ‘normal' development for many countries, in particular India.28 Anti-colonial struggle was not only necessary to break the forces of political integration within the metropole of the world order, but for the development of advanced revolutionary consciousness in the peripheries.29 This consciousness could include not only modernization projects, but ‘traditionalism’—the self-defense of communal forms of life among peasants and indigenous peoples could be revolutionary.30 Despite their later critiques of Eurocentrism, however, Marx and Engels never made a decisive break with it. They still evaluated decolonial struggles in relation to the metropole’s needs. In other words, they thought from the perspective of Europe.31 If Marxism were to

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez become a movement of the global periphery, and therefore a global movement, it would have to make a conscious choice to pick up the decolonial thread in Marx and Engels rather than stretch their mistakes into a barrier for integration, reformism, and complacency. This struggle, where the One of Marxism threatened to divide into Two, took place across the history of the Second International. Both anti-colonialism and proto-fascist racialism clamored side by side within the organization.32 The outbreak of World War I cleaved the International in two, though the dividing lines had already been drawn. From this crisis in Marxism, a decision had to be made. Among those who opposed defenseism and participation in the slaughter of worker by worker, a new anti-colonialism emerged. With an eye to the colonized of the world, drawn into the war by the metropolitan masters, militant communists began to advocate the alliance of social revolution and decolonization.33 Most exemplary among these was the Russian Bolshevik Vladimir Lenin. Lenin, again and again, emphasized the importance of national liberation as a principle. To other communists, he appeared to be manically intransigent on the issue.34 To Lenin, however, the relevance was clear. The capitalist world was differentiated through and through. There could not be an international communism without working through this:

“In real life the International is composed of workers divided into oppressor and oppressed nations. If its action is to be monistic, its propaganda must not be the same for both. That is how we should regard the matter in the light of real (not Dühringian) ‘monism’, Marxist materialism.”35

But even Lenin understood decolonization first and foremost in the terms of national liberation. Like Marx and Engels, he considered these struggles to be “democratic tasks, the tasks of overthrowing foreign oppression.”36 He basically agreed with the orthodox analysis of this struggle as necessary to establish a unified capitalist system—though, in his view, this would carry over directly into the self-destruction of the capitalist system and the emergence of socialism.37 Famously, he advocated that a strategy for proletarian revolution in the global periphery, among the “weakest links” of the capitalist system, that would navigate through two

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Horizons modalities—bourgeois-democratic and communist.38 He considered the proletariat to be the most vital force of democratic struggles, as opposed to the vacillating or even complacent bourgeoisie (an evaluation very similar to that of Marx and Engels).39 Yet within this perspective, seeds of complacency lay waiting to be fertilized and bloom. And bloom they did, as early as 1921. In the wake of the 1917 revolution, and the failure of the 1918-1919 German revolution, the Bolsheviks turned to the East for signs of the future. There, they found kin in the Young Turk movement, considering it to be a model for revolution across Asia. In their eyes, the Young Turks were progressive bourgeois revolutionaries, and therefore a perfect model for the kind of movement that the revolutionary Russian proletariat needed to ally with against the repression of Europe. But Turkey also held its own indigenous communist movement, as committed to revolution as any in Europe. The Bolsheviks advised that they support the Young Turks in bourgeois-democratic tasks and not get ahead of themselves into socialist revolution, which would sabotage the necessities of nation-building. They continued to offer this advice even after the Turkish state slaughtered communists en masse.40 This analysis of the Turkish situation even led the Bolsheviks to look upon the genocidaire Enver Pasha as a possible useful ally during the 1920 Baku Congress—despite knowing full well what he had done to Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians (and, according to Grigory Zinoviev, confronting him with this fact face-to-face).41 Any notion of Pasha’s usefulness later soured for them when he joined the Basmachi Revolt against Bolshevism, rather than aiding the Red Army’s struggle against the rebels as he had previously agreed to.42 The furthest limitations of the Old Bolsheviks in decolonization are embodied in the figure of Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, a Muslim Tatar. Coming from the perspective of a colonized people, Sultan-Galiev considered decolonization to be of prime importance for social revolution. He radicalized Lenin’s evaluation of the European working class, denouncing settler-colonialism and considering the entire metropolitan world to live at the expense of the colonized.43 SultanGaliev’s perspective on revolution was almost the exact reverse of Marx and Engels’; rather than the self-emancipation of the periphery creating an opportunity for the more advanced revolutions of the core, he believed that the stirrings of the core (for example, the German revolution) would

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez create an opportunity for the more advanced revolutions of the periphery.44 The wretched of the earth, the underside of the world, held the future in their hands. Though Lenin was critical of figures like Sultan-Galiev, considering them to tend towards an excessive nationalism, he protected them from those other Bolsheviks who acted in hostility towards ‘minority’ nationalism.45 Lenin only acted harshly towards ‘minority’ nationalisms where he considered them to be tied to international reaction (for example, the White Army) or to impede the democratic development of a peripheral nation.46 The charges of nationalism towards Sultan-Galiev held weight, however—he called for a unity of Muslims as a single people, and expressed certain pan-Turanist understandings of national liberation.47 Yet the other Bolsheviks were not exactly innocent of such mistakes, since they held such great admiration for the Young Turks. After Lenin’s death, the atmosphere in the Soviet Union turned hostile towards ‘minority’ nationalists like Sultan-Galiev, leading to his marginalization and eventual execution.48 Sultan-Galiev’s radicalization of Bolshevism within and against Bolshevism-as-it-was would not be the last of its kind. The revolutionary turn to Asia extended far beyond Central Asia, all the way into the emergent nation of China. Just as in Turkey, many Bolsheviks (in particular Joseph Stalin) considered bourgeois-democratic revolution to be an initial priority for. The Chinese movement, and so supported the Nationalists in their struggle to ‘modernize’ the country against the remnants of ‘feudalism.’49 The Communist International told the Communist Party of China to follow suit. The Party did, up until the disastrous 1927 Shanghai Massacre, carried out by the Nationalist dictator Jiang Jieshi against the urban center of the Party. The Massacre proved the bankruptcy of this approach, and conversely empowered that faction of the Party which argued that the social revolution would have to begin in the countryside—which represented the majority of China. Key among the advocates of this thread was the young Mao Zedong.50 The global visibility of the Communist Party in its role struggling against Japanese imperialism and its victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 brought it to prominence as the first major representative of a ‘Third World Marxism.’ This was a non-European, non-white nation emerging on the global stage. It was led by militants articulating Marxism, an originally European movement, in indigenous terms—Mao was particularly well-known for his education

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Horizons in both Chinese and Western classics.51 Though they were not the first to do this—the 1920s had been filled with figures articulating relationships between decolonization and Bolshevism, from Muhammad Iqbal to José Carlos Mariátegui—they were one of the key forces in globalizing the thread which Sultan-Galiev had begun a generation before. Thus, the emergence of Maoism on the global stage can be considered decisive in the genealogy of decolonial communism. The truth of this is especially evident when one traces the influence of Maoism on contemporary decolonial movements. In continental Africa, Maoism was a core influence for the Tanzania African National Union and its radical expression of ‘African socialism’ in the 1967 Arusha Declaration.52 Fausto Reinaga (Quechua Aymara), the father of indianismo in Bolivia, declared his sympathy with Mao-era China as another colored people rebelling against the West —despite his fundamental ideological disagreements with Maoism.53 Through the struggles the ‘minorities’ and indigenous peoples of the world, Maoism was radicalized far beyond the statements of Mao Zedong himself. This was not unlike what Sultan-Galiev had done to Bolshevism. In North America, Maoism was the discourse through which the Black Panther Party (BPP) expressed its Marxist form of Black Power. The Panthers had greater continuity with local Black radical traditions than with Chinese Maoism, but to them, Maoism represented the bond between them and global decolonization.54 The Panthers’ Maoist-inflected interpretation of decolonial communism spread to the far reaches of the earth, influencing decolonial movements in Canada, South Africa, Palestine, New Zealand, and Australia.55 Black radical traditions had long been a key model for decolonial movements worldwide. Pantherism was the newest iteration of that influence. The indigenization, in settler-colonial contexts, of Pantherism (and Maoism more broadly) heavily influenced the development of modern decolonial critique. Even within the U. S., the radical faction of Indigenous sovereignty represented by the American Indian Movement (AIM) was influenced foundationally by Pantherism.56 The historical moment represented by Pantherism is still a major expanse of the ground which modern communism and decolonization stand on.57 Contemporary decolonization thus cannot be thought of separately from communism, and vice versa. But this does not mean that the relationship between the two is now simple and straightforward, only needing to be cleared up by wiping away a thin veil of illusion. Rather, decolonization is not homogeneous, and neither

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez is communism—especially not in an age when the international movement has been fractured. There is a reason that the 1979 Iranian Revolution gave such a jolt to so many radicals. This was a primarily urban revolution, with a significant role played by proletarians, which was dominated not by communists, but by Shia radicals.58 Led by Ruhollah Khomeini, they purged communists in the same moment that they declared themselves as a force of decolonization intransigently opposed to Eurocentrism.59 During the 1979-1981 hostage crisis, the revolutionaries released African-American hostages, claiming sympathy with their oppression by American white supremacy.60 The Revolution blasted through the gap between communism and the newer generations of decolonization. The 1979 Revolution was not merely empty rhetoric. It was genuinely a decolonial project, and that is exactly the problem for formulating any kind of decolonial communism in the present era. We cannot think of the two as simply identical, because We find ourselves looking up at the thread of coloniality which communism must confront within itself and the thread of conservatism which decoloniality must confront within itself. I consider decolonization and communism to contain the truth of each other, but to discover this truth within each requires laborious struggle. We cannot constitute decolonial communism without working through the histories and presents of communism and decolonization. Only by doing this can we become a new generation, and rebirth the historical Communist Party on solid ground. Others have already expressed this need. I claim only to offer sketches, with my eyes towards the horizon. The re-emergence of the Communist Party demands committed struggle and the development of a strongly emancipatory political culture. We cannot consider this to be a linear step from point A to B, because to do so would impede our travels along the path to the communist horizon. In order to realize a free society, where all are kin, we must learn to free the world around us, and thus to free ourselves. We can only do this through a community of life. We can only establish a community of life by consciously struggling against the marks of capital and coloniality which surround and permeate us. Now is the time to pick the pieces of Our body up, constitute Ourself together into a sturdier shape, and begin once again walking towards the horizon. But we can only do so if we know where We have come from, where We are, and where We must travel.

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Horizons Footnotes 1 Throughout

the text, I use terms such as ‘America,’ ‘North America,’ ‘Latin America’ etc. I do not do so without awareness of their colonial implications—’America’ originates with the so-called discoverer Amerigo Vespucci, and ‘Latin America’ originates with criollo projects of nation-building. I do not oppose the use of such terms as Turtle Island to unsettle the complacency buried in regular, casual use of ‘America’ and other terms, which conceal a history of colonization (and the power to name and claim). However, I consider the constitution of the so-called ‘Americas’ as a coherent region of the world to be itself colonial. To extend pre-colonial Indigenous terms for particular places into continental names is only a political myth, though useful for the unsettling of naming. Anahuac, for instance, never referred to the territorial scope of modern ‘Mexico’ before its modern reinterpretation. We must understand the coloniality of the modern world as it exists in order to decolonize, and this extends to how we consider its geography. Thus, I use ‘America’ etc. to speak of the colonial present, using the name for convenience of understanding as well. How geography and place-naming will be transformed in the course of decolonization is not up to me to decide. 2 “The significance of critical utopian socialism and communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modem class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed more reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavor, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realization of their social utopias, of founding isolated ‘phalanstères,’ of establishing ‘home colonies,’ of setting up a ‘Little lcaria’—duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem—and to realize al these castles in the air they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degree they sink into the category of the reactionary conservative socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto (New York, New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 241. 3 Thus the Party cannot merely indulge in lesser-evilism, opportunistically try to take the winning side, or tail behind the most ‘progressive’ factions of bourgeois society. Such a principle extends to global bourgeois society as well— the ‘underdog’ states, like the Russian Federation, are not to be supported as foils to the United States and other Western countries. The Party acts within bourgeois society, but is politically autonomous: “We want the abolition of classes. What is the means of achieving it? The only means is political domination of the proletariat. For all this, now that it is acknowledged by one and all, we are told not to meddle with politics. The abstentionists say they are revolutionaries, even revolutionaries par excellence. Yet revolution is a supreme political act and those who want revolution must also want the means of achieving it, that is, political action, which prepares the ground for revolution and provides the workers with the revolutionary training without which they are sure to become the dupes of the Favres and Pyats the morning after the battle. However, our politics must be working-class politics. The workers' party must never be the tagtail of any bourgeois party; it must be independent and have its goal and its own policy,” Karl Marx, “Apropos Of Working-Class Political Action,” September 21, 1871, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/09/21.htm.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez 4 Vladimir

Lenin’s response to the anti-parliamentarism of the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács, and the latter’s subsequent re-evaluation, is especially illustrative of this. Lenin said against Lukács: “G. L.’s article is very Leftwing, and very poor. Its Marxism is purely verbal; its distinction between “defensive” and “offensive” tactics is artificial; it gives no concrete analysis of precise and definite historical situations; it takes no account of what is most essential (the need to take over and to learn to take over, all fields of work and all institutions in which the bourgeoisie exerts its influence over the masses, etc.),” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “For the Countries of South-Eastern Europe (in German), Vienna,” trans. Julius Katzer (Kommunismus: Journal of the Communist International, June 12, 1920), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jun/12.htm. Lukács in turn re-evaluated his older position, restating his understanding of totality more in line with that of Lenin: “Only knowledge of the historical context in which the proletarian party has to act can give a real understanding of the problem of party organization, which depends on the immense, world-historical tasks which the period of declining capitalism places before the proletariat—the immense, world-historical responSibility these tasks lay on the shoulders of its conscious leaders. Because the party, on the basis of its knowledge of society in its totality, represents the interests of the whole proletariat (and in doing so mediates the interests of all the oppressed—the future of mankind), it must unite within it all the contradictions in which the tasks that arise from the very heart of this social totality are expressed,” Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2009), p. 34. See also Brian Williams, “Lenin versus the Early Lukács,” Socialist Action (blog), February 10, 2011, http://www.socialistaction.net/2011/02/10/lenin-versus-theearly-lukacs/. 5 “I would point out d'abord that, after the ‘League’ had been disbanded at my behest in November 1852, I never belonged to any society again, whether secret or public; that the party, therefore, in this wholly ephemeral sense, ceased to exist for me 8 years ago. The lectures on political economy I gave, after the appearance of my book (in the autumn of 1859), to a few picked working men, amongst whom were also former members of the League, had nothing in common with an exclusive society — less even than, say, Mr Gerstenberg’s lectures to the Schiller Committee[...] I have frankly stated my views, with which I trust you are largely in agreement. Moreover, I have tried to dispel the misunderstanding arising out of the impression that by ‘party’ I meant a ‘League’ that expired eight years ago, or an editorial board that was disbanded twelve years ago. By party, I meant the party in the broad historical sense,” Karl Marx, “Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath in London,” February 29, 1860, Marxists Internet Archive, https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1860/letters/60_02_29.htm. See also Jacques Camatte, “Origin and Function of the Party Form,” 1974, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/ archive/camatte/origin.htm. 6 “Irrespective of whether the proletarian class can ‘conquer’ more or less unchanged the surpassed state apparatus following the illusion of the Marxist reformists, or whether it can only really appropriate it according to revolutionary Marxist theory by radically ‘smashing’ its surpassed form and ‘replacing"’it through a new voluntary created form - until then, in either case this state will differ from the bourgeois state in the period of revolutionary transformation of capitalist into Communist society only through its class nature and its social function, but not through its political form. The true secret of the revolutionary commune, the revolutionary council system, and every other historical manifestation of government of the working class exists in this social content and not in anyone artificially devised political form or in such special institutions as may once have been realized under some particular historical circumstances.,” Karl Korsch, “Revolutionary Commune,” 1929, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1929/commune.htm. 7 The Polish Marxist Rosa Luxemburg formulated a great summary of this: “The scientific basis of socialism rests, as is well known, on three principal results of capitalist development. First, on the growing anarchy of capitalist economy, leading inevitably to its ruin. Second, on the progressive socialisation of the process of production, which creates the germs of the future social order. And third, on the increased organisation and consciousness of the proletarian class, which constitutes the active factor in the coming revolution,” Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution? (Paris, France: Foreign Languages Press, 2020), pp. 6-7. The role of communists is the self-articulation of the “active factor in the coming revolution,” embodying the most advanced elements of it. 8 See Mario Tronti, “Postscript of Problems,” in Workers and Capital, by Mario Tronti, trans. David Broder (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2019), pp. 285-289.

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Marx expressed the limitations of even organically working-class forms for this task many times. “Trades Unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organised forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system,” Karl Marx, WageLabour and Capital and Value, Price and Profit (New York, New York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 62; “I have always defied the momentary opinions of the proletariat. We are devoted to a party which, most fortunately for it, cannot yet come to power. If the proletariat were to come to power the measures it would introduce would be petty-bourgeois and not directly proletarian. Our party can come to power only when the conditions allow it to put its own views into practice. Louis Blanc is the best instance of what happens when you come to power prematurely. In France, moreover, it isn’t the proletariat alone that gains power but the peasants and the petty bourgeois as well, and it will have to carry out not its, but their measures. The Paris Commune shows that one need not be in the government to accomplish something,” Karl Marx, “Meeting of the Central Authority of the Communist League,” September 15, 1850, Militant Archives, https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/ Meeting_of_the_Central_Authority,_September_15,_1850. 10 For an early analysis of these tendencies, see Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, 2nd ed. (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Routledge, 1991).. For more recent texts, see Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott, 2nd ed. (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2018); Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (Chicago, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello, The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession (Verso Books, 2023). 11 “The division of society into classes distinguished by economic privilege clearly removes all value from majority decision-making. Our critique refutes the deceitful theory that the democratic and parliamentary state machine which arose from modern liberal constitutions is an organization of all citizens in the interests of all citizens. From the moment that opposing interests and class conflicts exist, there can be no unity of organization, and in spite of the outward appearance of popular sovereignty, the state remains the organ of the economically dominant class and the instrument of defence of its interests. In spite of the application of the democratic system to political representation, bourgeois society appears as a complex network of unitary bodies. Many of these, which spring from the privileged layers and tend to preserve the present social apparatus, gather around the powerful centralized organism of the political state. Others may be neutral or may have a changing attitude towards the state. Finally, others arise within the economically oppressed and exploited layers and are directed against the class state. Communism demonstrates that the formal juridical and political application of the democratic and majority principle to all citizens while society is divided into opposed classes in relation to the economy, is incapable of making the state an organizational unit of the whole society or the whole nation. Officially that is what political democracy claims to be, whereas in reality it is the form suited to the power of the capitalist class, to the dictatorship of this particular class, for the purpose of preserving its privileges. “Therefore it is not necessary to devote much time to refuting the error of attributing the same degree of independence and maturity to the vote of each elector, whether he is a worker exhausted by excessive physical labour or a rich dissolute, a shrewd captain of industry or an unfortunate proletarian ignorant of the causes of his misery and the means of remedying them. From time to time, after long intervals, the opinion of these and others is solicited, and it is claimed that the accomplishment of this ‘sovereign’ duty is sufficient to ensure calm and the obedience of whoever feels victimized and ill-treated by the state policies and administration,” Amadeo Bordiga, “The Democratic Principle,” February 1922, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/ works/1922/democratic-principle.htm. 12 For critiques of citizenship, see Mario Tronti, On Destituent Power, trans. Andreas Petrossiants, (Ill Will, 2022) and Mario Tronti, “Towards a Critique of Political Democracy,” trans. Alberto Toscano, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 5, no. 1 (2009), https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/ view/127. This analysis is further held out by the militancy of groups beyond the pale of political-national citizenship, such as undocumented workers struggling at the forefront of the re-emergent labor movement in North America, Palestinian refugees fighting for their stateless nation abroad, and indigenous peoples of the world defending their sovereignty beyond and even against citizenship.

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“Even the most vulgar democrats, who see the millennium in the democratic republic and have no inkling that it is in this last form of the state for bourgeois society that the class struggle will definitively be fought out—even they stand head and shoulders above a kind of democracy that keeps within the bounds of what is allowed by the police and disallowed by logic,” Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx: Later Political Writings, by Karl Marx, ed. Terrell Carver, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 223; “‘The whole people will govern, and there will be no governed. [Mikhail Bakunin]’ “If a man rules himself, he does not do so on this principle, for he is after all himself and no other,” Karl Marx, “Conspectus of Bakunin’s ‘Statism and Anarchy’” (Marxists Internet Archive, April 1874), https:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/04/bakunin-notes.htm; We cannot agree with the characterization offered by Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James, that “Complete universality, complete democracy in the sense that every man is able to do what every other man does, this is the ultimate stage [of humanity],” C. L. R. James, “Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity,” 1947, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/diamat/diamat47.htm.. Though democratic forms can be important for the self-articulation of the revolutionary proletariat, their importance is more for the elements of them that transcend democracy. For example, the radical democratic practices of the Civil Rights activist Ella Baker inspired the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, setting the tone for Black Power’s rejection of bourgeois paternalism in the movement. However, the legacy of her approach split between reformism, emphasizing survival as a stage preceding revolution, a necessary stage permanently prolonged, and those who understand the intimate relationship between survival and revolution. To respect the insights offered by Baker and others, it is necessary to extend them beyond democratic forms and beyond survival towards transformation of the whole of society. Such transformation demands the non-universality of democratic principles—in other words, the sovereignty of the revolution, exercised by force, against the old society and its defenders. 14 “And the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the moneybags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force; it is clear that where there is suppression, where there is violence, there is no freedom and no democracy[...] “Democracy for the vast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i.e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people—this is the change democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to Communism. Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists has been completely crushed, when the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no difference between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then ‘the state... ceases to exist’, and it ‘becomes possible to speak of freedom’. Only then will there become possible and be realized a truly complete democracy, democracy without any exceptions whatever. And only then will democracy begin to wither away, owing to the simple fact that, freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copybook maxims; they will become accustomed to observing them without force, without compulsion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for compulsion which is called the state,” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The State and Revolution (Paris, France: Foreign Languages Press, 2020), pp. 88-89. 15 See Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2016), pp. xliii-xlviii. Marx expressed an early form of this insight, saying “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas; hence of the relations which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an historical epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Includes: Theses on Feuerbach and the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (New York, New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), p. 67.

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Mao Zedong effectively expressed twin negative possibilities in communist organization: “Our congress should call upon the whole Party to be vigilant and to see that no comrade at any post is divorced from the masses. It should teach every comrade to love the people and listen attentively to the voice of the masses; to identify himself with the masses wherever he goes and, instead of standing above them, to immerse himself among them; and, according to their present level, to awaken them or raise their political consciousness and help them gradually to organize themselves voluntarily and to set going all essential struggles permitted by the internal and external circumstances of the given time and place. Commandism is wrong in any type of work, because in overstepping the level of political consciousness of the masses and violating the principle of voluntary mass action it reflects the disease of impetuosity. Our comrades must not assume that everything they themselves understand is understood by the masses. Whether the masses understand it and are ready to take action can be discovered only by going into their midst and making investigations. If we do so, we can avoid commandism. Tailism in any type of work is also wrong, because in falling below the level of political consciousness of the masses and violating the principle of leading the masses forward it reflects the disease of dilatoriness. Our comrades must not assume that the masses have no understanding of what they themselves do not yet understand. It often happens that the masses outstrip us and are eager to advance a step when our comrades are still tailing behind certain backward elements, for instead of acting as leaders of the masses such comrades reflect the views of these backward elements and, moreover, mistake them for those of the broad masses. In a word, every comrade must be brought to understand that the supreme test of the words and deeds of a Communist is whether they conform with the highest interests and enjoy the support of the overwhelming majority of the people,” Mao Zedong, “On Coalition Government,” April 24, 1945, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_25.htm. 17 “In what relation do the communists stand to the proletarians as a whole? “The communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties. “They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. “They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement. “The communists are distinguished from the other working class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independent of all nationality. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole. “The communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the workingclass parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. “The immediate aim of the communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat,” Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, pp. 222-223. 18 “To the Marxist it is indisputable that a revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, it is not every revolutionary situation that leads to revolution. What, generally speaking, are the symptoms of a revolutionary situation? We shall certainly not be mistaken if we indicate the following three major symptoms: (1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the ‘upper classes’, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for ‘the lower classes not to want’ to live in the old way; it is also necessary that ‘the upper classes should be unable’ to live in the old way; (2) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual; (3) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in ‘peace time’, but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the ‘upper classes’ themselves into independent historical action,” “II,” in The Collapse of the Second International, by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1915, https://www.marxists.org/archive/ lenin/works/1915/csi/index.htm#ii.

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In this usage, I follow from that of Manuel Quintín Lame and Sylvia Wynter. “those men who walked on the road built by Christopher Columbus on October 12, 92 when it was inaugurated and known by the peoples of Europe, to come here to persecute and murder us like rapacious wolves, without realizing that we, like wolves, are children of nature, but the foreigners are not children of nature but children of rocks, because the rock is an inherent being, which has been turned into flames, because rocks are the house of fire. For this reason the white man's heart is the house of envy and persecution against the poor, ignorant Indian, taking advantage of his ignorance and weakness. But the weak and asinine Indian brings forth today a work called ‘Los Pensamientos’ which marks the collapse of the Colombian Colossus, because what has been said is the truth and nothing but the truth. Because the Law of Compensation is drawing near, and many intellectuals don't realize it,” Manuel Quintín Lame, Liberation Theology from Below: The Life and Thought of Manuel Quintin Lame, ed. Gonzalo Castillo-Cárdenas (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1987); “Given that since our human behaviors are invariably oriented in the forms of the specific perceptual-cognitive processes by which we know our reality, then the behaviors that we normally display, as well as the empirical social affectivities to which our behaviors, taken collectively, lead, can ‘give’ us access to the specific mode of ‘subjective understanding’ in terms of which we normally, even when dissidently, perceive our contemporary sociosystemic reality as well as conceive the past that led to it. Such is the case with our present liberal Positivist conception that what Columbus did in 1492 was to ‘discover’ America. “This formulation is the basis of my proposed human view of 1492. This view is that both the undoubted ‘glorious achievement’ of the processes that led up to Columbus's realization of his long dreamed-of voyage and the equally undoubted horrors that were inflicted by the Spanish conquistadores and settlers upon the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and the Americas, as well as upon the African-descended Middle Passages and substitute slave labor force, are to be seen as the effects of Western Europe's epochal shift. That shift-out of the primarily supernaturally guaranteed modes of ‘subjective understanding’ (and, therefore, of their correlated symbolic-representational and ethico-behavioral systems) that had been common to all human cultures and their millennial traditional ‘forms of life’ was a product of the intellectual revolution of humanism. Elaborated by humanists as well as by monarchical jurists and theologians, this revolution opened the way toward an increasingly secularized, that is, degodded, mode of ‘subjective understanding’ In the context of the latter's gradually hegemonic political ethic, not only would the earlier religio-moral ethic then common to all cultures be displaced, but a reversal would take place in which the Christian church, of which the earlier feudal states of Latin Europe had been the temporal and military arm, would now be made into the spiritual arm of these newly emergent absolute states. It was to be the global expansion of those states that would bring into being our present single world order and single world history,” Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington D.C.; London, United Kingdom: Smithsonian Institution press, 1995), pp. 12-13. 20 “What is termed globalization is the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism as a new global power. One of the fundamental axes of this model of power is the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. The racial axis has a colonial origin and character, but it has proven to be more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was established. Therefore, the model of power that is globally hegemonic today presupposes an element of coloniality,” Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from the South 1, no. 3 (2000): p. 533. 21 “According to a common (and manipulable) misconception, imperialism is relatively recent, consists of the colonization of the entire world, and is the last stage of capitalism. This diagnosis points to a specific cure: nationalism is offered as the antidote to imperialism: wars of national liberation are said to break up the capitalist empire. “This diagnosis serves a purpose, but it does not describe any event or situation. We come closer to the truth when we stand this conception on its head and say that imperialism was the first stage of capitalism, that the world was subsequently colonized by nation-states, and that nationalism is the dominant, the current, and (hopefully) the last stage of capitalism. The facts of the case were not discovered yesterday; they are as familiar as the misconception that denies them,” Fredy Perlman, The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism (Detroit, Michigan: Black & Red, 1985), p. 7.

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Hegel’s characterization of the rabble sounds like a critical version of Marx’s later characterizations of the proletariat: “From logic, though indeed not of the accepted kind, we know how the conception, and in a concrete way the idea, determine themselves of themselves, and thereby abstractly set up their phases of universality, particularity, and individuality. To take the negative as the point of departure, and set up as primary the willing of evil and consequent mistrust, and then on this supposition cunningly to devise breakwaters, which in turn require other breakwaters to check their activity, any such contrivance is the mark of a thought, which is at the level of the negative understanding, and of a feeling, which is characteristic of the rabble,” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. S.W. Dyde (Kitchener, Canada: Batoche Books, 2001), p. 217. 23 Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2010), pp. 380-381. 24 Erica Benner, Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2018), pp. 50-56. Benner considers this representative of what she sees as a radical democratic streak in Marx and Engels, while I consider the notion of the proletariat constituting itself the nation to be the form of revolution within bourgeois society—one cannot have a proletarian ruling class without classes, nor can one have the proletariat constitute itself a nation with neither proletarians nor nations. 25 Robert Biel, Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement (Montreal, Quebec: Kersplebedeb, 2015), pp. 62-64. 26 “As to the Irish question....The way I shall put forward the matter next Tuesday is this: that quite apart from all phrases about ‘international’ and ‘humane’ justice for Ireland – which are to be taken for granted in the International Council – it is in the direct and absolute interest of the English working class to get rid of their present connection with Ireland. And this is my most complete conviction, and for reasons which in part I cannot tell the English workers themselves. For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy. I always expressed this point of view in the New York Tribune. Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. That is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general,” Karl Marx, “Letter from Marx to Engels in Manchester,” December 11, 1869, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1869/letters/69_12_10-abs.htm. 27 Biel, Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement, pp. 88-97. 28 Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 15-16. 29 Anderson, Marx at the Margins, pp. 22-24. 30 “My answer is that, thanks to the unique combination of circumstances in Russia, the rural commune, which is still established on a national scale, may gradually shake off its primitive characteristics and directly develop as an element of collective production on a national scale. Precisely because it is contemporaneous with capitalist production, the rural commune may appropriate all its positive achievements without undergoing its [terrible] frightful vicissitudes. Russia does not live in isolation from the modern world, and nor has it fallen prey, like the East Indies, to a conquering foreign power[...] “Also favourable to the maintenance of the Russian commune (on the path of development) is the fact not only that it is contemporary with capitalist production [in the Western countries], but that it has survived the epoch when the social system stood intact. Today, it faces a social system which, both in Western Europe and the United States, is in conflict with science, with the popular masses, and with the very productive forces that it generates [in short, this social system has become the arena of flagrant antagonisms, conflicts and periodic disasters; it makes clear to the blindest observer that it is a transitory system of production, doomed to be eliminated as soc(iety) returns to... ]. In short, the rural commune finds it in a state of crisis that will end only when the social system is eliminated through the return of modern societies to the ‘archaic’ type of communal property. In the words of an American writer who, supported in his work by the Washington government, is not at all to be suspected of revolutionary tendencies, [’the higher plane'] ‘the new system’ to which modern society is tending ‘will be a revival, in a superior form, of an archaic social type.’ We should not, then, be too frightened by the word ‘archaic,’” Karl Marx, “The ‘First’ Draft,” in Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and “the Peripheries of Capitalism,” ed. Teodor Shanin (New York, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp. 105, 107. 31 Biel, Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement, pp. 78-80. 32 Donald Parkinson, “Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism in the Second International,” Cosmonaut, April 18, 2020, https://cosmonautmag.com/2020/04/colonialism-and-anti-colonialism-in-the-second-international/; Also see Mike Taber, ed., “The Debate on Colonialism,” in Reform, Revolution, and Opportunism: Debates in the Second International, 1900-1910 (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2023). 33 Biel, Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement, pp. 112-113.

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See Amanda Candeias and Angelo Segrillo, Tracing The Debate Between Rosa Luxemburg And Lenin About The National Question, 1st ed. (São Paulo, Brazil: FFLCH/USP, 2022); Rudolf A. Mark, “National Self-Determination, as Understood by Lenin and the Bolsheviks,” Lithuanian Historical Studies 13, no. 1 (2008): 21–39, https://doi.org/ 10.30965/25386565-01301004; Vijay Prashad, “The Internationalist Lenin. Self-Determination and AntiColonialism.,” Monthly Review Online (blog), August 10, 2020, https://mronline.org/2020/08/10/the-internationalistlenin-self-determination-and-anti-colonialism/. 35 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Monism and Dualism,” in A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism (Marxists Internet Archive, 1916), https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/carimarx/ 5.htm#v23pp64h-055. 36 Lenin, “Monism and Dualism.” 37 Biel, Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement, pp. 114-117. 38 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “The Chain Is No Stronger Than Its Weakest Link,” June 9, 1917, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/may/27.htm; “Marxism teaches the proletarian not to keep aloof from the bourgeois revolution, not to be indifferent to it, not to allow the leadership of the revolution to be assumed by the bourgeoisie but, on the contrary, to take a most energetic part in it, to fight most resolutely for consistent proletarian democracy, for carrying the revolution to its conclusion. We cannot jump out of the bourgeoisdemocratic boundaries of the Russian revolution, but we can vastly extend these boundaries, and within these boundaries we can and must fight for the interests of the proletariat, for its immediate needs and for the conditions that will make it possible to prepare its forces for the future complete victory,” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (Paris, France: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), p. 46. 39 “Capitalism in general, and imperialism in particular, turn democracy into an illusion—though at the same time capitalism engenders democratic aspirations in the masses, creates democratic institutions, aggravates the antagonism between imperialism’s denial of democracy and the mass striving for democracy. Capitalism and imperialism can be overthrown only by economic revolution. They cannot be overthrown by democratic transformations, even the most ‘ideal’. But a proletariat not schooled in the struggle for democracy is incapable of performing an economic revolution. Capitalism cannot be vanquished without taking over the banks, without repealing private ownership of the means of production. These revolutionary measures, however, cannot be implemented without organising the entire people for democratic administration of the means of production captured from the bourgeoisie, without enlisting the entire mass of the working people, the proletarians, semi-proletarians and small peasants, for the democratic organisation of their ranks, their forces, their participation in state affairs. Imperialist war may be said to be a triple negation of democracy (a. every war replaces ‘rights’ by violence; b. imperialism as such is the negation of democracy; c. imperialist war fully equates the republic with the monarchy), but the awakening and growth of socialist revolt against imperialism are indissolubly linked with the growth of democratic resistance and unrest. Socialism leads to the withering away of every state, consequently also of every democracy, but socialism can be implemented only through the dictatorship of the proletariat, which combines violence against the bourgeoisie, i.e., the minority of the population, with full development of democracy, i.e., the genuinely equal and genuinely universal participation of the entire mass of the population in all state affairs and in all the complex problems of abolishing capitalism[...] The Marxist solution of the problem of democracy is for the proletariat to utilise all democratic institutions and aspirations in its class struggle against the bourgeoisie in order to prepare for its overthrow and assure its own victory,” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Reply to P. Kievsky (Y. Pyatakov),” September 1916, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/sep/00b.htm. 40 Loren Goldner, Revolution, Defeat and Theoretical Underdevelopment: Russia, Turkey, Spain, Bolivia (Leiden, South Holland; Boston, Massachusetts: Brill, 2016), pp. 78-87. 41 “Enver Pasha was not a delegate, and there was even a resolution against him. Of course, Enver Pasha was the leading butcher of the Armenians, and we also told him that to his face,” Grigory Zinoviev, quoted in Alp Yenen, “The Other Jihad: Enver Pasha, Bolsheviks, and Politics of Anticolonial Muslim Nationalism during the Baku Congress 1920,” in The First World War and Its Aftermath: The Shaping of the Middle East, ed. T. G. Fraser (London, United Kingdom: Gingko Library Press, 2015), p. 289. 42 Goldner, Revolution, Defeat, and Theoretical Underdevelopment, pp. 73-75.

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“Examining the East from the socioeconomic point of view, we see that almost all of it is the object of exploitation by West European capital. It is the chief source of material for European industry, and in this respect it constitutes highly inflammable revolutionary material. “If it were possible to compute the degree of exploitation of the East by Western capital, and in this connection, its indirect participation in the emergence of the power of the European and American bourgeoisie which have exploited and continue to exploit it, then we would see that a lion’s share of all the material and spiritual wealth of the ‘whites’ has been stolen from the East, and built at the expense of the blood and sweat of hundreds of millions of laboring masses of ‘natives’ of all colors and races. “It was necessary for tens of millions of aborigines of America and Africa to perish and for the rich culture of the Incas to be completely obliterated from the face of the earth in order that contemporary ‘freedom-loving’ America, with her ‘cosmopolitan culture’ of ‘progress and technology’ might be formed. The proud skyscrapers of Chicago, New York, and other cities are built on the bones of the ‘redskins’ and the Negroes tortured by inhuman plantation owners and on the smoking ruins of the destroyed cities of the Incas,” Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, “Appendix A - The Social Revolution and the East,” in Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union: A Revolutionary Strategy for the Colonial World, by Alexandre A. Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 135. 44 It is true that the West European states, including their ally America, appear to be the countries where all the material and ‘moral’ forces of international imperialism are concentrated, and it would seem that their territories are destined to become the chief battlefield in the war against imperialism. But in no way can we confidently say that there is enough strength in the Western proletariat to overthrow the Western bourgeoisie. This bourgeoisie is international and worldwide, and its overthrow demands a concentration of all the revolutionary will and all the revolutionary energy of the entire international proletariat, including the proletariat of the East. “In attacking international imperialism only with the West European proletariat, we leave it full freedom of action and maneuver in the East. As long as international imperialism, represented by the Entente, dominates the East, where it is the absolute master of all natural wealth, then so long is it guaranteed of a successful outcome in all its clashes in the economic field with the working masses of the home countries, for it can always ‘shut their mouths’ by satisfying their economic demands[...] “We must always remember one thing: the East on the whole is the chief source of nourishment of international capitalism. In the event of a worldwide socialist civil war, this is a factor extremely favorable to us and extremely unfavorable to the international imperialists. Deprived of the East, and cut off from India, Afghanistan, Persia, and its other Asian and African colonies, Western European imperialism will wither and die a natural death,” SultanGaliev, “The Social Revolution and the East,” p. 134, 136; Matthieu Renault, “The Idea of Muslim National Communism: On Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev,” trans. Patrick King, Viewpoint Magazine, March 23, 2015, https:// viewpointmag.com/2015/03/23/the-idea-of-muslim-national-communism-on-mirsaid-sultan-galiev/. 45 Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2005), pp. 50-55; Biel, Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement, pp. 123-127 46 “[...]the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations. The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form[...]” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions for The Second Congress Of The Communist International,” trans. Julius Katzer, June 5, 1920, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jun/05.htm; Anthony Pahnke, “Regrounding Critical Theory: Lenin on Imperialism, Nationalism, and Strategy,” International Studies Review 23, no. 1 (March 2021): pp. 194-195, https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viaa028. 47 Bennigsen and Wimbush, Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union, pp. 66-68. 48 Bennigsen and Wimbush, Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union, pp. 90-92. Sultan-Galiev was not alone in this fate. The Assyrian Bolshevik, Freydun Atturaya, held a similarly controversial position in the movement. He similarly fell victim to the post-Lenin chauvinist turn, being secretly executed under false accusations of ‘spying’ for the British in 1926. Arthur Margulov, “Assyrian National Elites of Georgia in the 1920s: Public Policy and National Identity,” Skhidnoievropeiskyi Istorychnyi Visnyk [East European Historical Bulletin], no. 20 (September 30, 2021): p. 101, https://doi.org/10.24919/2519-058X.20.240035.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez 49 Alexander

Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 1919–1927 (Honolulu, Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), pp. 134-143; Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 199-203. 50 Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, 3rd ed. (New York, New York: The Free Press, 1999), pp. 28-32. 51 Chenshan Tian, “Mao Zedong, Sinicization of Marxism, and Traditional Chinese Thought Culture,” Asian Studies 23, no. 1 (2019): pp. 20-21, https://doi.org/DOI: 10.4312/AS.2019.7.1.13-37. 52 Priya Lal, “Maoism in Tanzania: Material Connections and Shared Imaginaries,” in Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History, ed. Alexander C. Cook (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 96–116. 53 “China has freed itself from the clutches of the West and has become the world's leading ideological power. Socialism is the first time that it has been able to achieve this goal. And armed with its Atomic Bomb it has been standing tall in front of North America and Russia,” Fausto Reinaga, La Revolución India, 4th ed. (La Paz, Bolivia: Movimiento Indianista Katarista, 2010), p. 78. 54 Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2013), pp. 68-70; James Gethyn Evans, “Maoism, Anti-Imperialism, and the Third World: The Case of China and the Black Panthers,” Made in China Journal 6, no. 2 (2021): 139–46. 55 Glen Sean Coulthard, “Once Were Maoists: Third World Currents in Fourth World Anti-Colonialism, Vancouver, 1967–1975,” in Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, ed. Brendan Hokowhitu et al., 1st ed. (New York, New York; London, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2020), 378–91; Bloom and Martin Jr., Black Against Empire, pp. 252-253; Greg Thomas, “The Black Panther Party On Palestine,” Hampton Institute (blog), May 19, 2021, https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/the-black-panther-party-on-palestine; Robbie Shilliam, “The Polynesian Panthers and the Black Power Gang: Surviving Racism and Colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand,” in Black Power beyond Borders: The Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement, ed. Nico Slate (New York, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 107–26, https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295064_6; Matthew Wills, “How the Black Panther Party Inspired the Aborigines,” JSTOR Daily (blog), October 9, 2015, https://daily.jstor.org/black-pantherparty/. 56 Bruce D’Arcus, “The Urban Geography of Red Power: The American Indian Movement in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, 1968-70,” Urban Studies 7, no. 6, Special Issue: Cities, Justice and Conflict (May 2010): pp. 1249-1251. 57 The 2011 split between Occupy Oakland and Decolonize Oakland replicated the terms of the old debates from the New Left, albeit in a significantly different global situation. Today’s neo-abolitionists, who have been at the forefront of contemporary Black struggles, similarly trace their origin to Pantherist prisoner movements. 58 Asef Bayat, Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran (New York, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 52-58; Ervand Abrahamian, “Structural Causes of the Iranian Revolution,” MERIP Reports, no. 87, Iran's Revolution: The Rural Dimension (May 1980): pp. 25-26. 59 Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 162-164. 60 “Khomeini justified his clemency on grounds that ‘Islam reserves special rights for women’ and that ‘blacks for a long time have lived under oppression and pressure in America and may have been sent [to Iran under duress.]’” Jonathan C. Ral, “Women, Blacks Ordered Freed in Iran,” The Washington Post, November 18, 1979, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/11/18/women-blacks-ordered-freed-in-iran/66947cbd-c9b1-4933ac10-0e400c67e215/.

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Part I: Beginnings

Lived Experience “We regard our personal experience, and our feelings about that experience, as the basis for an analysis of our common situation. We cannot rely on existing ideologies as they are all products of male supremacist culture. We question every generalization and accept none that are not confirmed by our experience.” — Redstockings Manifesto (1969)1

The above quote summarizes a basic philosophical principle which underlies many liberatory movements in recent history—the importance of “lived experience.” The Redstockings, a radical feminist organization, did not invent this concept. “Lived experience” was and continues to be an important phrase for the feminist movement, and the notion itself extends outward and deeper. From the perspective of an oppressed person, oppression is no mere theoretical abstraction. It is something lived and experienced—in the conditions of one’s life, in the perceptions of others, in limited access to resources, in limitations of possibilities. The Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist organization, said of this that “[t]here is also undeniably a personal genesis for Black feminism; that is, the political realization that comes from the seemingly personal experiences of individual Black women’s lives.”2 For this generation, this insight was a natural outgrowth of the philosophy expressed in the slogan “the personal is political.” As scholars like Patricia Hill Collins have shown, the concept had existed for a long time before being explicitly formulated as a theoretical framework, in the approaches of such historical as like the freedwoman abolitionist Sojourner Truth.3 This concept of “lived experience,” which tends to be paired with the interrelated concepts of embodied knowledge and standpoint epistemology theory, has now proliferated across everyday discourse—particularly after the upheaval of 2020. From an intuitive experience

Lived Experience of this epistemic principle in everyday life, to intellectual and academic expressions of it, the concept has now moved right back into the public in a…somewhat altered form. Like a game of telephone, it has been mediated and modified from a guiding concept of radical and confrontational movements to a conduct guide incorporated by capitalists and bureaucrats into workplace training procedures. The value of lived experience is now a mantra being inserted into the clinic, social work, public policy, infographics, YouTube videos, casual conversations… Today, it seems like almost everyone respectable agrees that one must listen to the lived experience of others, that lived experience of oppression gives one a uniquely privileged standpoint to discuss the subject. This, unsurprisingly, has led to a wave of criticisms, for the most part from conservatives. Many conservative or ‘centrist’ media outlets, like the New York Times, peddle pieces saying that this way of thinking “[…]would lead to a world in which we would create stories only about people like ourselves, in stories to be illustrated by people who looked like ourselves, to be reviewed and read only by people who resembled ourselves.”4 To them, the mantra is just another step in the decline of our civilization into entitlement, narcissism, and nihilism. I would like to push back on this idea that accounting for the primacy of “lived experience” is solipsistic—it can be, but is not inherently so. The vast majority of theorists who have intellectually expressed it, from Patricia Hill Collins to Audre Lorde, have not done so to dismiss theory in general.5 Rather, they emphasize that they defend “lived experience” as necessarily a starting point for any theory, and a standpoint from which to engage with theory. On this basis, they criticize theory which obscures or neglects their experiences as untrue, or not fully true, to their place in the world. This is supposed to make knowledge true to its conditions. We engage with knowledge from our positions in the world, so we should create knowledge which works through that positionality.

The Telephone Game Nevertheless, it’s true that the telephone game of proliferation has in some cases turned “lived experience” into a genuinely solipsistic dogma. Often, radical liberals speak of “lived experience” in opposition to theory. If I already know everything I need to know from my own

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez immediate experience, why should I bother with what a bunch of dead old white people have written? If you have spoken to anyone ‘left of center,’ you’ve probably also come across the admonishment to ‘stay in your lane.’ This advises people to stay silent on issues which they lack the authority of lived experience on. Although motivated by benevolent intentions, this restriction of discourse into hard distinctions can become harmful to movement-building. If done crudely, it can encourage a passive, infantile, and quite honestly, obnoxious attitude for the ones kept ‘in their lane.’ They’re supposed to sit by, suck their thumbs, and naively ‘listen and learn,’ rather than develop a capacity to participate.6 It also assumes strong delineations between identity-positions which simply don’t exist. How does someone define whether an issue affects them or not? For race and ethnicity, this becomes especially tangled when one considers the issues posed by mixed people, light skinned, white-passing people, assimilation, tokenism, etc. The dissolution of any hard definition upon closer inspection is a classic teaching of dialectic. There is also the issue of whether every single individual in a group really represents the entirety of that group. This assumption is a target of criticism that was identified very soon after standpoint epistemology was first explicitly formulated. Black feminists rejected the homogenous category of “Woman,” which often led to white women speaking for and over them.7 Philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò has identified this phenomenon, where the most powerful of a group become the “spokespersons” for everyone else, as “elite capture.” He describes this phenomenon as “the control over political agendas and resources by a group’s most advantaged people.”8 Ironically, many of these advocates of ‘staying in your lane’ recognize this risk of spokespersons having positions which contradict the interests of their group in the case of working-class Trump supporters. To them, it’s obvious that their voting for Trump undermines their own interests as workers. It is perhaps also obvious that a blatant reactionary like Candace Owens can’t necessarily speak on behalf of Black women as a group, even if doing so is well within ‘her lane.’ But they do not often think through this conundrum. Perhaps one source of the pitfalls in this popularized, radical liberal approach is that it exists thoroughly within the quantitative thinking of global bourgeois society. This is not to say it

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Lived Experience literally speaks of numbers, but that it speaks with the same way of thinking associated with speaking of numbers. The concept of “lived experience” was originally vindicated as a means of challenging this quantitative way of thinking and being. As opposed to positivism, which only values what is captured and expressed in ‘hard facts,’ there was to be an approach which expressed the silenced experiences of everyday life for oppressed peoples from their own perspectives. Yet, mediated by the quantitating influences of capitalist bureaucracy and intellectual production, which turns everything into a category for a filing cabinet, it has in turn taken on a quantitative character in the telephone-gamed version. This can be illustrated with an average diagram used to explain privilege theory—-the guiding rationale behind ‘staying in your lane.’ One must locate oneself on the diagram, and then work within its literal delineations of positions.

”Figure 1: The Web of Oppression” The Promise and Perils of Anti-Oppressive Practice For Christians in Social Work Education Scientific Figure on ResearchGate.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Diagrams can be useful for understanding everyday experience and the social whole by abstracting parts from it. They also formulate and organize that experience in a certain way. If I think of myself as placed into the category-cabinets of X, Y, and Z, then I think of myself abstractly. The abstract categories tell me little about the experience behind them. When we speak of an abstract category like “Woman,” we try to capture many concrete, lived experiences —deeply differentiated by actual perspective and social position—into a single, homogenous whole. This quantitative reasoning tries to accommodate difference with an extremely crude version of “intersectionality.” In order to understand unique experiences, we simply add together multiple abstract categories. “Woman” + “Black” + “Poor” = “Poor Black Woman.” By coalescing three definitions for abstract categories, we are somehow supposed to logically represent the wealth of experiences in everyday life. At best, we can account for this issue by simply throwing up our hands and declaring that every person has so many “axes of oppression,” that their lived experiences cannot be captured entirely in just a few categories. Therefore, we need a quantitative infinity of categories to understand lived experience itself. Simply enumerate more identities! This is the bad infinite that G. W. F. Hegel critiqued over two centuries ago, defined purely by homogenous quantities stacked on top of each other.9 Such a quantitative thinking depends on a homogenous substance to be divided up. Think of it this way: In order to figure things together into a quantity, I need to first put them on a single scale, axis, or measure. In order to do so, I need to determine a common character, or quality, between them. I have to abstract from some-thing. This quantitative radical liberalism abstracts with ‘oppression points.’ The more privileged identities someone has, the less oppressed they are. The more oppressed identities someone has, the more oppressed they are. There is also an interest rate on each intersection! Such psychology is basically the ressentiment described by Friedrich Nietzsche, who compared it to lambs saying “these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb—would he not be good?”10 This mockery of intersectionality has been criticized by Patricia Hill Collins as believing that “the more subordinated the group, the purer the vision available to them.”11 She identifies

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Lived Experience the positivism inherent in this thinking, characteristic of the reasoning of a mediocre bourgeois rational bureaucracy. However, she then polemically asserts that such an error “is an outcome of the origins of standpoint approaches in Marxist social theory, itself reflecting the binary thinking of its Western origins.”12 This assertion certainly cannot be left to stand. If we think through the quantitative reasoning, which assumes a basic homogeneous substance across human beings which allows their identities to be quantified, we in fact begin to head towards Karl Marx. The quantitative figuring of privileges and oppressions, not coincidentally, sounds like a capitalist figuring liabilities and assets. Instead of money, it simply transfers this to the field of morality. It flips things around so that oppression is moral capital while privilege is social capital. As Marx noted, capitalism itself depends on an abstraction of human characteristics into the homogeneous substance of abstract labor.13 This abstraction becomes the substance of valueas-such and enables the operation of universal exchange.14 That is, there must be a qualitative abstraction and homogenization in order for there to be a quantitative rationalization. It is no coincidence that capitalist bureaucracy has so easily swallowed up this ‘enlightenment’ into workplace Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training. This notion of diversity is simply diversity within a unity, just like having many capitals subsumed under general capital on the social scale. ‘Diversity makes us strong’ in this light sounds like ‘diversify your investments,’ rather than anything even close to the intent of decolonization. To use the term “decolonial” in any proximity to such thinking is a bad joke. This quantitative reasoning of privilege-liabilities and oppression-assets is ultimately well within the rationality of the capitalism it thinks it criticizes.

Embodied Knowledge and Mystified Experience Against this bourgeois quantitative thinking, the critical approach of “lived experience” teaches that we can understand social phenomena through our embodied knowledge, since we experience society as unique embodied subjectivities.15 That is, we are both subjects and objects. This is an attempt to operate outside of the mind-body dualism of Cartesianism and to challenge the idea that abstract, disembodied (masculine) reasoning is the only path to knowledge.16

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Despite accusations of irrationalism by conservatives, this turn is ironically not far from the solution to Cartesian dualism offered by the rationalist Baruch de Spinoza.17 On this subject of Spinoza, the similarities of his rationalist-monist philosophy to ‘intuitive’ Indigenous philosophies has been observed explicitly by the late philosopher Viola Cordova (Jicarilla Dindéi).18 This importance of embodied knowledge is meant to be a philosophical teaching which contradicts the dominant Cartesian rationality of Euro-bourgeois civilization, rather than operating within it through the limitation of quantitative-thinking. Those solipsists who damn theory as being colonial misunderstand the decolonial approach. Decolonization of knowledge does not mean rejecting theory, but redeeming those knowledges which do not operate within the Euro-bourgeois mental-manual labor separation by critiquing that separation.19 It sees theory in everyday life, rather than establishing a dualism of “theory” and “lived experience.” The practice of testimonio, a narrative in which an individual tells a story simultaneously about themselves and their community, is a powerful instance of this —I am thinking especially of the work of Rigoberta Menchú (K’iche’ Maya) titled My Name is Rigoberta Menchú, and This is How my Awareness was Born (1982).20 Such a practical critique of the separation between mental and manual labor, between thinking and being or feeling, is shared both by decolonial philosophers like Cordova as well as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou) and Western critical philosophers like Spinoza and Marx. This approach reclaims the role of the body in knowledge, which has within Euro-bourgeois-modernity become identified with femininity.21 Indigenous decolonial philosophers do not reject theory, like the solipsistic quantitativethinkers do, but seek to transcend the need for its abstraction. They pursue knowledge which is true to the unity of mind and body and of thinking and doing. Their understanding of lived experience is as the position from which one engages with the unity of reality. Subjectivity, feeling are not oppositional to reality—they are expressions of it.22 The one is not the One— rather, the One is the interrelation of all the ones. It is the harmony of them.23 “Lived experience” is the experience of one subject amidst a world of countless subjects—this is qualitative reasoning.

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Lived Experience In a world which is split, alienated, untrue to itself, this unity of the world is torn and reconfigured under the totalitarianism of alienated existence. Capital aims at becoming the social whole. It drives to subordinate everything to itself and reorganize the world around its alldevouring growth. As Marx taught us, capital originates from the way that the relations between living beings are organized, but it also dominates these beings. By doing so, it acts “behind the backs of the actors.”24 In a word, capitalism becomes second nature in a dual meaning—it literally operates above and beyond the individuals who create it the same way as physical processes such as gravitational pull, and it appears to individuals in capitalist society as the natural order of the world. Marx tried to describe this phenomena in the two related concepts called commodity fetishism, where value appears as a characteristic of objects themselves rather than as socially created, and real abstraction, abstract categories like labor-as-such or value-as-such which operate in everyday life as an expression of the prevailing capitalist arrangement of human activities. The division of labor, the growing scale and density of society, make society into something like a massive machine, where it is impossible for any individual to comprehend or control the whole thing.25 What Marx always emphasized is that capitalism is literally mystified, and that this mystification occurs both on the level of our social whole and on the level of subjective consciousness. With this in mind, an uncritical form of appealing to “lived experience” seems quite problematic. Not only can our consciousness about the world be mystified and fail to understand —the world itself can be mystified? If our lived experience is complacent with this mystification (and vice versa), then how can it be a reliable appeal for emancipatory truth? How can we be sure we understand the world, or even ourselves? One answer to this unreliability would be to simply identify that truth with the whole rather than the individual, to say that truth on an individual scale falls apart and that one only reaches truth when the truth-seeker is identical to the object which they seek truth about. The individual truth-seeker, the knower, is not enough—one must reach the scale of the Whole knowing itself. Perhaps, this ultimate identity of subject and object can even be called God. Or maybe it can be called the Absolute, the unconditioned truth which is not merely true relative to

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez something else. This is Hegel’s answer. In light of the horrific catastrophe of modern life, from the Holocaust to the ecocidal capitalocene, this seems trite. Theodor Adorno’s slogan, that “The whole is the false,” seems more appropriate to the world we presently live in.26 The critical dialectic of Marxism offers us a potential to redeem this desire for an emancipatory approach premised on “lived experience,” where it questions the ‘truth’ of this capitalist social totality. This materialist dialectic teaches us to question intuition, since immediate experience often contains abstractions and mystifications. Yet, it also values that embodied intuition as a potential seed for transformation on a total scale. Marx spoke approvingly of the intuitive revolts of workers, saying of the 1844 uprising of Silesian weavers “[…]Not only are the machines, these rivals of the worker, destroyed, but also the ledgers, the property titles, and while all the other movements turned first only against the industrial baron, i.e. the visible enemy, this movement turned also against the banker, the hidden enemy[…]”27 Here, Marx sees the working class as already recognizing the power of capital as transcending individuals, as something beyond just its embodiment in the boss. In this sense, the workers themselves, in their uprising itself, point through their practice to a theoretical point. In his words, “[…]the Silesian revolt by no means took place in the separation of thoughts from social principles.”28 As Raya Dunayevskaya has noted about his writing on the working class struggle to shorten the workday in Capital (1867), “[…]theory is not something the intellectual works out alone. Rather, the actions of the proletariat create the possibility for the intellectual to work out theory.”29 Rather than emancipatory truth being the social totality, or being the solipsistic and quantitative individual, Marx pointed towards the potential emancipatory whole embedded in the revolutionary actions of everyday life. Revolution, or emancipation, must start from everyday life, but cannot become content with staying there. The notion of ‘emancipatory’ solipsism is in truth a defense of the capitalist social totality. You are not revolutionary merely by existing. There is a revolutionary potential within our concrete, lived existences, but these existences in themselves are not revolutions. We must reject both those pessimistic doctrines which speak of the system as independent of human action (whether it is the natural order, or it is so entrenched that it may as well be so) and those which try to take the individual as a refuge from society, ignoring the historical and social

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Lived Experience mediation of every individual and their identities. This is including their very identity of being an individual! We are not inherently anything, and this becomes obvious when the attempts to strictly delineate lanes fall apart into incoherence. Adorno offered sound advice on this dilemma, teaching that:

“[…]the point about dialectics is not to negate the concept of fact in favour of mediation, or to exaggerate that of mediation; it is simply to say that immediacy is itself mediated but that the concept of the immediate must still be retained[…]”30

On this ground, embodied knowledge has its place, but is not immediate access to truth. The point of Marx’s analysis of mystification is that our world is riddled with false appearances, but that these are made necessary by the organization of our interrelations with each other. These (necessary) false appearances mutilate us in a very concrete way. Frantz Fanon, for example, harshly critiqued the novelist Richard Wright’s ontological turn:

“It is true that black writers and poets all endure their own suffering, that the drama of consciousness of a westernized Black, torn between his white culture and his negritude, can be very painful; but this drama, which, after all, kills no one, is too particular to be representative: the misfortune of the colonized African masses, exploited, subjugated, is first of a vital, material order; the spiritual rifts of the ‘elite’ are a luxury that they are unable to afford.”31

Fanon famously wrote of the internalization of anti-Blackness in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), noting that individuals internalize a false world.32 Our “lived experience” is not separate from the falsehood of the world. It is intertwined in it. It is important to note that Fanon also teaches us that the very experience of lived experience as something branded as false (false to officialdom) is an effect of the world’s falsehood. This lived experience of being false, or a nonbeing, to the world, is the scarring of racialization.33 Identity in this sense is a brand, a wound. To

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez live this wound does not inherently mean one has reached truth. The internalization of racism is the untruth of the world seeping into the individual through their lived experience. Rather than upholding identity as inherently good in itself, Fanon considered identity as something which offers a ground to start from in reaching towards total revolutionary transformation. In fact, one must start here, from the experience of common racial oppression and, in turn, common racial identity. But it is only a beginning. Staying within this identity, this brand, of race is to stay within the old racial world.34 In order to reach a new world, we must also recreate ourselves anew—“After the struggle is over, there is not only the demise of colonialism, but also the demise of the colonized. This new humanity, for itself and for others, inevitably defines a new humanism. This new humanism is written into the objectives and methods of the struggle.”35

From Experience, Beyond Identity Critiquing identity politics is now a commonplace for socialist circles, typically being a scapegoat for the contemporary mediocrity of the American left and the failure of various social democratic electoral campaigns. Yet, this thinking tends to rest on the basic identity of the working class with itself. The working class is true, whereas racial, gendered, etc. identities are untrue and mere illusions. If we just return to agitating around the interests of the workers as a group, we’ll be in the realm of true politics. This is thinking about the working class the same way that a trade union bureaucrat does, being a figure who merely helps manage workers as one interest group among many other interest groups within capitalism. Its advocates think they are revolutionary, but they consider workers to already be a coherent collectivity in their mere existence. It does not figure workers as unique living beings, living beings who have other ‘identities,’ but merely as workers. In a word, worker=worker and nothing else. The working class is identical with itself. This thinking is right there in that formula of A=A, which is a classic target for critique by dialectic. Hegel already attacked the identity-formula, saying that it is purely within the realm of positivity (asserting what is—it literally says that what is, is what is). He said “They do not see that in saying, ‘Identity is different from difference,’ they have thereby already said that

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Lived Experience identity is something different. And since this must also be conceded as the nature of identity, the implication is that to be different belongs to identity not externally, but within it, in its nature[…] the truth is complete only in the unity of identity and difference, and, consequently, that it only consists in this unity.”36 Marx in turn continued this dialectical critique of identity-thinking. He argued that any conception of revolution which calls for the universalization of the identity “worker “is a “crude communism” which “in negating the personality of man in every sphere,” turns out to be “really nothing but the logical expression of private property, which is this negation[…]”37 It is merely a first negation. It tries to abolish classes by making everyone a worker as the worker appears under capitalism. Marx spoke damningly of this form of identity politics in 1844:

“The community is only a community of labor, and an equality of wages paid out by the communal capital—the community as the universal capitalist. Both sides of the relationship are raised to an imagined universality—labor as a state in which every person is put, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community.”38

The working class is the negative side of the capitalist social whole, but is still a capitalist class in the sense of being of capitalist society. Workers are the other side of the coin with capital. Instead of identity-thinking, Marx called for the abolition of the proletariat by the proletariat itself. This was the true step into a communist society.39 In a similar thread, Frantz Fanon critiqued narrow nationalism as caught in a dialectic of identity with the colonizer rather than abolishing the colonial relation.40 He believed that the decolonial revolution needed to start from here, just as Marx said that communist revolution starts from the worker, but that it must transcend it and “make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.”41 Marx and Fanon critiqued class society and coloniality from a broader and deeper perspective than that offered by the quantitative-thinking of contemporary radical liberalism.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez This includes the silly dualism of race versus class, which we are supposed to choose one out of to be ‘primary’ as a source of oppression. On the level of “lived experience” and critiques extending from out of perspective, the two are not separated by any means.42 Global and national divisions of labor, the development of classes, are heavily racialized. That distinction in the arrangement of relations of production in turn is the ground of racialization itself. Fanon described this situation well, observing that “In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.”43 The ultimate question in expressing the revolutionary dialectic is to reject the identity of our world with itself, and thus our identity with ourselves. If we want to change the world, it also means changing ourselves. That means refusing to just be at peace with ourselves as ‘pure’ and ‘authentic.’ Our “lived experience” does not automatically guarantee emancipatory truth, as we have said. But according to the philosopher Enrique Dussel, this cannot be done with a purely critical stance, which tries to reject peace with any unity rather than beginning with the unities given to us.44 We must begin where we are, and that means with the unities which we are branded into. We must be particularistic in order to be universalist, without assuming that those particular identities are settled facts. Otherwise, we risk asserting a universality which is a particular interest in disguise—this is what Black feminists critiqued in the abstract “Woman” of white feminists—or retreating within a particular identity and refusing to engage the untrue social whole. The particular, individual or identity-standpoint cannot be the totality or the whole. It cannot even be a potentially new, free, true whole. In Marxist terms, this means to stand against Georg Lukács, who identified the proletariat with the identical subject-object, and to stand with Adorno and his critique of identity-thinking.45 Adorno’s critique is in line with Marx’s critique of workers as being workers-in-capital rather than already the blooming embodiment of the new world. To refer back to Collins’ dismissive remark on him—Marx did not think in binary terms. He saw workers and capital as an identity, a unity, in capitalist society. He wished to shatter this

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Lived Experience identity, which necessarily meant the self-abolition of the proletariat (or the oppressed, if you like). Such a concept of revolution means that the oppressed group must work from their position of oppression to remake the oppressive world. They remake themselves a new from the ‘oppressed’ into something free, which thrives and creates a liberated world order. We can therefore agree with both Patricia Hill Collins and the Marxist Henri Lefebvre— that the unity of theory and practice is realized through everyday life, or rather a revolution from out of it.46 Rather than something alien to Marxism (as is implied in the base-superstructure trope), this is directly embedded in Marx’s rejection of the separation of mental and manual labor and of thinking and doing. This unity is a truth of knowledge to be realized through revolutionary disalienation, by overcoming the identity of the world with itself. In trying to change our world, we should understand the necessity of Marx rather than merely dismiss him. Marxism’s advocacy of this harmony of thinking and being, of subject and object can in turn learn from the sibling critique represented by decoloniality. Both begin from the immediacy of lived experience.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Footnotes 1

Redstockings, “Redstockings Manifesto,” www.redstockings.org, July 7, 1969, https://www.redstockings.org/ index.php/rs-manifesto. 2 Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2015), p. 211. 3 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York, New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 258. 4 Pamela Paul, “Opinion | The Limits of ‘Lived Experience,’” The New York Times, April 24, 2022, sec. Opinion, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/24/opinion/lived-experience-empathy-culture.html. 5 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, p. 270; Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2015), p. 94. 6 Olúfẹḿi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took over Identity Politics and Everything Else (London, England: Pluto Press, 2022), p. 107. 7 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, p. 28. 8 Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò, “Being-In-The-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference,” The Philosopher ́ 1923, November 20, 2021, https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/being-in-the-room-privilege-elite-capture-andepistemic-deference. 9 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, ed. George di Giovanni (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 206-208. 10 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, New York: Vintage Books, 1989) 11 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, p. 270. 12 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, p. 270. 13 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1., trans. Ben Fowkes (London, England: Penguin In Association With New Left Review, 1976), p. 172. 14 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., pp. 172-176. 15 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, pp. 14-15; Chrystos, “Entering the Lives of Others, Theory in the Flesh,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2015), p. 19. 16 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, pp. 270-271. 17 Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, ed. Matthew J. Kisner, trans. Michael Silverthorne and Matthew J. Kisner (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 55. 18 Viola Cordova, How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V.F. Cordova, ed. Kathleen Dean Moore et al. (Tucson, Arizona: The University of Arizona Press, 2007), p. 109. 19 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London, England: Zed Books, 2008), pp. 47-49. 20 Available in English as Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, trans. Ann Wright (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2009). 21 Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2013), pp. 53-57. 22 Dian Million, “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (Fall 2009): pp. 53–76, https://doi.org/10.1353/wic.0.0043. 23 Gregory Cajete, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Clear Light Publishers, 2000), p. x. 24 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., p. 485. 25 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., pp. 172-173.

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Lived Experience 26 Theodor W. Adorno,

Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London, England: Verso, 2005), p. 50. 27 Karl Marx, “Critical Marginal Notes on ‘the King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian,’” in Marx: Early Political Writings, ed. Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 109. 28 Marx, “Critical Marginal Notes on ‘the King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian,’” p. 112. 29 Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 until Today (New York, New York: Bookman Associates, 1958), p. 91. 30 Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2006), p. 21. 31 Frantz Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, ed. Jean Khalfa and Robert Young, trans. Steven Corcoran (London, England: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), p. 639. 32 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 13. 33 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 9-16. 34 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 17. 35 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 178. 36 Hegel, The Science of Logic, p. 358. 37 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto (New York, New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 101. 38 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, p. 101. 39 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Includes: Theses on Feuerbach and the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (New York, New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), pp. 60-61. 40 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 150-151. 41 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 239. 42 This is especially clear in Marx’s practice of worker’s inquiries, sociological surveys which were also meant to encourage their working class subjects to carefully think through their everyday life as itself bound up with their social position. See Hilde Weiss, “Die ‘Enquête Ouvrière’ von Karl Marx (1936),” trans. Zurowski (Notes From Below, July 9, 2022), https://notesfrombelow.org/article/hilde-weiss-die-enquete-ouvriere-von-karl-marx-193. 43 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 5. 44 Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf And Stock, 1985), pp. 159-160

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez 45

“In his early Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx gave a lapidary account of the special position of the proletariat in society and in history, and the standpoint from which it can function as the identical subject-object of the social and historical processes of evolution. ‘When the proletariat proclaims the dissolution of the previous world-order it does no more than reveal the secret of its own existence, for it represents the effective dissolution of that world-order.’ The self-understanding of the proletariat is therefore simultaneously the objective understanding of the nature of society. When the proletariat furthers its own class-aims, it simultaneously achieves the conscious realization of the—objective aims of society, aims which would inevitably remain abstract possibilities and objective frontiers but for this conscious intervention,” Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Paris, France: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), p. 180; “Dialectics is the consistent consciousness of non-identity. It is not related in advance to a standpoint. Thought is driven, out of its unavoidable insufficiency, its guilt for what it thinks, towards it. If one objected, as has been repeated ever since by the Aristotelian critics of Hegel, that dialectics for its part grinds everything indiscriminately in its mill down into the mere logical form of the contradiction, overlooking – even Croce argued this – the true polyvalence of that which is not contradictory, of the simply different, one is only displacing the blame for the thing onto the method. That which is differentiated appears as divergent, dissonant, negative, so long as consciousness must push towards unity according to its own formation: so long as it measures that which is not identical with itself, with its claim to the totality. This is what dialectics holds up to the consciousness as the contradiction. Thanks to the immanent nature of consciousness, that which is in contradiction has itself the character of inescapable and catastrophic nomothetism [Gesetzmaessigkeit: lawabiding character]. Identity and contradiction in thinking are welded to one another. The totality of the contradiction is nothing other than the untruth of the total identification, as it is manifested in the latter. Contradiction is non-identity under the bane [Bann] of the law, which also influences the non-identical,” Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. Dennis Redmond (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001), p. 16 https:// probablydave.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/adorno-theodor-negative-dialectics-2019-dennis-redmondtranslation.pdf. 46 Collins, Black Feminist Theory, pp. 29-30; Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I, Introduction, trans. John Moore (New York, New York: Verso, 1991), p. 182.

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Dialectic of Freedom

One is one’s life embodied. One lives, and the content of one’s life is molded into one’s flesh. It is true that we are shaped by our environments. But we also produce those very environments, externalizing ourselves into the world. To exist is to exist as a unity of subject and object. Subjectivity refers to one’s subjective experience of life. In common phrasing, we think of this as our ‘internal’ or ‘mental’ lives. It includes our specific perspectives and understandings of the world, things which are not necessarily physical as well. Objectivity refers to one’s physical presence in the world. In particular—the existence of one’s material body among and in relation with other material bodies. Many philosophers have historically asserted that only our subjectivity is certain to us, because all of our interactions with the objective world are mediated through it. René Descartes, for instance, famously declared “I am thinking, therefore I exist.”1 By this, he meant that the sureness of his existence lay in the presence of his subjectivity. He did not consider the notion of “I exist, therefore I am thinking” to be a valid method of reasoning. In this perspective, we become separated from our bodies—our existences in the material world—and thus conceive of ourselves as monads. Yet, this perspective cannot appreciate our lived unity as subjects and objects. Our subjectivities are not separate from the objective world, but are shaped by it. Our subjectivities further act as we shape the world. We are thinking and acting beings. Karl Marx held a deep

Dialectic of Freedom understanding of this. In his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, he elaborated this view:

“Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, posits his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by his externalization, it is not the act of positing which is the subject in this process: it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something objective. A being who is objective acts objectively, and he would not act objectively if the objective did not reside in the very nature of his being. He creates or posits only objects, because he is established by objects—because at bottom he is nature. In the act of establishing, therefore, this objective being does not fall from his state of ‘pure activity’ into a creating of the object; on the contrary, his objective product only confirms his objective activity, establishing his activity as the activity of an objective, natural being.”2

Marx recognized our presence in the world as component parts of our environment, including its formative power on, in, and through us. This is a truth which has been understood from the very beginnings of philosophy. His innovation was in recognizing our mediation of our own subjectivities in the objective, material world through objective, material social-activity— labor. He transcended the mind-body problem of Descartes, demonstrating the active unity of our ‘internal’ and ‘external’ existences.

Flesh Molded by Life The objectification of our subjectivities in the world is the aspect of this analysis which is typically focused on. We love to talk about how we change the world. Yet, the objectification of our social-activity and our shaping of the world into ourselves is often neglected. We forget that we also transform ourselves in our very transforming-activity itself.3 By focusing on this lesstraveled end of the metabolism, we can derive important lessons about our bodies, identities, and psychologies as individualities and as social beings.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez We can certainly take this in a purely biological direction. For instance, analyzing how our physical diets determine the shapes, qualities, and compositions of our bodies. To refer to a common aphorism: ‘You are what you eat.’ Yet our diets also act in conjunction with our everyday activities—protein does not automatically lead to muscle growth, it only does so in conjunction with physical activity. Further, our bodily metabolisms vary by individuals, so that a one-size-fits-all conception does not explain everything about the influence of diets on body composition and shape. Friedrich Engels used this biological approach in his analysis of the influence of labor on the evolutionary formation of the human body, positing in 1876 that:

“Only by labour, by adaptation to ever new operations, through the inheritance of muscles, ligaments, and, over longer periods of time, bones that had undergone special development and the ever-renewed employment of this inherited finesse in new, more and more complicated operations, have given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael, the statues of a Thorwaldsen, the music of a Paganini.”4

Engels focused on the human hand because, in this text, he is arguing that labor is definitive of human—as opposed to animal—existence. He and Marx alike considered planned, conscious, intentional metabolism with nature to be a human-specific trait.5 This claim is undermined by developments in biological sciences since their time, which have revealed the existence of similar capacities in our primate relatives, corvids, cetaceans, cephalopods, and other animals.6 What is true in their approach extends from their analysis of labor. This is their understanding of human existence as openly relational, participating actively and in highly variable means with the creation and re-creation of the world— rather than being subservient to it, bound to it by an umbilical cord.7 An illustrative example which gets to the root of this principle is the musculature of a body. Muscles are not purely a product of inheritance or passive molding by an external environment. Rather, they are the embodiment in an individual of past, repeated activities—

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Dialectic of Freedom lifting heavy items, doing exercises, jogging regularly.... These material activities in and on the world objectify themselves into our muscles. Specific exercises develop specific muscles in specific ways. We often joke about those who focus exclusively on working out their upper bodies or their lower bodies, to the detriment of their musculature’s balance. Yet this common object of humor also exposes an interesting truth: What you do as a subject, as an actor in the world, informs what you are as an object, as a body among bodies. The objectification of our social-activity in ourselves doesn’t only take a purely material form in our bodies. It is also at play in the concepts and languages which mediate our understandings of the world. Many philosophers recognize the importance of concepts to mediating the information we receive from our senses, but fail to recognize the foundations of these concepts in historical social-activity. Marx, once again, explained this in Notes on Adolph Wagner (1881):

“[Humans] begin, like every animal, by eating, drinking, etc., hence not by ‘standing’ in a relationship, but by relating themselves actively, taking hold of certain things in the outside world by action, and thus satisfying their need[s]. (Therefore they begin with production.) Through the repetition of this process, the property of these things , their property ‘to satisfy needs,’ is impressed upon their brains; men, like animals, also learn to distinguish ‘theoretically’ from all other things the external things which serve for the satisfaction of their needs. At a certain stage of this evolution, after their needs, and the activities by which they are satisfied, have, in the meantime, increased and developed further, they will christen these things linguistically as a whole class, distinguished empirically from the rest of the external world. This happens necessarily, since they stand continually in the production process—i.e. the process of appropriating these things—in active association among themselves and with these things, and soon have to engage in a battle with others over these things. But this linguistic designation only expresses as an idea what repeated corroboration in experience has accomplished, namely, that certain external things serve men already living in a certain social connection (this is

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez a necessary presupposition on account of language) for the satisfaction of their needs. Men assign to these things only a particular (generic) name, because they already know that they serve for the satisfaction of their needs, because they get hold of them through activity which is repeated more or less often, and they also seek to retain [them] in their possession; perhaps they call them ‘goods’, or something else which expresses the fact that they need these things practically, that these things are useful for them, and they believe that this useful character is possessed by the thing, although it would scarcely appear to a sheep as one of its ‘useful’ properties that it is edible by man.”8

We always conceive of life from a perspective, and that perspective includes organizations, needs, actions, habits, gestures etc. inherited from past generations. The specific concepts we fit our senses

into are the congealed ideations of the entire history of social-activity. We inherit these frameworks from past generations, and so we inherit the legacies of their worlds and their actions. We can never act apart from society or history. The inheritances of social history are embedded into our fundamental psychological operations through language. This does not mean we are merely slaves to the intellectual baggage of our ancestors. We are ourselves the ancestors of our future descendants, and our activity will inform them, just as our own ancestors' activities informs us. We do not operate like clockwork, but operate as thinking beings within a given context. Specific social practices, social relations, social history—social perspectives—are literally embodied in us, whether physically, psychologically, or practically. Even in everyday life, this metabolism is at play. We aren’t mindless laborers. We think while we work, and thinking is necessarily a component of working. What we do and how we do it inform our ways of thinking, the rhythm of our lives.9 Repetitive, hyper-specialized work can certainly impair our capacities for thought, but this is itself a certain way of thinking tied to our ways of working. A human being, a subjectivity, can never be fully reduced into a mindless machine, an object devoid of subjectivity. This is an outlook which stretches far beyond both individualist solipsism and mechanical determinism.

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Dialectic of Freedom Embodied Sickness If we are our social activity embodied, then harmful activity can also be embodied in us. In a material sense, this can mean agonies such as lung cancer from living in a coal mining community, or a missing limb from a factory accident. Certain forms of labor might harm the development of our spines, our shoulders, our knees… If we live in a food desert, we might develop heart disease and diabetes. If we live in cramped conditions, then our joints may suffer. In a psychological lense, we can speak of this on both a personal or a social level. For the former, we may experience trauma from horrific experiences within our lifetimes. Those experiences embody themselves in our psychologies—the way we understand the world and our activity in it. Childhood abuse is well-known for having this effect on the psychology of its victims. We can also inherit ways of thinking informed by trauma from past generations, transmitted consciously or unconsciously by everyday actions. Increasingly, we recognize that this is at play in the communities of descendants of African slaves.10 Here, we make the step from the personal to the social which enables us to begin to recognize the potential for broad social sicknesses to be embodied in personal psychologies. A society with fundamentally harmful conceptions of the relation between the self and the other, or of the relations between entire groups of people, will embody oppressive relations in the way its participants think and feel. Our own society’s structure fosters hyper-individualistic and misanthropic psychological structures. Thus, social ‘common sense’ can be sick, too.

The Objectification of Oppression Oppressive social relations can be embodied in us. If ‘sicknesses’ can be embodied in us, and the nature and distributions of these ‘sicknesses’ are socially determined, then relations of exploitation and oppression are key to our metabolisms with the world. Oppressors seek to render the oppressed as merely objects of themselves. Objects are acted upon, they are non-actors in the midst of acting subjects. Subjects categorize objects and mediate their interactions with them by means of concepts, which accord to the way they interact with the objects. That is, subjects objectify, or externalize, themselves into the objects. Oppression is the objectification of subjects, the forcible appearance of them as mere objects of

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez oppressive subjects. An oppressor sets out to make the oppressed purely what they make them as, what they define them as. A rapist tries to turn his victim purely into the raped, into a sex-thing. Physically, he wishes to turn his victim purely into their violated body, and psychologically, purely into the trauma of his rape. The colonizing society wishes to mark the colonized society as purely an extension of itself. Even in many critiques of colonialism, we see the colonized rendered purely as victims with no history or agency of their own. They are rendered purely as pitiful objects of the oppressor subject, leaving no potential for self-transformation—decolonization. The objectified subjects can become visible in their own objectification, being actively positioned as the opposite of the oppressor subjects in the minds and the practices of those oppressors, or, they can be rendered invisible. They can be rendered as non-being. The narcissism of the bourgeoisie is one example of the oppressor subject implicitly projecting their subjectivities over the entire world—they see themselves as the universal, and those outside of them are simply left invisible as non-universals. They are considered, at best, props to be gandered at and exploited, and not as subjects to participate in the community of equal, bourgeois subjects. In conditions where the objectification of the oppressed is embraced, sadism is an orientation of behavior common to oppressors. The sadist is a narcissist who wishes to render all subjects as objects of himself. He wishes to absorb everything into his subjectivity, his desires. Yet he cannot enjoy this sadism unless he knows his victims can recognize him, feeling pain and humiliation at his violation of their subjectivities. Paradoxically, he feels the weight of his power to objectify other subjects in the very nature of their subjectivities.11 He can never be fully satisfied, he can never successfully enclose them within his externalization. Yet, his orientation is based on a desire to supplant other subjectivities into one, Self-Same order made by the sadistic individual, a typical goal of oppressors who aim to exploit the oppressed.12 Masochism, on the other hand, is a character of those who come to desire their domination. This might appear as a contradiction and impossibility, but it is a psychology tied to the dialectic of identity and that of subjects and objects. Masochism can on one hand be a certain hidden sadism, as Robert J. Stoller argued.13 That is, it can be a desire to subvert the very act of

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Dialectic of Freedom oppression, of objectification and bondage, by subordinating it to the desires of the masochist as a subject. Yet, the very desire to be consumed into another subject, the bliss of Nirvana, can never be fully realized due to the implicit presence of sadism in this case. On the other hand, a masochistic desire to be subsumed into another’s subjectivity by becoming an object might actually be a redirected desire for one’s own, autonomous subjectivity. One may have grown into a world which asserts an all or nothing notion of subjectivity and objectivity, where one is either a master-subject or a slave-object. Thus, if one does not believe they can be a master, they might seek a blooming of subjectivity vicariously by fully melting into the perspective of another, rather than seeking kinship and affirmation as a fellow subject among subjects.14 This desire is also ultimately frustrated by the inability to establish full continuity between the masochist and the sadist. The very act of objectifying domination over the masochistic subject establishes their separateness from the sadist. They could not be dominated and experience the pleasure of domination if they were not a distinct subject. Despite the attempts by oppressors to render the oppressed as purely objectification of oppressor subjectivity, they can never fully destroy the subjectivity of the oppressed. The oppressed remain living beings who can act and shape the world, even where their abilities to act in the world are organized and limited by relations of oppression. The oppressor and oppressed are caught in a dialectic of identity—the ruler is only a ruler with the existence of the ruled, and they cannot get by without a group to rule over and benefit from the unfree labor of. The master needs the labor of the slave, and so the master cannot fully consume the slave into himself.15 Even if he desires to render the oppressed as an object, the oppressor needs the subjectivity of the oppressed, which he can never fully abolish anyway. He might be able to change the nature of the oppression, but he cannot destroy the entire class of the oppressed as such while he remains an oppressor. Though the oppressed are marked by their oppression, their subjectivity enables them to change the world as it is—including themselves as they live in it— and to transcend it.16 We are what is, but what is already has the seeds of what could be. The proletariat, for instance, is a class produced and exploited by the bourgeoisie. It is molded from the classes dispossessed and thrown into the war of all against all represented by the market. The proletariat is the domination of capital embodied in a certain historical form of

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez labor—commodified labor operating to produce surplus-values to feed the profits of capital. Physically and psychologically, proletarians are marked by their lives in capitalist society. Yet they can also transcend their conditions through revolution, which they have the potential for and interests in. They are grouped together in cooperative labor, and are branded with commonalities and common bonds to the market which enable the growth of networks of resistance. In their role as concrete, living labor, they contradict the despotic commands of abstract capital. They might be capitalistically produced, but they are also the embodied selfdestruction of capital. Categories of races are the historical objectifications of colonialism and imperialism. For instance, the notion of “Blackness” as a unified category did not exist before the Transatlantic slave trade flattened peoples of many African communities, associations, and states into one racial category. This category was then used to justify their condition of commodified enslavement. North American, flung across networks of exchange and brutal exploitation, lost much of their languages and tribal identities. At the same time, they gained a certain common identity in their condition of enslavement which enabled cooperation in resistance. Blackness is a product of slavery and oppression, but it is also a common identity which has become a means of uniting in opposition to common oppression. Though races are socially constructed through oppressive histories, they are also produced as the means of transcending those histories. Racialized people may become caught up in a dialectic of identity with the oppressor, but they also contain the potential for the transcendence of the racial present. Womanhood and sex dichotomy are self-fulfilling prophecies which brand bodies and practices. Gender is not human nature, it is socially and culturally produced. The way we think about womanhood and manhood, and other genders, do not fall from the sky. They emanate from historically informed worldviews. Similarly for sex categorization based on a dichotomy. It is not a given, but is informed by the assumption that reproductive genitalia are automatically valid as a central logic for a categorization of human beings. Implicitly, this is aimed at a regulation of reproduction and definition of the reproducers as women. Thus, these expectations inform the muscular, social, and psychological development of gendered individuals.17 They are embodied,

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Dialectic of Freedom objectified in them. Gender is a relationship to nature as a whole, mediated by our own corporeal existence—especially our corporeal needs and functions related to sexual reproduction.18 Womanhood is patriarchy embodied into a category “Woman” as a/the property of “Man,” but women have agency to shape it and challenge it through common spaces. The very nurturing ethics tied to womanhood roles enable a certain challenge to the mainstream, implicitly ‘masculine' character of bourgeois rationality. We should also remember that the idealization of a given womanhood or generalized definition of woman is also the idealization of a given lifestyle. For instance, to idealize slenderness and meekness is to implicitly condemn working class women whose social activity does not objectify into such bodies. We ought not naturalize womanhood, but must remember that it is the objectification of specific historic relations. Womanhood as it stands cannot be the basis for liberation, but the mark of it must be the basis for its own self-overcoming. It is important not to conceive resistance as automatically representing new subjectivity. Even in resistance, the oppressed can be caught in a dialectic of identity with the oppressor.19 One can define oneself purely in opposition, in contrast to the oppressor. By doing this, forever tossing the objectifications of oppression in oneself at the oppressor, one does not escape. One is still trying to prove oneself to the oppressor, acting as an object of him. One need not be purely the accusatory marks of oppression to be aware of those scars. One must resist as an innovative subject rather than as an object of oppression. To escape from this oppressive objectivity is to reclaim one’s subjectivity and one’s right to practical action in objectifying oneself in the world. One should not ignore that one is marked by oppression. One should recognize that one is marked but that one isn’t only what was enacted upon them. One holds a capacity for new life and thriving. One can engage in continued practical transformation of the world and oneself on the basis of what exists. As long as one lives, one doesn’t stop living. One is not only a survivor, but holds a potential to thrive.

What We Are and What We Could Be This form of analysis is important both epistemologically and analytically—it avoids moralizing individualism, a homogenous, abstract, and alienated notion of social structures, and

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez also avoids naturalizing our social relations or our characteristics. It can account for the personal and the political. The personal is political, and the political is personal. However, we should also be careful not to merely naturalize us into what we currently are or the history of what we have been. We must remember that we aren’t merely what we do. We are also the potential for the transcendence of that which exists right now on a basis that is already present within what we are. Self-liberation is possible. The metabolism of subjectivities and objectivities is not a closed one, but dynamic. This framework also reminds us of the importance of caregiving and nurturing in any revolutionary movement if we wish to build something new. We live in a deeply sick and damaged society. We are dominated by the massive machine of an alienated society built in the image of capital. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we can see how a sick society embodies itself both physically, as with the virus, and mentally, as with the mass depression and hopelessness which accompanies such crises. In our identity as individuals, our subjectivities can never be fully suffocated. There are healthy approaches to the subjectivity of ourselves and others and there are unhealthy approaches. We live in a deeply sick society stricken by violent individualism and a twin duo of narcissism and self-destruction. To recognize our existence as subjects who can transform the objective world through our subjectivities, we must remember that we are subject-objects. We are minds, but also embodied minds, and we are actors in the world among other actors in the world. For a new world, a world which could heal from the sickness of what is which embeds itself in our bodies, we must develop a new social logic. This must be a logic premised on intersubjectivity, by an orientation which both recognizes ourselves as objects in the world and recognizes others as subjectivities rather than purely objects existing for our own ends.20 We need a world premised on nurturing, care, and community, not exploitation. If we wish to transform ourselves, we must remember that it cannot be an individual endeavor. To act as communal individuals is itself to begin the subversion of our sick world. Revolutionary transformation is not merely a change in thinking of individuals producing a new order. It is bloomed from the seeds already existing within the relations among people.

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Dialectic of Freedom Where capitalism atomizes us, its relations of oppressions also produce potential modes of commonality and mutuality. Realizing a new society based on mutuality and the ethics of community on a universal scale is the key to transcending the objectification of a sick society into ourselves. Our sick society and our embodiment of this sickness can themselves be embodied into the earth. We are nature, and yet we are a part of nature which consciously shapes nature. By our very existence as human beings, we shape the environment around us. This objectification is not the same at all times and in all places—it varies with what embodiments we are acting through and as. Oppressive societies, especially their unsustainable demands on human beings and the earth, drain life—human, animal, and earth alike. Capital is the most destructive of oppressive societies in the entirety of history. We must restore balance in our rhythms with the earth. Our rhythms with the earth can have agency, we do not merely react to the rest of nature but act with it. We are dancers to a rhythm, and we have choice in the details of how we choose to dance to that rhythm.21 This brings us to realize the need to destroy this system which refuses all organic rhythms in the name of all-devouring cannibalism. When someone is afflicted, we treat them and nurse them back to health. We need a movement and a society which expresses this as a means of transcending the alienation of capital. Capitalism is killing us and the earth. It demands that we sacrifice life for labor, and labor for value. Communism must assert the use of labor for a wealth of possibilities in life, and the value of flesh and blood against the domination of value. Where capitalism represents the domination of people by things, socialism must be the reconciliation of people and things and the realization of self-consciousness. We must no longer feel like mere victims of circumstance, of the harsh and impersonal, coldly rational rhythms of capital. We must be an active force which can mold ourselves and be the unity of subjectivity and objectivity in the world. We are not only the embodiment of what is and what has been. We are also the embodiment of potentiality and of the seeds for a new world.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez The Pitfalls of Universalism But the new world cannot be cultivated so simply. Those of us who consider ourselves to be committed to emancipation tend to consider ourselves as universalist in orientation. Many of us make such statements as ‘we are all human’ or ‘we are all equal,’ implying a certain common status, and thus substance, to all people. It is simply common sense to us that to be a progressive, one must be a universalist. To be interested in local or specific concerns is apparently reactionary and narrow-minded. This is not the only way which we can conceive of universalism, however. There are two main philosophical tendencies in contemporary universalist politics: A homogenizing, abstract universalism, and a pluralistic, concrete universalism, made rich in its determinations by manifold abstractions.

Abstract Universalism By homogenizing universalism, I mean a universalism which asserts itself on the basis of a fundamental sameness of everyone, such as in the statement ‘we are all human.’ This pairs closely with a rhetoric of equality. We tend to think of equality as inherently progressive, or fundamentally good. In asserting equality, we typically lack consciousness of its inherent homogenizing force. Equality takes two distinct things, in this case people, and subjects them to one measure. In order for this to be done, it is necessary to in some way subject them to a homogeneity so that they can be measured as if they were quantities of one substance. Here, we tend to make the substance of ‘human”’and ‘human rights’ the substance of equality between distinct people.22 We might consider this to be a ‘common sense’ means of liberation—isn’t oppression manifested by treating people differently? Thus, doesn’t treating them the same, regardless of who they are, transcend that oppression? Such an assumption fails to recognize that difference is inherent to existence, even if specific differentiations (i.e., racial) are not. To treat everyone as exactly the same is to demand homogeneity. Equality in the sense of sameness seeks to abolish, to flatten difference. Universalism premised on this concept demands that people reject their history, their specific social relations, in in favor of a common abstract

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Dialectic of Freedom identity—whether a human, a citizen of a nation, or a citizen of the world. Despite altruistic pretenses, this is not a true liberation. This all-devouring, all-subsuming universalism, which has a basic tendency to abolish distinction-in-general, is not rooted in emancipatory politics. This form of universalism is not really universal—despite its abstractness and emphasis on the fundamental sameness of all people, it is actually socially and historically rooted. Specifically, rooted in Western European political history and ideology. It assumes that all people-places are interchangeable, and that history is an eternal marching of some temporal ‘destiny.' It claims to be unchained to specific people-places, to be free-flying, and yet it is merely the ‘spirit’ of Western Europe spreading its wings to reach over the whole of the world. Vine Deloria Jr. (Íŋyaŋ Woslál Háŋ) lambasted this outlook, saying:

“Western European peoples have never learned to consider the nature of the world discerned from a spatial point of view. And a singular difficulty faces peoples of Western European heritage in making a transition from thinking in terms of time to thinking in terms of space. The very essence of Western European identity involves the assumption that time proceeds in a linear fashion; further it assumes that at a particular point in the unraveling of this sequence, the peoples of Western Europe became the guardians of the world.”23

Theodor W. Adorno similarly critiqued the destructive tendencies in this outlook as they manifested in Western European history:

“The abstract utopia would be all too easily reconcilable with the most devious tendencies of society. That all human beings would resemble each other, is exactly what suits this latter. It regards factual or imagined differences as marks of shame, which reveal, that one has not brought things far enough; that something somewhere has been left free of the machine, is not totally determined by the totality. The technics of the concentration camps was designed to turn prisoners into guards, the murdered into murderers. Racial difference was absolutely sublated, so that one

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez could abolish it absolutely, if only in the sense that nothing different survived anymore.”24

This genocidal orientation is not merely an empty potentiality in the North American context, either. It has shown itself loud and clear in infamous historical developments. In North America, the project of forcibly assimilating Indigenous peoples was premised on the idea that a free, civilized society could only be composed of a homogenous, essentially European (or Anglo) citizenry. Communal ways of life among Indigenous peoples were considered to be incompatible with ‘civilized’ bourgeois republican idea of citizenship. In the words of Captain Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the Carlisle Indian School, it was a project which aimed to “kill the Indian, save the man.”25 In a parallel thread, Thomas Jefferson and other early U. S. politicians advocated for the expulsion of all Africans from the continent of North America.26 Their reasoning was that Africans were inherently an unfree race, and that to have a ‘slave-people’ in the middle of a society of free equal citizens would represent a tendency for degeneration. Thus, the only solution was to expel all Africans from the country, whether to Liberia or elsewhere, so that the United States could be uniformly Euro-American. Jefferson and the other advocates of colonization for African slaves were mortally terrified by the Haitian Revolution, wishing to eliminate the potential for an American slave revolution by any means necessary. To have a colony of the ‘dangerous classes’ living among them was suicidal, in the eyes of these bourgeoisie. The universalist liberalism of both of these projects demanded a homogenous humanity or citizenry. Both of them sought to abolish difference, albeit doing so in different ways. This abstract universalism as we know it is not a neutral outlook in terms of social class. It is essentially bourgeois. This may seem as if it is a typical Marxist approach, attributing everything to economic interest. This characterization is not so simplistic. The development of this outlook organically expresses the everyday social activity of the bourgeoisie, and is an instance of bourgeois ideology naturalizing this class perspective into seemingly neutral ‘common sense.’

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Dialectic of Freedom The bourgeoisie is a capitalist class. In fact it is the capitalist class. The bourgeoisie is the embodiment or the personification of capital, appearing as its private owner. But what is capitalism? In simple terms, capitalism is the domination of generalized commodity production, which means production of commodities produced for all-around market exchange in the name of accumulating greater capital. What this entails is that the interest of producing surplus-values, to be distributed across the dominant classes of society in the forms of profit, interest, rent, and taxes, predominates. How are concrete labor and its distinct concrete products transformed into this abstract expression of value? Here is where our critique of equality becomes somewhat clearer. For many distinct products to be exchanged as value-equivalents, there must be an equal measure for that value. The only common, measurable characteristic between commodities, however, is the minimum average socially necessary labor time embodied in them. Let us take an example of a baker and a carpenter. We will assume that the baker produces bread, while the carpenter produces wooden shelves. How can we compare, say, 20 loaves of bread with 1 shelf? What consistent common characteristic do they have? The only one is a general category of ‘labor,’ taking the two very different categories under one umbrella. Yet the forms of labor embodied in each are very different. How do we derive one measure or substance of labor from such distinct, specific forms of labor? By abstracting labor into labor-in-general, or into the socially necessary labor time embodied in the products. We cannot do so without a market for labor, or commodity laborpower, and a market where manifold activities defined by a division of labor are simultaneously interchangeable in form. The common substance of abstract value depends on the abstraction of specific, concrete expenditures of labor into one abstract category of labor-as-such. The equality of a measure to weigh distinct commodities against each other depends on the assumption of an equality and sameness to the labor which produces them. Commodity production produces a homogenous coherence in the form of value.27 This equality is not even a true equality, it is a false equality (though. what equality can even be true in a world of distinct entities?). The capitalists consider the exchange to be just and

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez fair. In the hypothetical condition of an equilibrium market, they are buying the labor-power, or commodified labor-capacity, of the workers 'at their value’ (the cost of reproducing the worker, ensure that they keep showing up and deliver a given quality of labor) in exchange for an equivalent in money. Yet labor-power is not like other commodities—it is the only commodity which is inseparable from living labor. Living labor is the power to produce new value by actively transforming things into new, embodied forms of use-values. Labor produces more than the equivalent for the remuneration of the worker—their wages. The new value is hidden from the sight of the exchange, becoming surplus-value. The assumption of an abstract equality between the buyer (capitalist) and seller (worker) ignores the fundamental inequality in the exchange—one owns means of production and the other owns nothing but their own labor-power. This distinction in owning versus laboring means that the buyer, or owner, appropriates the new value produced, which is beyond the bounds of the exchange of equal commodities. The two classes are not the same, despite both being owners on the market—the capitalist owns the means of production and the worker owns their labor-power. To acknowledge this basic qualitative distinction would be to toss off the veil of the equality of all market actors and recognize people by their social relations in the system of social relations. Just as this exchange premised on equality simply hides the inequality and exploitation inherent in the relation of capitalists and proletarians, the ideology of abstract universalism simply smoothes over difference and sweeps oppression under the rug of common ‘humanity’ or ‘citizenship.’ As in the ‘equality’ of the buyer and seller of labor-power, the ‘equality’ in abstract universalism demands homogeneity, and it either attacks or hides difference. We have seen how this takes the form of assimilation when we recognized this tendency within the assimilation of Indigenous peoples. There are other instances where this logic shows itself to be a bourgeois, colonialist project. In liberal discourse there is a partial recognition of this, particularly in the wake of the summer 2020 uprisings in the United States. When conservatives assert that ‘racism is over, we’re already equal,’ they mean that since de jure racial distinctions in citizenship status have been abolished, racism in society has ceased as well. Liberals recognize the fundamental issue in

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Dialectic of Freedom this—the continuity of racial inequality in concrete conditions of life, such as in disproportionate police violence and racialized income inequality, means that racism is not ‘over.’ Equal citizenship has merely privatized it. From this, they extrapolate that we merely need to establish ‘true equality,’ that the problem is that it has not been applied consistently. But the fundamentally oppressive nature of abstract universal equality roots itself deeper than any such symptoms of incomplete equality. The world can never be abstract, so to impose an abstract conception on it is always to obscure the characteristics of the real state of things. Abstract equality inherently depends on this act of dissection. It cannot recognize real social relations: the real networks of ties between people, their formations as specific individuals, the historical development of these social relations. There were manifestations of this even preceding that of assimilation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 17th century Northeastern America, Indigenous peoples who had converted to Christianity held a status as “Praying Indians.”28 They were not considered to be equal to European-Americans, nor were they fully included in Euro-American society. However, they were seen as having achieved spiritual equality in the eyes of god. In a word, all souls were equal, but the real, material people who held those souls were not. In this relation, the ‘soul’ is abstracted away from the concrete relations of oppression at hand in order to establish ‘equality’ in a non-material, fantastical non-existence. The equality of souls in this conception precedes our modern American notion of the equality of citizens or humans. ‘Equal in the eyes of God’ was simply changed into ‘equal in the eyes of Man.’ The obscuring of real social relations by abstract categories like ‘mankind' can represent two forms of mystification. On one hand, we smooth over concrete oppression by treating oppressor and oppressed as ‘equal’ through an abstract measure. On the other hand, we conceal this oppression by excluding the oppressed from the substance-category of the equals, considering the equals to be the only ones who exist. Everyone else is simply ‘the help,’ ‘the wretched,’ the outsiders, or, perhaps, they are completely irrelevant to any ‘true’ life. They are expelled from the legitimacy of life by the equal masters’ beloved practice of narcissistic navelgazing.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez In the July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”29

This, at the same time that he and many of the other signatories owned slaves. Those enslaved Africans were not included in the Founding Fathers’ definition of “men,” who were held to be equal. They were excluded from such a consideration entirely. To be excluded from ‘humanity’ or the community of the free was also, however, an equality in its own sense. The logic of these exclusions homogenized the groups it excluded under the same category and within the same logic. Abstract categories invoked in oppression overwhelmed and branded them with the mark of that oppression. For example, the concept of a homogenous group of “Black people” as we think of it was forged in the hellfire of chattel slavery. Before the development of a massive transatlantic slave trade and chattel slave population in the Americas, if one were to ask, say, a Yoruba person whether they consider themselves a “Black person,” the same group as a Xhosa person, the question would seem absurd. The notion of black Africans composing one racial group emerged hand in hand with American chattel slavery conflating the condition of enslavement, of being a living commodity, with Blackness. Africans from manifold tribal groups were forcibly thrown together into the horrors of the Middle Passage and the exploitation of slavery, regardless of their regional origin, language, or religion. They were abstracted from their real relations, from their ties as indigenous peoples to their people-places or their specific homelands. A first moment in the legitimization of their enslavement was their being ‘marked’ by Blackness—the so-called Curse of Cain. The second step was in abstraction from their real social lives and individualities into quantifiable, equal measures of value—their musculature, their age, their gum health, their fertility.... There developed a certain, darkly ironic equality among slaves: They were subjected to the same measure of dehumanizing fungibility in exchange-value.

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Dialectic of Freedom The ones who engaged in this commodification, the slave traffickers and the slave owners, were not contradicting their liberal ideologies of abstract universalism. In reality, this was an instance of the ‘universal’ being universal in being exclusionary, of their exercising of freedom being the freedom to commodify the unfree or the unequal. In the words of the historian of slavery Stephanie Smallwood:

“If the logic of commodification is one of ‘quantification’ and ‘abstraction,’ then presumably people—the most singular of beings—should represent the greatest challenge to that logic, should be the most resilient in the face of its homogenizing impulse. In the first instance, then, we confront the difficult truth that the modern freedom envisaged by Locke and produced by Anglo-Atlantic capitalism not only easily accommodated and protected slavery, but in fact found its fullest expression in the commodification of the person—in the lesson learned that the logic of commodification could be extended to cloak even human beings in its shadow[…]”30

The abstract universal is not a real universal—it hides the commodified ‘draft animal’ non-citizens.31 The non-citizens are ‘non-universals,’ bare natural ground-beings. Any abstract conception of the universal overshadows their existence. Their oppression is concrete, it requires operating on the level of concrete relations. If we only concern ourselves with the abstract community of free and equal citizens, we don’t even notice them—we become complacent with the mutilation of those who are cast alongside mutilated nature, excluded from the community of citizens. Freedom becomes the freedom to commodify. Freedom is then freedom through the unfreedom of the ‘non-universals.’ Abstract, bourgeois universalism is an all-devouring universality—it claims that ‘that which is not myself is untrue.’ Jack D. Forbes (Powhatan-Renapé and Delaware-Lenapé) recognized this tendency of cannibalism within capitalist civilization, stating that “the wealthy and exploitative literally consume the lives of those that they exploit.”32 Oppressors in relations of exploitation tend toward this self-universalization and devouring of the so-called ‘non-

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez universals.’ Colonizers consume the colonized, the patriarchal man consumes the woman. They are merely means to ends for them, things to be possessed in the name of their ‘universal' goals.

Concrete Universalism Having demonstrated the destructiveness of abstract universalism, we can finally introduce the positive alternative of concrete universalism into our critique. The alternative vision is one which is finely summed up by a Zapatista slogan: “Un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos/A world where many worlds fit.” In Zapatista philosophy, this derives from a specifically K’iche’ Mayan iteration of a principle common to Indigenous American philosophies: each people has a right to a cosmology or mode of life particular to their people-place, or homeland.33 The colonialist project of forcible conversion and homogenization does not make sense within this framework. As Vine Deloria Jr. explains in God is Red (2003):

“Tribal religions are actually complexes of attitudes, beliefs, and practices finetuned to harmonize with the lands on which the people live. It is not difficult to understand that the Hopi people, living in the arid plateau and canyon lands of northern Arizona, had need of a rain dance to ensure the success of their farming. Here place and religion have such an obvious parallel that anyone can understand the connection. “It becomes exceedingly more complicated, however, when we learn that the Lummis and other tribes of the Pacific Northwest also had a rain dance. Perhaps once or twice in a person’s lifetime the West Coast would have an exceedingly heavy snow storm. The snow would bury the longhouses in which the people lived, and if it remained deep for any significant period of time, the Lummis would be unable to get out and hunt and fish and would starve to death. A man with powers to make rain would then perform the rain dance, and the snow would cease falling, turning to rain that melted the snow and prevented the people from being snowbound.”34

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Dialectic of Freedom Socially and historically, such outlooks emerge from the basis of Indigenous identities in community social relations, including one’s relation to one’s specific homeland. One’s identity is based in one’s community. One’s worldview does not create a hard dualism between the concrete and the abstract, between the ‘world’ and the ‘spirit,’ but is concerned primarily with the everyday life of the community. We are not advocating simply to return to pre-colonial community localism here. Rather, we are advocating that we pursue a universalism which is non-homogenizing, which is pluralistic. The universal ought to be the organic unity of the many particulars. We should be students of Indigenous communities to learn this principle, for communism is the restoration of community life out of the tragedy of colonialist, capitalist history. The investigation of the root of issues in the structure of social relations, and the search for the solution in the transcendence of those social relations are organically linked to a pluralistic outlook. Marxists strongly emphasized beginning with social relations as they stand in their study and critique of existing society. When we start with the concrete, seeking to liberate the concrete from the domination of its own abstractness (such as in the domination of abstract value over the concrete labor and needs of workers), we start from a much broader foundation than the universal abstract categories. The genuinely concrete appears abstract from the perspective of abstraction, and the abstract (say, value) appears concrete from the perspective of uncritical subjects. The abstract is always an abstraction from the concrete, whether it realizes it or not. All subjectivity, all living perspective, begins with what’s immediately given—and thus, something vague, abstract.35 It’s by working through the world that the abstract becomes true to the infinite characteristics in the concrete. The concrete is always more full and multifaceted than the abstract, although the latter is extremely important as a means to comprehend and enrich the former.36 Abstract and Concrete In capitalist society, the bourgeoisie tends to be the abstracting class, and the working classes the concrete classes. This means that the bourgeoisie represents the embodiment of the drive of abstract value to subordinate all of concrete society to its demands, regardless of the

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez concrete consumption needs of the people. We saw this during the COVID-19 pandemic when capitalists and bourgeois politicians fretted about saving the economy, while thousands of “essential workers” died from the virus. Yet the two are identical in one thing, capitalism. The characteristics of workers as capitalist workers are the marks of capital, we cannot affirm ‘good’ against ‘evil.’ Concreteness cannot be asserted in a dichotomy against abstractness. Rather, we must think on the scale of their identity in the social totality. The bourgeoisie tends to be dedicated primarily to the augmentation of abstract values (appearing as money), although they engage with concrete mechanisms to serve these aims. For example, they wish to serve ‘the economy,’ and they often believe in a form of cosmopolitan politics which is based on purely bourgeois and anti-popular concerns. This manifests in the institutions of G20, the World Trade Organization, and others. Multinational corporations relocate freely in order to pursue the lowest possible production costs and thus to maximize profit, serving the growth of capital. The bourgeoisie of various countries, bound to international finance capital for the very coherence of their system, tends to sacrifice local concerns and needs in the name of satisfying the needs of worldwide value. Which, not coincidentally, tend to overlap with the needs of those with the greatest concentration of capital. Often at the ‘advice’ of imperialist organizations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, leaders of periphery countries cut social spending and privatize nationalized industries. The ‘concreteness’ of the nation-states, so often framed as the opposite of ‘traitorous’ international capital, in fact is merely a unit of global capital. In bourgeois society, abstraction is not derived from the concrete, the concrete is merely a manifestation of the abstract. “So God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him[...]”37 On the other hand, the working classes of various countries are concerned primarily with their conditions of labor, their living standards, their consumption, their communities—in short, with ‘concrete’ aims. These ‘concrete’ aims, in being so simple as to be ‘abstract’ by lacking conceptual complexity, in fact become a justified abstraction, a real means for universalism. The working classes are hostile to capital and feel frustration at the domination of their lives by impersonal powers, which they do not always recognize as the power of capital.

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Dialectic of Freedom They are considered narrow-minded by the bourgeoisie. They are described as backwards, localist, provincial, ignorant.... And yet, there is a potential for a far deeper universalism within the very nature of the global working class itself, by its universal domination under capital. The same is the case for all those ‘particularisms’ which confront false, dominating universalism. As the feminist theorist Françoise Vergès has written:

“For racialized women, it is not about filling a void, but about finding the words to breathe life into that which has been condemned to non-existence, worlds that have been cast out of humanity.”38

To vindicate these exiled world—las afueras—would be to breathe life into a world where many worlds fit. Where the bourgeoisie tends towards a homogenous cosmopolitanism (“humanity”), a homogenous nationalism, or both in one—which are in truth the projections of abstract value into the world—the working classes tend to specificity in their criticisms and demands, almost all of which point toward worldwide networks of dependency and exploitation. These market networks and confluence of demands constitute the potential for the realization of a global working class. By this, I mean the activity of the global working class as a class—as the revolutionary proletariat. The working classes of the world have common interests in defying global capital in favor of their concrete demands and livelihoods, although this is expressed in local forms. There is a potential for internationalism, for a concrete universalism, among the workers on the basis of their pluralistic commonality of interests.39 The working class is the true universal class in a very real, concrete sense—they emerge from the manifold wretched of the earth. They are immigrants, mothers, prostitutes, children, orphans, the lowest castes, indigenous peoples, the outsiders—they are the negativity of the system. The working class holds within itself the basis for “a world where many worlds fit,” and comes into direct conflict, by its own bread-and-roses demands, with the false, abstract universalism of the bourgeoisie.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez

Difference and Universalism Through a revolutionary, concrete approach to universalism, we can appreciate the importance and power of specificity. Specificity and difference are not contrary to universalism, but ought to be the basis of it. The key is to seek a system of social relations based on a concrete universalism, one which is concerned primarily with people-people relations. Vine Deloria Jr., the well-known Oceti Sakowin author of Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), tapped into the expression of a form of this in Indigenous views of the individual, remarking:

“The vital difference between Indians in their individualism and the traditional individualism of Anglo-Saxon America is that the two understandings of man are built on entirely different premises. White America speaks of individualism on an economic basis. Indians speak of individualism on a social basis. While the rest of America is devoted to private property, Indians prefer to hold their lands in tribal estate, sharing the resources in common with each other. Where Americans conform to social norms of behavior and set up strata for social recognition, Indians have a free-flowing concept of social prestige that acts as a leveling device against the building of social pyramids. “Thus the two kinds of individualism are diametrically opposed to each other, and it would appear impossible to reconcile one with the other. Where the rich are admired in white society, they are not particularly welcome in Indian society. The success in economic wars is not nearly as important for Indians as it is for whites, since the sociability of individuals with each other acts as a binding tie in Indian society.”40

The Black Martinican philosopher and decolonial militant Frantz Fanon expressed the power of specificity in the context of Black people rejecting the racist homogenization we described earlier. In his analysis, an important step of the transcending of a colonized state of being is to realize:

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Dialectic of Freedom “I do not have the duty to be this or that …. “If the white man challenges my humanity, I will impose my whole weight as a man on his life and show him that I am not that ‘sho’ good eatin’ that he persists in imagining.”41

Fanon and Deloria Jr.’s analyses bring us to particular examples of where universalism fails and where it can succeed. The system of citizenship in the United States is tied directly to abstraction, and thus citizenship. In 1924, the Indian Citizenship Act was passed, extending U. S. citizenship to Indigenous peoples.42 Yet although this appeared to be a victory for equal rights, it also superseded tribal sovereignty in favor of the unitary jurisdiction of the United States over colonized peoples. The demand for homogeneity was in truth the privatization of oppression. Similarly, while the 1964 Civil Rights Act began the process of abolishing de jure racial hierarchy within legal citizenship, it was premised on the notion of uniform American identity.43 If you are an ‘American,’ then to point out distinct forms of racial and colonial oppressions is to disrupt the unity of citizens and to engage in dangerous separatism. It is to violate abstract universalism, which is implicitly Euro-American and bourgeois. This is why it is considered ‘reverse-racist’ to point out the specific concerns of oppressed peoples, while pretending to be ‘colorblind,’ to ‘not see race,’ is not—even though racial oppression is still a concrete fact in distinctions of everyday life. And yet, Indigenous peoples and Black Americans have produced their own forms of universalism through their specificities themselves. Pan-Indigenism and Pan-Africanism were formed out of common experiences of colonial and racial oppression. They do not inherently demand homogeneity. Instead, they seek to unite many particulars into one on the basis of the common interest composed by those particulars. They are not provincialist or navel-gazing, but universal in perspective, starting from the particular and then moving to the universal. They uphold the right to difference and to specificity not as irreconcilable with universalist politics, but as the very bedrock of it. Yet difference can itself become a bad or violent abstraction. We have already seen how the differentiation of the ‘universals’ from the ‘non-universals’ can abstract and homogenize the

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez latter. In resisting their oppression by the ‘universals,’ the ‘non-universals’ can themselves be caught up in their position and naturalize it. Common identities formed from common oppression can become common identities which are dependent on that oppression. One can make an ethic out of their conditions of oppression and condemn the oppressor on the basis of their being one’s opposite, rather than transcending the bonded identities of oppressor-oppressed into freedom.44 Fanon described this dialectic of identity as it appears in the psychological drama of selfdecolonization:

“The language of the colonizer suddenly scorches his lips. Rediscovering one’s people sometimes means in this phase wanting to be a ‘[n-word],’ not an exceptional ‘[n-word],’ but a real ‘[n-word],’ a ‘dirty [n-word],’ the sort defined by the white man. Rediscovering one’s people means becoming a ‘filthy Arab,’ of going as native as possible, becoming unrecognizable; it means clipping those wings which had been left to grow.”45

This expression of a slave morality can take a moderate, often liberal form, or it can take a radical form. In the moderate form, it is expressed as an ideology extolling diversity as the means to transcend marginalization, or otherwise advocating the moral upholding of marginalized groups. Yet this naturalizes the formation of these identities, ignoring their social-historical development and homogenizing them into ahistorical, asocial elements. For example, the category of “latinx” crumples many ethnic, regional, linguistic... groups into one category on the basis of their relation to the mainstream of Euro-American society. They are assumed to have some form of a homogenous experience as “latinx” since they are non-EuroAmericans with ancestry originating from south of the U. S. border. Their manifold distinctions in real histories and community relations are flattened into a diversity category. There is an inherent element of abstraction in this process, which cannot handle the real nuances of historically produced social relations and the identities tied to them. They are merely a certain

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Dialectic of Freedom subset of non-whites. They are defined by the terms of mainstream society, even while they are seeking to challenge the racist exclusion and domination rendered by that society. In the radical form, the very same manner of abstraction dependent on oppressoroppressed relation is at play as in the moderate. The situation is conceived of in a purely dichotomous manner, being a literal oppressor-oppressed relation with absolutely no nuance of real concrete relations. All in the ‘oppressor’ group are flattened into being equivalent and equally bad, and all in the ‘oppressed’ group are flattened into being equivalent and equally good. This ignores both the complexities of relations among ‘oppressor’ groups, the fact that their nature as ‘oppressors’ is a historical product rather than elementarily grounded in them— and that the ‘oppressed’ also have distinctions among them. One example I am familiar with is that of the Mexica Movement, which conflates all of us Chican@s with Indigenous peoples and tends to homogenize us in the same moment that it homogenizes Euro-Americans as an undifferentiated enemy group. This outlook ignores the distinctions of the non-Indigenous among us from the Indigenous peoples, the dimension of Afro-Mexican identity and antiBlackness in our history. It also fails to recognize distinctions among Euro-Americans and thus fails to grasp the truth of the social systems which we seek to supersede. Yet we should not conflate this ‘oppressed’ chauvinism with ‘oppressor’ chauvinism. The former is ultimately a response to the latter. It is important to remember that it is specifically a naturalization of real relations of exploitation and oppression. To treat them as equivalents is itself to operate on an abstract plane. One frequent manifestation of this error is to equate white nationalism and Black nationalism. This is quite comical once one considers that the former has historically been how the U. S. as a nation was defined, and the latter has been a response to that. The latter seeks to escape the former. Where it has chauvinistic tendencies, this is typically a play at ‘turning the tables’ of the relation of oppression—which is still operating within the terms of that relation. The chauvinism of the oppressor is historically primary. If we look at the situation from the point of view of concrete universalism, we can critique both and redirect our focus to the analysis of concrete social relations and the concrete

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez transcendence of them. We have to remember that the common interests of the oppressed are not elemental or ‘ready-made,’ but that they are coalitions formed out of pluralities.

The Universal Community The world to be built on the basis of concrete universalism is communism, or the universal community. The notion of a community is one based on familiar, person-person connections. Rather than being mediated primarily by abstractions, whether by value or by divinely ordained estates, community is mediated by specific relations between specific people. People are not considered faceless, interchangeable atomistic units, but are considered as integral nodes in the web of the community’s relations. What is key is their particular places in that community as their particular individualities. Yet the old communalist societies held a limitation within their logic. Their nature as closed communities and the associated power of their leaders were the means through which they self-negated into ranked and distanced class societies.46 They define themselves according to particular genealogical networks and people-place homelands. This derives from their productive-activity, which is tied to specific localities and the bonds of the citizen-residents in those localities. There is a tendency toward self-negation in their interactions with outsiders, such as via the enslavement of prisoners of war. The regulations reproducing community bonds within the community rarely apply to outsiders, and outsiders can usually only become community-citizens through adoption into the network of relations. This logic enables the accumulation of slave populations within many of these societies, typically under the monopoly of the most powerful warriors, which becomes the basis for the rise of class distinctions. To radically universalize the logic of communal life is to transcend this limitation. We wish to restore the principle of person-person relations and self-identification based on one’s place in all of their relations. We do not wish to do this solely in a localist framework, but worldwide. We seek the abolition of society as it presently stands. This is not merely a moral assertion. Capitalism has already established a universal society by linking up the world and the

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Dialectic of Freedom many communities of it into the networks of the global market. Abstract value binds all of us together in a concrete manner. The ‘world,’ for the first time in history, exists as a unified thing in a concrete sense through this interconnection. Yet to realize the ‘world,’ we have to liberate this network of interconnection from the domination of capital, which subjects all of us to its despotic, necrotic demands. We seek to transcend exploitative interconnection on the basis of that very interconnection. We seek to liberate ourselves from the domination of the abstract on the basis of what it has forced the concrete to construct. The universal community to be realized should not be a homogenous project—that is the characteristic tendency of the capital-produced ‘world.’ This world is not one, it is many. It is the capitalist ‘world’ which subordinates manifold experiences into itself. The universal community should be just the opposite of that—an all-encompassing, pluralistic society premised on reciprocity and communal bonds. A community of communities, a world of worlds. A world where many worlds fit.

The Authenticity Trap But the project of the unfolding of a wealth of worlds runs into obstacles. We must clarify ourselves and our relation with this world—we work with bad givenness even in trying to do that. Be true to yourself. You can only trust yourself. There are only two genders. Tradition keeps us from chaos. What do these sentiments have in common? Themes of the self and of realizing the self, of the loneliness of the world, of a hard limit in the external world and in the body, of dependency. This is dependency on the self, a desire for pure independence as a means to live a happy, meaningful, ‘authentic’ life for oneself. Another desire appears, hungering for some fixed ground outside of oneself—some firm thing to stand on. People as a whole have come to a desire for dependency, for structure, for escaping the emptiness of life and to escape the horrible void of unsure possibilities.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez We are living in a world stricken by a crisis of meaning, one that was already identified by people like Friedrich Nietzsche in the late 19th century (the “Death of God”). It has become clearer as the myths of the “New World Order,” announced by George H. W. Bush in the wake of the Eastern Bloc’s collapse, themselves fall apart. In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis and the endless list of ‘unprecedented' events since at least 2019, any notion of solid foundations seems hard to come by. Everyday life for the majority of people is a cacophony. We live an endless barrage of confusion and anxiety, of pain and suffering, of insecurity and crises. Our ‘normal’ state has become one of extreme, open tension. Many people turn inward in a search for stability in an unstable world. They decide that their only path to security, meaning, and pleasure in a miserable world is by becoming one’s own rock. To them, the world is fundamentally evil, and the only part of life apart from the world is their internal, individual life. They search for the secure dependency in their own ‘independence’—they fall into dependency on some notion of a stable and well-defined self. Others turn to some exterior stability, fearing the isolation of this internally-facing independence and seeking some form of community. Yet their communities are often alienated ones which they surrender themselves to in some search for oneness and escape from the tensions of everyday bustle. They want someone else to lay down what their role is in life, what its meaning is, to direct them like a Father with his child. In both of these forms of dependency, there is a quest for primary experiences as a solid, dependable foundation to become identical within the white water rapids of our variable and chaotic world. The internal and external forms of dependency coalesce significantly. Think of ancestry tests, Myers-Briggs personality tests, gender and sexual identity, the notion of male vs female bodies and/or brains, the concept of family values, cults, cultic pyramid schemes, defining diagnoses, mothering and fathering, etc. All of these are various forms of surrendering to something external and fixed, even if it is a supposedly internal ‘authentic’ or ‘foundational’ self. Although they coalesce, one can also detect a certain difference in tendencies for these two authenticity-drives.

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Dialectic of Freedom In one form, there is the individualist search for an asocial, ‘authentic’ self. This one asserts the monadic autonomy of the individual against society and takes up the slogan of ‘let people do what they want.’ This is basically a liberal or radical liberal version of authenticitydrive. The other form is that which tends towards reactionary politics. It seeks a fixed, despotic externality above and beyond individuals to arrange and order them paternalistically. This one decries the ‘moral breakdown’ of modern society, directing its ire in particular against the individualist authenticity-drive. Against this, they assert God, the Family, the Nation, the State, and other forms of external collectivities. Both of these posit a strict separation of individual and society, taking one side or the other whether they admit it explicitly or not. Both assume there are fundamentals to existence beyond history and the development of society, whether it’s the notion of an ‘authentic self,’ often seen to exist from birth, or the notion of some external objectivity which individual subjectivity cannot and should not do anything about—“Facts don’t care about your feelings.” And yet the pursuit of authenticity, of absolute, unshakeable fundamentals to lean on in dependency like a Big Strong Man of a Father ultimately fails. Either there must be some part of oneself entirely separate from the change and variability of everyday life which one can lean on (whether that’s DNA, a soul, or being “born this way”) or there must be some external ‘tradition’ or Thing which is entirely on sure ground and apart from the variability of subjectivity or the ‘decadent’ parts of society. Both of these, implicitly or explicitly, depend on their claim to truth on an absolute, dualistic separation of subject and object, individual and social, self and other, tradition and decadence, is and ought. They are mirror images of each other, both are moments of one dying society where its participants search desperately for strong supports in a rotten and collapsing house. These are not our only options in confronting the impersonal powers which dominate us in modern, alienated life—those things which stand above and beyond us and toss us around like leaves in a wildfire. Rather than coping, we can turn to a dialectical approach which takes what

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez is given and unravels it through practical critique, one which understands transformation as emanating from the social subject rather than positing any dualism. The bipolar separation of the individual and society means an affirmation of what is, whether one sides with the individual or with the society. If the world is unchangeable by individuals and is like a current which one cannot resist, then there is no reason to focus on anything except an atomistic self. If the self is a danger to be tamed, then one can only depend on a stable, cohesive, and despotic social world. The choice is either the twin forms of carving a place into the present world, or the risks and the benefits of revolutionary transformation within and against society, where new possibilities seem realizable. People today make peace with a world that they despise and are desperately miserable. They believe they have no other option. Where new possibilities appear immanent, they are willing to take risks in rebellion or even revolution. Contrast the summer 2020 uprisings, with its the opening of the floodgates in what can be considered realistic, to now, where the world-as-it-exists seems more solid than ever (despite the explosion of a challenge, beginning in late 2023, in the form of internationalist solidarity with Palestine). Marx’s concept of reification is addressed to this situation. Marx did not believe that merely knowing the truth of the socially-determined appearance of an eternal order of things would liberate one from it. He believed that this realization of contingency, of the world not having to be what it is, becomes revolutionary with a recognition of the possibilities that the world can be something else through mass action. Knowing that appearance is not identical with essence, that it is everyday social relations that create the appearance of insurmountable, impersonal power in the form of capital is not enough. Through communal relations, through revolutionary organization and the emergence of the new out of the shell of the old, we come to realize that what appears solid is a spell which can be broken. To take a specific example which demonstrates the pitfalls of authenticity in either its ‘individualist’ or ‘collectivist’ forms—think of the body. In these authenticity-drives, there is an internal-external dialectic in their practices. Pure internality reinforces pure externality and vice versa. Ultimately, they both signify the body as a periphery (within one’s skin is the Self, beyond one’s skin is the Other) and as a battleground (the conflicts over bodily self-expression,

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Dialectic of Freedom reproductive rights, sexuality etc). One assumes the body is the receptacle of the ‘true self’ and should be defended as a space apart from society, the other assumes it is merely a social unit to be subject to despotic morality. Marxism, however, considers the body as itself engaged in dialectic through labor—It is created by environment and also self-creating, it creates environment both in arranging it into categories through its engagement and it participates in specific kinds of relations with it. Marxists ought to emphasize such scientific discoveries as the plasticity of the brain against the notion of gene-coded individuals. The body is not separable from its activity, and its activity is not apart from the world. This goes all the way down to metabolism from before one is even born —what is available in nutrients is socially and historically determined, especially by class locally, nationally, and globally. In short, Marxism ought to advocate a concept of the body in this example as social but not purely a cog in a machine. The body is what a subject lives the world through, what a subject lives as an object through, but is itself something that both is molded by externality and by internality. The body lives and. experiences. We ought to oppose turning to either the despotic power of moralizing institutions (whether it be the Church or some podcaster who demands that you should embody a naive bourgeois idea of success) or to calcified, dead “true self” (whether in the form of a label or a total turn inward). The revolutionary concept of the body should be of the body in community, a body which must be cared for but also care, one which is not a destiny imposed on the subject but a living potential for social freedom. We must revive a critique of the mutual alienations of individual, particular, and universal. All of these authenticity-drives, in the end, turn out to be death-worship. They worship necrotic institutions or a phantom-like version of the self. We are against domination of the living by the dead, whether it’s the deceased who exert their power through the despotic forms of tradition and institutions or by the dead dummy of an “authentic self” that one has to be true to. The dead don’t have to be terrible, alien things which dominate us, but can once again become living social relations. History, traditions, the image and memory of the deceased need not be things that exert a bondage on us, but neither should they be things we must render nonexistent.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez They can become living in a new sense, by creating a life-affirming way of life. You are not basically determined to be anything, you have many potentials in life which can be realized —the issue is that modern life is one where these potentials are limited through their domination by the dead, impersonal power of capital. To escape this impersonal power, we cannot simply bury our faces above or within. We must pursue an immanent transcendence in and through the everyday, in intersubjectivity and community with other living beings who experience this domination and drive to transcend it rather than burying ourselves in the graves of the dead. Revolution is for a society where the external is not like a barrier wall, and where the internal is not like an asylum. It is transcending givenness in favor of universal relativity.

Break the Spell What is what is. It is what it is for a reason. But what is always holds within itself the seed of its own overcoming. The appearance of eternity, of a permanent natural order, of givenness, is just that—an appearance. It is often remarked that the method of dialectical analysis is obscure and practically irrelevant. Yet dialectical critique is the means by which we can penetrate through these appearances and discover the basis for transformation from within the given order. Revolution means lifting the veil and practically exposing the untruth of reified, naturalized appearances. A placid body of water reflects what is above it, creating an illusion of stability. To splash the water is to reveal what lies throughout, to refract the light of reflection, and to participate in the creation of the water’s movement. The acknowledgment in dialectical critique of the total mediation of our experience of life further offers a tool to smash naturalized orders.47 By mediated, I mean mediated by concepts, language, and the social-historical baggage of one’s milieu. One always thinks and expresses oneself by medium of concepts, which have their own history in social activity. Our ways of thinking are in line with ways of life, down to our very grammatical expressions and the etymological origins of the words we use in everyday life. Karl Marx succinctly identified an example of this in the German language in a March 25, 1868 letter to Friedrich Engels:

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“But what would old Hegel say in the next world if he heard that the general [Allgemeine] in German and Norse means nothing but the common land [Gemeinland], and the particular, Sundre, Besondere, nothing but the separate property divided off from the common land? Here are the logical categories coming damn well out of ‘our intercourse’ after all.”48

While a theory of knowledge based on an assumption of immediate access to knowledge of reality seems to be more populist than one based on mediated knowledge, it can rather be more conservative. The notion that our experience of the world is a mirror image of reality in itself implies a certain naturalization of the world order as it is.49 It fails to account for the power of ideology except as mere delusion. Yet ideology can itself seem rational according to appearances, as in the case of commodity fetishism. What appears ready at hand is never totally immediate, there is always mediation in every experience. The appearance of pure immediacy obscures the social and historical specificity of all experiences. It mystifies the fact that all experience is the experience of a living, breathing, thinking subject, one who is a social-historical subject. A human subject thinks in linguistic concepts, concepts which hold histories behind them beyond the pure experience of the individual subject themselves. In the words of Theodor W. Adorno:

“Reified thought is the copy of the reified world. By trusting in primordial experiences, it lapses into delusion. There are no primordial experiences”50

Everything in experience is mediated. However, we must also distinguish a specifically revolutionary theory of mediated experience from a more conservative one. In the latter notion of mediated knowledge, we can only think within the limits of what is given. Mediating thought is taken as relatively unchanging and as basically a cap on our ability to think about and practically transform the world.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Another, more characteristic of Marx, identifies this mediation in the history of social practice itself, of the history of human activity, and thus accounts for the ability of human activity to shape its own destiny with the material it has inherited. Further, it recognizes the basis for the overcoming of what has been and what is within itself, as it identifies the basis of conceptual contradictions in real world social-historical contradictions. Thus, this offers a liberatory mode of analysis. In our world, the relevance of human social activity seems nonexistent. We all feel powerless in the face of a leviathan which careens into the abyss, dragging all of us with it. The beast lashes us with the barbed wire chains of transnational markets, with disease, with ecological collapse. It devours the earth in its maw. In appearance, it embodies inhumanity. We constantly feel overcome by powers far beyond our control and which bind us, helplessly, to them. We become caught up in engineered networks which affect our fundamental ways of thinking and living, whether these are online networks or market networks. It seems that no one is driving, and there is nothing we can do. Why bother with anything? Yet this appearance is not separated from our social activity, but emanates from it. Alienation is alienation on the basis of the way our social relations are arranged. Our world has run beyond anyone’s control because our societies are arranged on the basis of private interests and the maximization of profit. This is not a natural order of human existence as such, but is specific to a society based on generalized production of commodities, or production for the market. This doesn’t mean the nonhuman aspect of all of this is irrelevant or only a veil. Rather, the way we view it as a power unto itself is the veil to tear off. We are not dominated by technology-as-such. We are dominated by technology which has been designed and coordinated in a particular way in accordance with a particular social system. This social system objectifies itself into our infrastructure and the objects which shape our everyday lives, yes. But the fundamental potential for human agency in transformation remains, because the terrors of this way of life are themselves based in the way our human activity is organized. Under capitalism, the parts are rationalized, such as through maximization of efficiency, while the whole is irrational. This contradiction, and the dependence of all on all in

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Dialectic of Freedom the midst of a system of production based on feeding the beast of capital, warrants the need to fight for a rational unity. This rational unity would be socialism. Any proposition contains in its very premises the seeds of its own opposing response. Dialectical critique shatters any appearance of simple, tranquil unity in logic. Yet, as mentioned, conceptual thinking is itself the congealing of histories of human activity into forms of logic. Marx, being a materialist, singled out revolutionary action as itself a practical critique which breaks apart the appearance of an eternal, natural unity in the social order. Revolution bursts forth from elements within society itself, revealing its internal contradictions and the seeds of its own overcoming and transcendence by a new social order.51 For contemporary capitalist society, this is the revolts of the working classes against an alienated system committed to valorization instead of human needs. These working classes are capitalistically produced, and feed capital through their labor, yet also represent the potential for a new cooperative mode of life. To revolt against the existing order is to challenge the idea that it is a law of nature, and to mark a psychological break from its claim to fundamental legitimacy. This was well recognized by Frantz Fanon.52 Of course, a total psychological shift can only come with a transformation of our way of life itself, which is the process of revolution. The process of coming to consciousness is identical with the process of revolutionizing society. Revolt alone is not enough, it is only a first step clearing the debris of decaying civilization. It is up to revolution to constructively and practically theorize a new way of life. Today, the situation seems hopeless. It seems the inhumanity and death-worship of capitalism is insurmountable, and that the world is too far beyond our control to concern ourselves with it. In the consumerist West in particular, where we are hooked into engineered networks of the culture industry, it is easy to desire nothing more than to drop out and immerse oneself in passive nihilism. The potential for transcendence has not gone out, however. Our world is still based in relationality, and thus relational agency still lies as a weapon through which we might smash reified appearances and open up a vision of a new, possible world. We must reconstitute relations

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez of communality and reassert life against death, flesh against valorization, and care against extraction. Capital cannot fully abolish the social. It must feed its spell with living fuel. Potentials for realized communality and intersubjectivity are immanent in everyday life, whether in the creation of concentrated communities, common gendered oppression under the despotic rule of the paterfamilias, or by the all-round dependency of networks of labor. Our task is to realize their self-consciousness against the atomizing force of bourgeois society and irrational reason. Revolution is immanent in our apocalyptic conditions themselves. This is not to say the situation is not dire, but that as long as the potential to reignite human communal action exists within the existing premises, a practical critique is possible. Where practical critique is possible, so is practical transcendence. A tranquil unity is always merely an appearance. All unities can be broken open by critique, that self-emancipator of freedom.

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Dialectic of Freedom Footnotes 1

René Descartes, A Discourse on Method, trans. Ian Maclean (Oxford, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 28. 2 Karl Marx, “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole,” in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (New York, New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), pp. 153-154. 3 For a further discussion of this, see Joseph Fracchia, “Organisms and Objectifications: A Historical-Materialist Inquiry into the ‘Human and Animal,’” Konturen 6, no. 9 (2014): 41–61. 4 Friedrich Engels, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man,” in Engels: Anti-Dühring, Dialectics of Nature, by Friedrich Engels, vol. 25, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Collected Works (New York, New York: International Publishers, 1987), pp. 453-454. 5 Marco Maurizi, Beyond Nature: Animal Liberation, Marxism, and Critical Theory (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2021), pp. 117-121. 6 Kathelijne Koops, Elisabetta Visalberghi, and Carol P. van Schaick, “The Ecology of Primate Material Culture,” Biology Letters 10, no. 11 (November 1, 2014), https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2014.0508; S. A. Jelbert et al., “Mental Template Matching Is a Potential Cultural Transmission Mechanism for New Caledonian Crow Tool Manufacturing Traditions,” Scientific Reports 8 (June 28, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-27405-1; William J.E. Hoppitt et al., “Integrating Genetic, Environmental, and Social Networks to Reveal Transmission Pathways of a Dolphin Foraging Innovation,” Current Biology 30, no. 15 (June 25, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.05.069; Julia K. Finn, Tom Tregenza, and Mark D. Norman, “Defensive Tool Use in a Coconut-Carrying Octopus,” Current Biology 19, no. 23 (December 15, 2009), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2009.10.052. 7 “Cooperation is therefore the natural basis of human activity. Yet, for cooperation to become proper human labour, a further, double precondition is still needed: from the one side, the differentiation in the relationship between humans and nature, and, from the other, the differentiation among humans. Such double process is at the same time cause and effect of the ‘division of labour’. It is here that the ideality embodied in the individual working process is mediated with the total social labour. This is also the form in which such ideality becomes a proper form of planning, i.e. something which transcends natural, animal conditions. Reproduction of life in animals does not need to be socially mediated in such ‘ideal’ forms. This leads us to see the decisive passage from animals to humans, from natural history to human history: such transition is evident in sedentary societies through the domestication of plants and animals but, even more so, in class society. The organic unity of animal social life gets specified in human society through a series of leaps and ruptures: the organic unity of human social life can be defined ‘higher’ than the animal one, precisely because it presupposes such fractures. This is the paradox of human history: humans break the immediacy of animal life, what we experience as ‘unity’ and ‘immediacy’ is nothing but a process of ‘reconstruction’. We were the one who produced that ‘fragmentary’ life in the first place, yet without those fractures there would be no synthesis. It is precisely this paradoxical structure that can be defined as ‘human’ according to Marx and Engels (whenever they talk of our ‘exceptionality’ with respect to animals),” Maurizi, Beyond Nature, p. 120. 8 Karl Marx, “‘Notes’ on Adolph Wagner,” in Marx: Later Political Writings, by Karl Marx, ed. Terrell Carver, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 235–236. 9 “Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm. Therefore: “a) repetition (of movements, gestures, action, situations, differences); “b) interferences of linear processes and cyclical processes; “c) birth, growth, peak, then decline and end. “This supplies the framework for analyses of the particular, therefore real and concrete cases that feature in music, history and the lives of individuals or groups,” Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 15. 10 See Joy DeGruy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (San Francisco, California: HarperCollins Publishers, 2017). 11 Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York, New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), pp. 57–58.

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“Behind these psychological reactions, beneath this immediate and almost unanimous response, we again see the overall attitude of rejection of the values of the occupier, even if these values objectively be worth choosing. It is because they fail to grasp this intellectual reality, this characteristic feature (the famous sensitivity of the colonized), that the colonizers rage at always ‘doing them good in spite of themselves.; Colonialism wants everything to come from it. But the dominant psychological feature of the colonized is to withdraw before any invitation of the conqueror's. In organizing the famous cavalcade of May 13th, colonialism has obliged Algerian society to go back to methods of struggle already outmoded. In a certain sense, the different ceremonies have caused a turning back, a regression. “Colonialism must accept the fact that things happen without its control, without its direction. We are reminded of the words spoken in an international assembly by an African political figure. Responding to the standard excuse of the immaturity of colonial peoples and their incapacity to administer themselves, this man demanded for the underdeveloped peoples ‘the right to govern themselves badly,’ The doctrinal assertions of colonialism in its attempt to justify the maintenance of its domination almost always push the colonized to the position of making uncompromising, rigid, static counter-proposals,” Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in A Dying Colonialism, by Frantz Fanon, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York, New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 62-63. 13 Robert J. Stoller, Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred (London, United Kingdom: Karnac Books, 1986), p. 58. 14 Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, pp. 60-61. 15 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 520-523. 16 “But out of this deformed equality [of slavery] was forged quite undeliberate ly, yet inexorably, a state of affairs which could unharness an immense potential in the black woman. Expending indispensable labor for the enrichment of her oppressor, she could attain a practical awareness of the oppressor's utter dependence on her—for the master needs the slave far more than the slave needs the master. At the same time she could realize that while her productive activity was wholly subordinated to the will of the master, it was nevertheless proof of her ability to transform things,” Angela Y. Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” The Massachusetts Review 13, no. 1/2 (Winter-Spring 1972): p. 89. 17 Gina Rippon, Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds (New York, New York: Vintage Books, 2020); Thomas W. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992); Aïna Chalabaev et al., “The Influence of Sex Stereotypes and Gender Roles on Participation and Performance in Sport and Exercise: Review and Future Directions,” Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 14, no. 2 (March 2013): 136–44, https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.psychsport.2012.10.005. 18 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 184-191. 19 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (Summer 1982): 777–95. 20 Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, pp. 223-224. A

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“8. The demand for production solely in view of the satisfaction of needs belongs to prehistory, to a world in which production is not organized according to need, but in view of profit and the establishment of domination, and in which lack therefore prevails. If lack disappeared, then the relation between need and satisfaction would itself be transformed. In capitalist society, the compulsion to produce in view of needs that are mediated and fixed by the market is one of the chief means of keeping people in check. Nothing may be thought, written, done or made that would go beyond this society, which is kept in power largely through the needs of those who are at its mercy. It is inconceivable that the compulsion to satisfy needs should continue to exist as a fetter on productive force in classless society. Bourgeois society has for the most part failed to meet its immanent needs, but for that reason production has been kept under its spell, precisely through the reference to needs. It was as practical as it was irrational. The classless society, which will abolish the irrationality of the entanglement of production and profit, will satisfy needs and likewise abolish the practical spirit that still asserts itself in the aimlessness [Zweckferne] of the bourgeois notion of l’art pour l’art [art for art’s sake]. It will sublate [aufheben] not only the bourgeois antagonism between production and consumption, but also their bourgeois unity. To be useless [unnütz] will then no longer be shameful. Conformity will lose its sense. Productivity in its genuine, undisfigured sense will, for the first time, have a real effect on need: not by assuaging unsatisfied need with useless things, but rather because satisfied need will make it possible to relate to the world without knocking it into shape through universal usefulness [Nützlichkeit]. If classless society promises the end of art by sublating the tension between the actual and the possible, then at the same time it also promises the beginning of art, the useless [das Unnütze], whose intuition tends towards reconciliation with nature because it is no longer in the service of usefulness [Nutzen] to the exploiters,” Theodor W. Adorno, “Theses on Need,” trans. Martin Shuster and Iain Macdonald (A New Institute for Social Research, 1942), http://isr.press/Adorno_Theses_on_Need/index.html. 22 Gustavo Esteva and Madha Suri Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Zed Books, 1998), pp. 110-113. 23 Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, 3rd ed. (Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 2003), p. 62. 24 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso, 2005), pp. 102–103. 25 David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928 (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1995), p. 52. 26 Morgan Robinson, “The American Colonization Society,” The White House Historical Association, June 22, 2020, https://www.whitehousehistory.org/the-american-colonization-society. 27 Marx understood this process as directly related to human beings’ perspective in relation to nature. This general, abstract labor is a culminating form of our alienation from our own nature, becoming coherent only when we are alienated from our embodiment (proletarianized). He described this perspectival process: “It is as if, besides lions, tigers, hares, and all other real animals, which, if placed into groups, constitute the different orders, species, subspecies, families etc. of the animal kingdom, also in addition the animal existed, the individual incarnation of the whole animal kingdom. Such a singular which comprises in itself all really existing kinds of the same thing, is a universal, like animal, god, etc. Just as the linen became therefore a single equivalent through which one other commodity referred itself to it as the form of phenomenal manifestation [Erscheinungsform] of value, it becomes the universal equivalent, universal body of value, universal materialisation [Materiatur] of human labour as the form of phenomenal manifestation [Erscheinungsform] of value common to all commodities. The particular labour materialised [materialisiert] in it counts therefore now as the universal form of realisation of human labour, as universal labour,” Karl Marx, quoted in Riccardo Bellofiore, “The Adventures of Vergesellschaftung,” Consecutio Rerum 3, no. 5 (2018): p. 520. 28 Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 75–77. 29 Thomas Jefferson, “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription” (The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, July 4, 1776), National Archives, www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript. 30 Stephanie E. Smallwood, “Commodified Freedom: Interrogating the Limits of Anti-Slavery Ideology in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 2 (2004): 289–98, p. 296. 31 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), pp. 299-304. 32 Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals (New York, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), p. 25.

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Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater, Autonomy Is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language (Oakland, California: PM Press, 2019), pp. 18-20. 34 Deloria Jr., God is Red, 69. 35 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Who Thinks Abstractly?,” in Hegel: Texts, and Commentary, by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1965), pp. 113–18. 36 “It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, ifI were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations,” Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1973), p. 100. 37 David Norton, ed., The Bible (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2006), Genesis 1:27, p. 4. 38 Françoise Vergès, A Decolonial Feminism, trans. Ashley J. Bohrer (London, United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 2021), p. 83. 39 At various points in history, this overlapped directly with decolonial consciousness. Howard Adams (Métis) famously discussed the historiographical veiling of the participation of Euro-American workers in the 1885 Métis North-West Rebellion, led by Louis Riel. See “Causes of the 1885 Struggle,” in Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View, by Howard Adams, 2nd ed. (Saskatoon, Canada: Fifth House Books, 1989), 70–80. Contemporaneously, militant U.S. workers associated with late-19th century labor radicalism expressed their support on the basis of a common cause against bourgeois civilization: “Not very far off, in a little town on the other side of the lakes, in Canada, alone in a cell of the doomed to death, a man is awaiting the moment to be crucified, to die on the scaffold under the bloody hands of a hangman. The name of this man? Louis Riel. His crime? He called out his brethren, the Canadian half-breeds, to arms; he has unfurled the sacred standard of human freedom and independence,” Denis, “A Martyr” (The Alarm, October 31, 1885), https://mgouldhawke.wordpress.com/ 2022/12/26/a-martyr-the-alarm-1885/. 40 Vine Deloria Jr., We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes New Turf (New York, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1970), pp. 170–171. 41 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 229. 42 Kevin Bruyneel, “Indigenous Politics and the ‘Gift’ of U.S. Citizenship in the Early Twentieth Century,” in The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations, by Kevin Bruyneel (Minneapolis, Minnesota; London, United Kingdom: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 97–121. 43 Robert l. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1992), pp. 37-39. 44 For a critique of one instance of this, see Kevin Ochieng Okoth, “From Black Studies to Afro-Pessimism: The Making of an Anti-Politics,” in Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics, by Kevin Ochieng Okoth (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2023), 19–38. 45 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 158. 46 Heather A. Brown, Marx on Gender and the Family: A Critical Study (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2014), pp. 208–209. 47 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Paris, France: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), pp. 155–158. 48 Karl Marx, “Letter from Marx to Engels in Manchester,” ed. Sally Ryan, March 25, 1868, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68_03_25-abs.htm.

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“The objectivist speaks of the necessity of a given historical process; the materialist gives an exact picture of the given social-economic formation and of the antagonistic relations to which it gives rise. When demonstrating the necessity for a given series of facts, the objectivist always runs the risk of becoming an apologist for these facts: the materialist discloses the class contradictions and in so doing defines his standpoint. The objectivist speaks of ‘insurmountable historical tendencies’; the materialist speaks of the class which ‘directs’ the given economic system, giving rise to such and such forms of counteraction by other classes. Thus, on the one hand, the materialist is more consistent than the objectivist, and gives profounder and fuller effect to his objectivism. He does not limit himself to speaking of the necessity of a process, but ascertains exactly what social-economic formation gives the process its content, exactly what class determines this necessity. In the present case, for example, the materialist would not content himself with stating the ‘insurmountable historical tendencies,’ but would point to the existence of certain classes, which determine the content of the given system and preclude the possibility of any solution except by the action of the producers themselves. On the other hand, materialism includes partisanship, so to speak, and enjoins the direct and open adoption of the standpoint of a definite social group in any assessment of events,” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “A Criticism of Narodnik Sociology,” in The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticism of It in Mr. Struve’s Book: The Reflection of Marxism in Bourgeois Literature, by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1895, https:// www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1894/narodniks/index.htm#ch02. 50 Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, trans. Willis Domingo (Cambridge, United Kingdom; Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2013), p. 109. 51 Marx described this as directly tied to self-transformation: “Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; the revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Includes: Theses on Feuerbach and the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (New York, New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), p. 60. 52 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 42–51.

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Communalism and Communism “We have to give life to Indo-American socialism with our own reality, in our own language. Here is a mission worthy of a new generation.” — José Carlos Mariátegui, “Anniversary and Balance Sheet” (1928)1

All life is relational. But there are relations and there are relations. The distinctions among social constellations organizing relationships are of prime importance. The wealth of those societies in which the “communalist” mode of production prevails, presents itself as an arrangement of community relationships between humans and other beings. Those societies which engage in production for means of subsistence on a communal level (however community is defined) can most accurately be described by this term, “communalist.” This communalism can encompass different forms of production and social relations, though we provisionally define it as a single mode. Communalismm historically tends to maintain a certain continuity within a dominant mode of production—such as within a tributary mode of production or even capitalism. That is not to say that communalism never faces an antagonistic relationship with the dominant mode of production, but that communalism is not simply overturned by it. Historically, Marxists have referred to the ‘original,’ independent form of communalism as “primitive communism.”2 This is society preceding any development of forms of private property or classes. Or rather, it is collection of communities which we retrospectively label a society. Whatever surplus product exists is used in common by the community rather than appropriated by ruling classes, thus the choice to characterize them as communistic. Communalism as a mode of production (a post-facto generalization) not only encompassed exchange in many cases, thus petty commodity production, but also contains the

Communalism and Communism early beginnings of the blossoming of classes. But the ascent of both of these represents the subversion of communalism as a dominant mode of production. Communalism is closely related to the concept of the so-called “natural economy”— those modes of production where not only do the producers maintain the means of production, but their production is more or less in harmony, out of necessity, with the cycles of the ecology they exist within. The primary logic of production is long-term communal subsistence, meeting a limited definition and scale of needs.3 Needs are relationships, both with the objects of needs and with our own living existence. This limited system of needs is this a limited system of relationships. The economy seems “natural” in that there is no sharply antagonistic relationship between this set of social relations and the ecology which it situates itself within and is situated within. The apparent divorce between human society and nature emerges where a logic of production becomes antagonistic with ecological rhythms. Capital is the ultimate form of this, collapsing the spaces of the earth in the name of accumulating dead times for the command of more and more living time. Capital pursues unlimited exploitation and accumulation in a single world with the shortest-term realization of capital possible through the pursuit of as short of circulations of commodities as possible.4 Capital divorces the worker from the means of production and the acquisition of means of subsistence, thus alienating the worker from labor, product of labor, and world ecology. The external is now viewed as “nature,” something defined as whatever is distinct from and even antagonistic to humanity. It is something which must be battled and tamed like a wild beast. Communalist production for subsistence consumption, on the other hand, typically views the ‘purpose’ of production, and life broadly (the mode of production is also a mode of life) as ‘labor for life.’5 This is opposed to capitalistic ‘life for labor’ associated with the logic of production for the accumulation of capital. With this principle of ‘labor for life,’ the support of those unable to labor like the elderly or disabled is more ‘common sense’ than with capital. That is not to say that ableism is non-existent in communalist societies, but that it is nowhere near the core logical issue that it becomes under capitalism.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez The emergence of new dominant modes of production, as alluded to earlier, does not always lead to the decisive subsumption of communalism. Whatever form the totality of the new society takes, and how it forms, is particular to contingent historic contexts and developments. In many cases, class society emerges from out of the communalist mode of production by its own internal developments. In other cases, it emerges through the impositions of outside invaders, which find fertile ground in the internal potential class logics of communalist modes of production. Even in the case of invasion, a break in the of continuity of communalism is not necessarily guaranteed. As Marx says in the Grundrisse (1857-1861):

“In all cases of conquest, three things are possible. The conquering people subjugates the conquered under its own mode of production (e.g. the English in Ireland in this century, and partly in India); or it leaves the old mode intact and contents itself with a tribute (e.g. Turks and Romans); or a reciprocal interaction takes place whereby something new, a synthesis, arises (the Germanic conquests, in part). In all cases, the mode of production, whether that of the conquering people, that of the conquered, or that emerging from the fusion of both, is decisive for the new distribution which arises. Although the latter appears as a presupposition of the new period of production, it is thus itself in turn a product of production, not only of historical production generally, but of the specific historic mode of production.”6

In the first possibility for conquest—the project of eliminating the conquered people’s mode of production—is still a struggle, a protracted process which is rarely ‘completed.’ Even where it seems to be snuffed out, there is still the living memory of communalism among the masses of the people. It survives in the continuity or quotidian characteristics originating with the old mode of production (i.e. language, culture, celebrations, spiritual practices, stories, motifs, family structures, etc). This holds for the successful eclipsing of communalism as a dominant mode of production by a new one. In many cases, especially where the class shift emerges from within the particular communalist society rather than from invasion, this shift emerges with slave labor.

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Communalism and Communism Slave labor is not inherently antagonistic with the internal logic of most forms of the communalist mode of production. This brings us directly to one of the core limitations of the communalist mode of production, and sources of weakness in the face of dominant social or “civilizational” mode of production. Communalism is limited to members of the commune, however membership is defined. It lacks impediments to antagonisms with, appropriation of and from, and exploitation of non-members. It can even depend fundamentally upon these. Again we will refer to Marx’s Grundrisse:

“Membership in the commune remains the presupposition for the appropriation of land and soil, but, as a member of the commune, the individual is a private proprietor. He relates to his private property as land and soil, but at the same time as to his being as commune member; and his own sustenance as such is likewise the sustenance of the commune, and conversely etc. The commune, although already a product of history here, not only in fact but also known as such, and therefore possessing an origin, is the presupposition of property in land and soil — i.e. of the relation of the working subject to the natural presuppositions of labour as belonging to him — but this belonging [is] mediated by his being a member of the state, by the being of the state — hence by a presupposition regarded as divine etc.”7

From a later section:

“The fundamental condition of property resting on the clan system (into which the community originally resolves itself) — to be a member of the clan — makes the clan conquered by another clan propertyless and throws it among the inorganic conditions of the conqueror’s reproduction, to which the conquering community relates as its own. Slavery and serfdom are thus only further developments of the form of property resting on the clan system. They necessarily modify all of the latter’s forms.”8

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez This slavery in communalism holds within it the seeds of antagonistic class society and class property. That is, the subsuming and disintegration of the communalist mode of production. This revolution of property and class has typically taken the form of a patriarchal revolution. Where non-propertied or non-class societies develop clear gendered divisions of labor, the labor of men centers on appropriation (whether through hunting or raiding) and that of women centers on gathering, horticulture, and agriculture.9 Sedentarization and the development of agriculture has often been identified by anthropologists with the historical emergence of patriarchy, but this is identity is not necessarily true.10 What is true is that where the labor division of men is empowered relative to that of women and non-men, patriarchal domination ascends. In most cases, this empowerment takes the form of the masculine ownership of slaves and cattle as private property. This is associated with agricultural production, but can exist in nomadic societies as well. The development of class society is thus initially, in almost all histories, a development from out of the earliest forms of patriarchal power.11 With the dawn of class society, private property, and patriarchy comes the dusk of the communalist mode of production and of matrilocal societies. The continuity of a communalist social form can, and often does, represent a continuity of matrilocal social practices. These can take the forms of cults of women or non-men deities, non-patriarchal community celebrations and practices, the power of women and non-men over medicine and spiritual affairs, etc. The forms can also become internally subsumed by patriarchy, albeit that subsumption is not as decisively as the outright patriarchalization of social forms. This ‘mixed’ subsumption is associated with the possibility of conquest outlined by Marx above, where the dominant social form and mode of life synthesizes with the old one. With regards to this synthesis, communalism as a social form can and does have a long continuity outside of the communalist mode of production. It is in fact usually incorporated into the dominant modes of life it finds itself within. For example, tributary modes of production often hold within them quite strong continuities of communalism.12 Communities continue to produce cooperatively, providing for their own common means of subsistence with common

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Communalism and Communism labor, while the ruling classes appropriate some part or all of the surplus produced above their needs for subsistence. The extent of autonomy which these communalist social forms exercise depends on the logic of the dominant mode of production and social form, as well as on the capacities and possibilities available to both. For example, when the Spanish Empire colonized Mexico, it had to allow a great degree of autonomy for Indigenous peoples out of necessity. It did not have a military or political capacity for centralized rule outside of Mexico-Texcoco.13 The main transformation which the Spanish pursued was the organization of Indigenous peoples into reducciones, or towns, concentrating them into population centers in order to ensure ease of tribute collection and acculturation (primarily religious) into the new colonial society. These being community forms of organization, they had a strong continuity with communalism. The reducciones were protected by the Crown and Church as a means of synthesizing Spanish rule with Indigenous societies and ensuring the stability of New Spain.14 The emergence of the specifically capitalist mode of production represents the most decisive historic challenge to communalist modes of production and social forms. The process of primitive accumulation is the means by which the conditions of production for capitalism are produced and reproduced. It is not only a means for the appropriation of initial capital through the expropriation of land, resources, and labor, but also a means for the creation and reproduction of the class of wage laborers through the divorce of producers from the means of production. Marx describes the ramifications of this for pre-capitalist modes of production and social forms, particularly communalism:

“A presupposition of wage labour, and one of the historic preconditions for capital, is free labour and the exchange of this free labour for money, in order to reproduce and to realize money, to consume the use value of labour not for individual consumption, but as use value for money. Another presupposition is the separation of free labour from the objective conditions of its realization—from the means of labour and the material for labour. Thus, above all, release of the worker from the soil as his natural workshop—hence dissolution of small, free landed property as well as of communal

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez landownership resting on the oriental commune. In both forms, the worker relates to the objective conditions of his labour as to his property; this is the natural unity of labour with its material [sachlich] presuppositions. The worker thus has an objective existence independent of labour. The individual relates to himself as proprietor, as master of the conditions of his reality. He relates to the others in the same way and—depending on whether this presupposition is posited as proceeding from the community or from the individual families which constitute the commune—he relates to the others as coproprietors, as so many incarnations of the common property, or as independent proprietors like himself, independent private proprietors—beside whom the previously all-absorbing and all-predominant communal property is itself posited as a particular ager publicus alongside the many private landowners. “In both forms, the individuals relate not as workers but as proprietors—and members of a community, who at the same time work. The aim of this work is not the creation of value—although they may do surplus labour in order to obtain alien, i.e. surplus products in exchange—rather, its aim is sustenance of the individual proprietor and of his family, as well as of the total community. The positing of the individual as a worker, in this nakedness, is itself a product of history.”15

Capitalism, the growth of generalized commodity production and the private ownership of the means of production as capital, emerges into history soaked in blood from its mutilation and slaughter of communalist social forms. In English terms, we see not only the Enclosure of the Commons in England, but the destruction of the communalist mode of production in Ireland, Scotland, and North America.16 The expropriation of the communalist indigenous from their homelands, their genocide, and the introduction of colonial, private property-based commodity production facilitates patriarchalization. As Silvia Federici argues in Caliban and the Witch (2004), primitive accumulation also ensures a subservient reproductive role of women to the commodity economy.17 Their labor is devalued at the same time that men, bourgeoisie or wage laborers, are empowered relative to this non-value producing (but reproductive) labor. Those outside of the

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Communalism and Communism binary logic of the modern patriarchal gender system are repressed. This is a revolution wrought by colonialism, imperialism, and patriarchy. The primitive or initial accumulation of capital is not a one-time event.18 Capitalism must continue to extend itself, or in other words to accumulate itself in new regions of life, but it also reproduces itself everywhere that it is already present. It must continue to impose itself against communalist social forms, ensure the availability of wage laborers, and ensure the consumption of commodity products to realize values. Not only this, but find outlets for those contradictions which create anxiety and pressure. For example, capitalist states may export as colonizers and settler-colonists some parts their industrial reserve army, those laborers who are made redundant and unemployable by the capitalist mode of production’s internal logic. The creation of a middle strata is facilitated by the creation of such colonizers as well as by the co-optation of parts of the colonized. Capitalism’s revolutionary overturn of communalist, and general pre-capitalist modes of production/social forms is not always a simple elimination. It also involves co-optation and integration. As it seeks to expand the scale of production, it consumes and transforms what were once pre-capitalist or communalist societies, which it introduced commodity exchange into as an outlet for the realization of commodities. An example of this was French colonial, and then English colonial, relations with the Algonquian peoples.19 This eventually became the means for the world market, or general capital, to inflict its insane demands on these peoples—resulting in the devastation of their home ecologies through the fur trade. Similarly, the trans-Atlantic slave trade became a power unto itself, depopulating continental Africa regardless of the resistance of indigenous communities, blocs, and states and the regulation of European colonial powers.20 Yet capital also can depend on some degree of a continuity of the self-production of means of subsistence by its laborers for its own operation.21 Some laborers are semi-proletarians, usually former peasants, who both produce means of subsistence and must sell their labor-power to survive. Many of them produce their means of subsistence in communal agriculture. The capitalists can buy their labor-power for even less than the total cost of their means of subsistence. They are only paying the price of their needs (rather, their needs to continue to work) beyond what the workers already produce for their own subsistence. Thus, a lower cost for

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez the bourgeoisie, ensuring the cheapness of the finished products (i.e., fruit) and their realization in consumption by those classes of the world with higher incomes. This is another form of co-optation, but again one undermined by expansion of capital in the hands of the agrarian bourgeoisie and the general expansion of the scale of capitalist production. The distinguishing character of capitalist co-optation is that its need for endless expansion eventually undermines associative need. Accumulation runs up against the maintenance of society. Capital pulls the ground from beneath its own feet. It of necessity destroys itself. This is, however, not our focus here. The key point is both that communalist social forms have continuity in the capitalist world-system, and they can also be co-opted by it. The defense of communalism and of the commons is something to be taken up by revolutionary communists. A very well-known and highly visible example of this struggle is that of the Zapatistas in the early 20th century and contemporarily with the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN). The original Zapatistas, led by the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata in the Ejército Libertador del Sur (ELS), were largely Indigenous people struggling to defend their communal land holdings against the encroachment of the Mexican state and bourgeoisie. First, against the comprador bourgeois regime of Porfirio Díaz, and later against the ‘Revolutionary’ regimes of the new Mexican Republic. The EZLN are largely Indigenous, particularly K’iche’ Maya, and formed out of a legacy of Marxist guerrillas fighting against the neoliberal Mexican state’s primitive accumulation. They became a movement of Indigenous peoples against the dissolution of communal land holdings and the neocolonial domination represented by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the United States.22 But not all Marxists have followed this path of alliance with communalist peoples. Historically, there have been many Marxists who have taken a crude unilinear understanding of historic development. This has led them to support capitalist expropriation of communalist social forms as ‘advancing the tide of history’—‘historically progressive.’ This is vulgar economic determinism. Communalism can be and has been a nexus of resistance and revolution against capitalism, ‘life for labor,’ and patriarchy.

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Communalism and Communism The defense and development of the commons into independence from the capitalist mode of production is a struggle to break out of the capitalist system. This is a struggle we revolutionary communists must take up as part of the struggle for communism. It is, of course, a protracted struggle, and true separation from the capitalist world-system cannot truly be successful without the development production of wealth (use-values, possibilities) and the socialization of the production process production. The defense and development of the commons is expressed in practices like community gardens for production of means of subsistence, the promotion of community owned urban agriculture, the defense of public, common spaces against privatization and commodification. It is most importantly expressed in the defense and development by indigenous peoples of their own commons. Breaking out of the capitalist system is not something that can be done by building a working class movement alone, as the burden of wage-labor on the demands of maintaining the commons, the repressive force of the state and the bourgeoisie all point to a need for revolutionary struggle against the powers-that-by to draw support from the springboard of communal development. This struggle, of course, cannot be limited only to the restoration or preservation of existing communalism. It must be in pursuit of universal development. Earlier we have made reference to the limitations of communalism. The Pan-Africanist political leader Kwame Nkrumah offered an interesting evaluation of this reality while in exile from Ghana. Writing in “African Socialism Revisited” (1967), he said:

“To be sure, there is a connection between communalism and socialism. Socialism stands to communalism as capitalism stands to slavery. In socialism, the principles underlying communalism are given expression in modern circumstances. Thus, whereas communalism in a non-technical society can be laissez-faire, in a technical society where sophisticated means of production are at hand, the situation is different; for if the underlying principles of communalism are not given correlated expression, class cleavages will arise, which are connected with economic disparities and thereby with political inequalities[...]

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez “It is the elimination of fancifulness from socialist action that makes socialism scientific. To suppose that there are tribal, national, or racial socialisms is to abandon objectivity in favour of chauvinism.”23

To merely demand the continuity of largely closed-circuit production and kinship—where most of the produce is consumed by the limited community of producers—is to place an obstacle in the way of the development of the forces of production. It is to limit the wealth of life. This limits the scope of society as a whole, attempting to replicate the inherent limitation of communalism to the chosen members of the community. This is not to say that communalism is always chauvinistic, or that those defending their own communalism are somehow reactionaries. It is to say that communalism on its own is not enough. Capitalism has blasted open the world, drawing the entire earth into the fold, developing production and needs alike in a mania never before seen in history. Yet this blast can be used by communist revolution. We can articulate a universal emancipation in the context of a universal domination. Communism is not merely the return of communalism. Perhaps it can be more accurately expressed as the process of universalizing communalism, with this universalism emerging from out of the capitalist development of the forces of production and its distorted development of an all-round dependency, cooperation, and association. The realization of this project is the realization of communism. Communism must transcend ethnic, communal limitations—the limited scale which communalism acts within. It does this by realizing the vast potentials of wealth, of use-values, which have been manically cultivated and wasted by capital.24 Communism must resolve the contradiction between socialized production and private appropriation—the anarchy of social production. In other words, it must be society become directly social—society which has realized the truth of its principles. But to realize itself, and to birth new forms of association, it will have to work through the mess of the world. That means the mess of a colonial world.

Settler-Colonialism and Decolonization

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Communalism and Communism The analysis of settler-colonialism as an ongoing process has finally reached the mainstream of North American political discussions. Yet, there is still a lack in popular understanding of the issues involved. Settler-colonialism, ironically, is understood within the ways of thinking brought by the European ruling classes to the Americas. Popular conceptions of decolonization are thus limited. Although the turn from analyzing psychological or discursive decolonization to analyzing practical, concrete colonization has been extremely important, it requires some clarifications.25 Settler-colonialism is a form of colonialism distinct from franchise colonialism.The colonizers seek first and foremost to eliminate the indigenous population rather than exploit them, as in the latter form of colonialism.26 Decolonization is the struggle to abolish colonial conditions, though approaches to it vary according to the shapes of the colonial conditions. Societies formed on a settler-colonial basis include the United States, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and Australia. For our purposes, we will focus on the United States, analyzing local notions of settler-colonialism and decolonization. Among North American radicals, there are two frequent errors in approaching decolonization. On the one hand, there are the opponents of decolonization who argue that settlercolonialism no longer exists. In their view, those who identify specific concerns for Indigenous peoples and identify the ongoing presence of settler-colonial social positions are divisive and stuck in the past. These opponents believe that settlers no longer exist, and that Euro-Americans have fully become indigenous to North America through a few centuries of residency.27 On the other hand, there are proponents of decolonization who believe that EuroAmericans are eternally damned as settlers. As colonizers, they therefore cannot be involved in any radical change whatsoever, except perhaps as morally indebted pariahs. The most extreme of these argue for the exclusion of Euro-Americans from radical politics entirely.28 Settler-colonialism is not over, contrary to the first view. Rather, Indigenous peoples still carry out struggles for their rights to sovereignty both within and outside reservations, especially ecological-spiritual rights. Their ostensibly politically recognized rights are not respected, either. The examples of the struggles waged by the Wet’suwet’en, Standing Rock Lakota, Mi’kmaq, and

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez other peoples in recent memory are testimony to this. Indigenous peoples are still here, and they are still fighting to thrive as Indigenous peoples. For them, that means defending the earth. Capitalists drive to exploit the earth, destroying ecology and throwing society into what John Bellamy Foster calls a metabolic rift.29 This means that the demands of capital for expansion are incompatible with the ‘rhythm’ of ecology, destroying the lives of humans and animals for the aims of accumulation. The negationist view seeks to simply snip our ties with history. Its refusal of the continuity of settlers is a refusal of historical continuity in general. What undergirds the negationist view is an atomistic, individualist worldview. When settler-colonialism is described as an individual responsibility or guilt, we are left with a very crude concept of it. The denialists of settler-colonialism assume that it must be over, because the ‘hot’ violence of the colonization of the Americas is apparently over. Thus, they say that modern Euro-Americans cannot be blamed for the sins of their forefathers, since individuals shouldn’t be held responsible for things which happened outside of their lifetimes. Responsibility in this conception is an assessment of whether an atomistic individual is responsible for extremely specific crimes, such as the Paxton Boys’ ethnic cleansing campaign in 1763 Pennsylvania.30 The same ideological approach characterizes the opposite side, which obsesses over the individual status of the “settler” and with micro-categorizing the contemporary residents of North America in a vague and abstract model of settler-colonialism. They argue that having the individual status of “settler” means one is eternally damned, that one is marked as a specific person by the crimes of a social system always and forever. This hefty sentence has high moral stakes. Thus the obsession with categorizing every unique case within a specific box. Neither of these approaches offers a successful insight into settler-colonialism. Instead, they work with the thinking of European bourgeois liberalism. The individual is defined in an atomistic way, by their characteristics, rights, crimes…31 In short, a citizen, a legal-political unit. The individual considered as a node in a web of social relations is totally out of the question. But that other sense of individuality is how we must think if we wish to understand settlercolonialism and, therefore, abolish it.

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Communalism and Communism To focus primarily on the categorization of atomistic individuals, instead of focusing on the ensemble of social relations, is to lose sight of the true engines of settler-colonialism. It is not that individuals choose one day to behave brutally, or that it is simply the nature of some peoples. Settler-colonialism has very concrete historical motivations emerging in the global system. For example, North American settler-colonialism was motivated significantly by the land hunger of capitalists who grew cash crops like tobacco and cotton, which were to be sold on the world market.32 Thinking in broad, structural terms is important in order to avoid reductive analyses and approaches. While the micro-categorizing side certainly have land in mind while thinking about this subject, they have a static and simplistic concept of land. In their minds, settlers are settlers because they are present in a certain place, to which a specific Indigenous group has an abstract, moral right to exclusive habitation in. To put it simply, their thought process is ‘if X person is in Y place, which belongs to Z people, then they are a settler.’ They do not understand the social relation of Indigenous peoples to their homelands, which extends into aspects of ecology, history, spirituality, etc. Indigeneity is itself a social relation. Indigenous peoples explicitly refer to their nations and homelands as relations. Their relation to land is not to land as an abstract thing, but to specific spaces that are inseparable from their specific communal lives. In the context of describing his people’s history, Nick Estes (Khulwíčhaša Oyáte) said in Our History is the Future (2017):

“Next to the maintenance of good relations within the nation, an individual’s second duty was the protection of communal territory. In the east, the vast wild rice patties and seasonal farms that grew corn, beans, and squash demarcated Dakota territory. In the west, Lakota territory extended as far as the buffalo herds that traveled in the fertile Powder River country. For Dakotas, Lakotas, and Nakotas, territory was defined as any place where they cultivated relations with plant and animal life; this often overlaid, and was sometimes in conflict, with other Indigenous nations.”33

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Identity and mode of life in communalist societies are specific to specific spaces, because keeping in the ‘rhythm’ of these spaces is a basic guiding logic of life. Because land is a relative, there was and is significant resistance among Indigenous peoples to the settler seizure of land and the commodification of their non-human relatives. The European bourgeoisie, meanwhile, was more concerned with what value could be extracted from the land, with their worldview being based in abstract concepts of Right, Justice, and Liberty. The micro-categorizing faction in question does not understand settler-colonists as part of an arrangement of social relations which seeks to negate communal land social relation for concrete aims—capital accumulation. They lack a broadness of perspective. They see society only as a collection of atoms, falling into micro-categories, which are subsequently bundled together in a mass. Having critiqued these two views, we can now formulate a better way to approach the category groupings involved in the analysis of settler-colonialism. Indigeneity is defined by a continuity of long-standing communal relations and identities which are indigenous to a certain region. Relation to a specific homeland or region is important to this, but the loss of direct ties to land does not necessarily negate indigeneity. Rather, the continuity of belonging to a certain ‘mode of life’ and community is key. A settler is one who is outside of these relations, and plays an active role in the negation of these indigenous relations. A settler is not merely a settler because they are foreign. Rather, they are a settler because of this active negating role. To play an active negating role does not necessarily mean one personally enforces colonial laws as a representative of the state. Instead, it means that one directly benefits from their participation in the destruction of these relations, such as by gaining residencies or employment at the expense of those land-relations. An important aspect of being a settler is being a socio-political citizen of a settler-colonial society. This means that, in law and in social interrelations, one exercises full rights of belonging to the settlercolonial nation. Many analysts of settler-colonialism, such as Jodi Byrd (Chikashsha), use a third category in their analysis: arrivants.34 Arrivants are those who are embedded into social structures which dissolve the land-relations of “natural economy,” but who lack the citizenship

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Communalism and Communism and political agency of settlers. An example of this would be Filipino debt peons. They cannot fully belong to the settler structures, in practice or in ideology, but they are still part of those structures and processes of colonial negation. In North American history, these groups have at various times been explicitly excluded from the right to own property or obtain full legal citizenship. Said citizenship was directly defined around whiteness, first de jure, and later de facto.35 These categories should be treated in a nuanced way, as tools to understand a concrete society and history. We should avoid trying to bend reality to fit abstract categories. Otherwise, one assumes these categories are destiny. One assumes that Indigenous peoples cannot be part of settler-colonial structures, or that all settlers are eternally damned and cannot overcome their social role as settlers. In history, there are many examples of Indigenous peoples participating in settler-colonial processes, such as with Tohono O’odham warriors participating in the 1871 Camp Grant Massacre against Apaches, or the Indigenous Vice President Charles Curtis (Kaw) sponsoring assimilation and allotment of communal lands.36 There are also examples of people without full socio-political citizenship participating in these processes, such as with Black Buffalo Soldiers fighting on the front lines of Manifest Destiny. There are also examples of Euro-Americans defecting to Indigenous societies in order to escape bourgeois “civilization.” Cynthia Ann Parker was abducted and adopted as a child by a Comanche war band. Texas Rangers, who had massacred her adopted relatives, had to force her to return to Euro-American society.37 While adopted Euro-Americans remained Euro-Americans, inclusion in those communal relations transformed them. Instead of playing a negating influence on the part of bourgeois society, they became participants in Indigenous relations. To be a settler is not destiny, but a status which can be negated through a revolutionary transformation of society. In a word, through decolonization. To obsess over policing micro-categories is not helpful for understanding or fighting settler-colonialism. Being conscious of social categories is important, but the key is to focus on broad social structures and the ways that we participate in them. The way we alter individuals is by altering social relations, and the way we fight for Indigenous sovereignty is by abolishing the

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez negating forces of settler society. To successfully treat a disease, one must keep in mind the body as a whole rather than a simple collection of parts. The same applies to society. Settler-colonialism in North America is a conflict of two ‘civilizations,’ one fighting to negate the other. The capitalist system: private, individualist, focused on expanding an abstract ‘God’ (capital). The Indigenous communal modes of life: premised on relationality, collectivist, focused on viewing the individual as a part of a community whole. The bourgeoisie seek exclusive, private ownership of land as property to be bought and sold as a commodity. They do not recognize communal land rights, or any community social relation with a place which is not ownership. Instead, they seek to sever the nerves connecting every aspect of communal life in order to box things in as commodities so that they can be abstracted into exchange-values. The 1887 Dawes Act, which dissolved Indigenous communal landholdings in the United States, was aimed at forcing this capitalist system on Indigenous peoples.38 In the eyes of the ruling class, this was simply promoting “civilization.” The bourgeoisie had to go to war with these communal ways of life to construct a capitalist system in its place.39 In the communal systems, unlike capitalism, land itself has rights as a relative instead of being merely a vehicle for value. People live through the land as a community instead of being landless wage-laborers, and exploitation is heavily frowned upon. The first Red Scare in the United States was not during the 1919–1920 assault on organized labor and anti-war activists, but during the struggle of the bourgeois state and capitalists against Indigenous communal modes of life.40 This war of generalized commodity production, capitalism, against alternative ways of being extends to ways of knowing. When forcing Indigenous children into boarding schools, the colonizers worked hard to destroy languages, religious practices, and cultural practices.41 In their place, they promoted individualism, bourgeois values, and a ‘bright’ future as wage laborers. In short, they sought the mass production of bourgeois individuals. The liberal view of individuals is quite representative of typical bourgeois thinking. Liberalism considers individuals in an atomistic way, without perceiving them as concrete beings with concrete relationships in a real world. It sees individuals as simply bundles of rights, obligations, agreements, etc. It premises meaning on extremely abstract, albeit universalizing concepts, such as “justice.” The rights of the liberal citizen are rights which they have apart from

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Communalism and Communism society. Their freedom is a space separate from society, since they see others as fundamentally competitors with themselves.42 This abstract thinking of individualism and competition makes plenty of sense for a bourgeois. Their well-off conditions and obsession with preserving their private property against others reflect in their lack of concern for positive rights (rights to things, like food or shelter). What they want is to realize their capital, defeat their competitors, and pay as little as they can for the working class’s costs of living. They only concern themselves with concrete things insofar as they relate to their mission to realize abstract, dead, congealed labor: capital. Capital commands them, though it can be a lenient and cunning master. If they do not expand their capital through exploitation and investment, they fall behind and decay in the rat race. Thus, the bourgeois is encouraged to be shrewd, atomistic, and anti-social. By contrast, the communal view of individuals characteristic of Indigenous nations is focused on very concrete things. Individuals are part of specific communities with specific histories, who are relatives with specific land-spaces. To preserve balance in one’s real relations is an important value, contrasting sharply with the capitalist virtue of satisfying the God of abstract capital by feeding it laboring sacrifices. The key to this communal worldview is the maintenance of the ‘rhythm’ of life: the rhythm of one’s human relatives, non-human relatives, ecology, spirits, etc. This finds a sibling in the views of Karl Marx. In the sixth thesis from Theses On Feuerbach (1845), Marx said:

“[…]the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.”43

From this principle, Marx became very concerned with the metabolic rift wrought by capitalism. In his view, while capitalism had for the first time linked up the whole world and all people into one global social system of production, it had also unleashed forces which it could not control. While everyone in capitalism depends on everyone else, the system is controlled by

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez the self-interested bourgeoisie, who in their role of personifying capital have little concern for humans, animals, or ecology. Therefore, there is a need for a working class revolution, where the people who produce the products that the world runs establish socialized control over this social production. Through that social control, they must restore the balance of humanity and nature, using the planning of production to end the chaos and blindness characteristic of capital. They will have established a communist society once they have fully developed this system of social control and planning and brought about a world where all people freely contribute to the social product for free satisfaction of needs instead of anyone exploiting anyone else. But communism must find its way to clasping with the hands of the contemporary Indigenous movement. The basis for Pan-Indigenism in North America was laid by the proletarianization of Indigenous peoples during and after World War II.44 The Federal government explicitly hoped to use this to assimilate Indigenous peoples by removing them from communal life on reservations. Instead, the contact of many distinct peoples in urban workforces and communities led to the development of a new, broad concept of Indigeneity. These proletarians thought of themselves not only as, for example, Standing Rock Lakota or Chiricahua Apache, but also as “Indigenous.” This had precedence with people such as Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee leaders of a Pan-Indigenous resistance to settler-colonialism in late 18th and early 19th century Ohio, or Wovoka, the Paiute founder of the Ghost Dance movement in the late 19th century. However, it had never reached this scale before. The same forces which sought to destroy Indigenous identity created means of establishing a new political movement in defense of it. This universalization of identity from particular to general, without necessarily negating the particular, is something which must be done by social revolution as well. Proletarianization unites many distinct peoples into one class, leading to radical contacts between worlds. It lays the basis for a revolution which for the first time establishes a real community of all of humanity. Decolonization ties directly into this project of social revolution. Capital attacks communal relations to establish and reproduce itself, yet by doing this it lays the foundation for a more universal form of communal life: communism.

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Communalism and Communism To decolonize is not to merely undo history and return to the past. We cannot undo centuries of change, of destruction. Instead, as advocated by anti-colonial theorists like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, we must assert indigenous aims out of the basis of the world that colonialism has brought to us. This must take the form of the social revolution, because capital leaves is that negating force against communalism and the relations of domination between groups of people. In our theorizing of communism, we must avoid the thought patterns of the bourgeoisie. We must not only avoid individualism, but also avoid the denigration of communalist ways of life. Communism cannot be some form of universalized bourgeois society, nor can it carry over the denigrated view the bourgeoisie have of life. Instead, it must be communalism reasserted on a universal scale. Decolonization does not mean one throws out settlers. It does not mean we send EuroAmericans back to Europe. This belief is premised on a bourgeois, colonial thinking about life. It assumes that behavior is ahistorical, inscribed into the DNA of people.45 Rather, it is social relations that we must expel, transforming people through incorporation into new ones. In the past, the adoption of Euro-Americans served as an alternative to their behavior as settlers. A decolonized society can follow this model on a broader scale, while preserving the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples over their homelands. Indigenous conceptions of land are not based on bourgeois exclusive right, but the right of specific people to have an ongoing relation with specific spaces. Abolishing the negating force, capitalism, and asserting these ways of life while working to establish the universalist form, communism, must be our program. To put it simply, decolonization should be understood as the indigenization of settlers. This necessitates a social revolution in all aspects of life. It does not mean settlers must immediately “play Indian.” Within the context of bourgeois settler-colonialism, that is in reality a core part of the process of dissolving Indigenous communities, destroying their ability to remain sovereign and distinct. We must destroy the capitalist society which these colonial antagonisms act through, and the entire colonial culture along with it.We ought to oppose the negation of local life capitalism engages in, while having the universal goal of revolution. That is, unite the particular with the universal, establish the particular as the basis of the universal. The old, European bourgeois ways

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez of thinking, lacking metabolism or relationality with other humans or with ecology, must be overcome. The emancipatory project of communism should not be hostile to, but a student of Indigenous peoples. When all people are one kin, when they are not divided by class or other social antagonisms, then we will all be free. That is the heart of the relation of decolonization and communism.

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Communalism and Communism Footnotes 1

José Carlos Mariátegui, “Anniversary and Balance Sheet,” in José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology, by José Carlos Mariátegui, ed. and trans. Marc Becker and Harry E. Vanden (New York, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), p. 130. 2 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Includes: Theses on Feuerbach and the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (New York, New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), p. 386; Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Paris, France: Foreign Languages Press, 2020), pp. 31-32. 3 Karl Marx explains the concept in contrast to other forms of economy: “One of the most obvious peculiarities of the circuit of industrial capital, and thus of capitalist production, is the situation that on the one hand the elements from which productive capital is formed stem from the commodity market, and must be continually renewed from it, bought as commodities; and on the other hand the product of the labour process emerges from it as a commodity, and must constantly be sold anew as a commodity. A modern farmer in the lowlands of Scotland might for example be contrasted with an old-fashioned small peasant on the Continent. The former sells his entire product and thus has to replace all its elements, even the seed-corn, on the market, while the latter consumes the greater part of his product directly, buys and sells as little as possible, and as far as possible produces his tools, clothing, etc. himself. “Natural economy, money economy and credit economy have for this reason been counterposed as the three characteristic economic forms of motion of social production. Firstly, these three forms do not represent phases of development of the same status. The so-called credit economy is itself only a form of the money economy, in so far as both terms express functions or modes of commerce [Verkehr] between the producers themselves. In developed capitalist production, the money economy simply appears as the basis of the credit economy. Thus money economy and credit economy merely correspond to different stages of development of capitalist production; they are in no way different independent forms of commerce as opposed to natural economy. It would be just as valid to counterpose the very varied forms of natural economy as equal in status to the other two. “Secondly, what is emphasized in the categories money economy and credit economy, and stressed as the distinctive feature, is actually not the economy proper, i.e. the production process itself, but rather the mode of commerce between the various agents of production or producers that corresponds to the economy, and so this should also be done in the case of the first category. Instead of natural economy, we would then have barter economy. A completely enclosed natural economy, such as the Inca state of Peru, would fall into none of these categories,” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach, Vol. 2., Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1978), pp. 194-196. 4 Marx, Capital, Vol. 2., pp. 312-316. 5 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1973), pp. 487-488. 6 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 97-98. 7 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 475. 8 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 493. 9 David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York, New York: Picador, 2021), pp. 73-76. 10 See especially the example of Çatalhöyük, discussed in Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, pp. 212-225. 11 See Eleanor Burke Leacock, Myths of Male Dominance: Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1982). 12 See James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1999); Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology, trans. Robert Hurley and Abe Stein (Brooklyn, New York: Zone Books, 1989). 13 Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 181-192. 14 For a description of the struggles emerging out of this, see Silvio Zavala, La Encomienda Indiana (Madrid, Spain: Centro de Estudios Históricos, 1935). 15 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 471-472.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez 16 Theodore W. Allen,

The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control, vol. 1 (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2012), pp. 50-57. 17 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia, 2004), pp. 60-64. 18 Ian Angus, “The Meaning of ‘So-Called Primitive Accumulation,’” Monthly Review, April 21, 2023, https:// monthlyreview.org/2023/04/01/the-meaning-of-so-called-primitive-accumulation/. 19 Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2010), pp. 160-187. 20 Harris, Joseph E. Africans and Their History. 2nd ed. New York, New York: Meridian, 1998, pp. 88-89; Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2018, pp. 91-95. 21 See Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 1996); Alain de Janvry, The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America (Baltimore, Maryland; London, United Kingdom: John Hopkins University Press, 1981). 22 George A. Collier and Elizabeth Lowery Quaratiello, Basta!: Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas, 3rd ed. (Oakland, California: Food First Books, 2005), pp. 81-88. 23 Kwame Nkrumah, “‘African Socialism’ Revisited,” in Revolutionary Path, by Kwame Nkrumah (London, United Kingdom: Panaf Books, 1973), pp. 444-445. 24 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 324-325. 25 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. 26 Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Cassell, 1999), pp. 51-53. 27 See, for example, Albert Bender, “What’s at Stake in the Settler Colonial Debate” (Communist Party USA, May 12, 2022), https://www.cpusa.org/article/whats-at-stake-in-the-settler-colonial-debate/. 28 I am thinking especially of organizations like Black Hammer Party. 29 John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), pp. 155–163. 30 So inflamed by racism, the Paxton Boys killed people from a different nation (Susquehannock) than they intended —they had meant to slaughter Lenape and Mohicans. James Hart Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), pp. 285-291. 31 It would do us good to remember what Nietzsche said about this: “What can our doctrine be, though?—That no one gives man his qualities, neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor man himself (—the nonsense of the last idea rejected here was taught as 'intelligible freedom' by Kant, perhaps already by Plato, too). No one is responsible for simply being there, for being made in such and such a way, for existing under such conditions, in such surroundings. The fatality of one's being cannot be derived from the fatality of all that was and will be. No one is the result of his own intention, his own will, his own purpose; no one is part of an experiment to achieve an 'ideal person' or an 'ideal of happiness' or an 'ideal of morality'—it is absurd to want to discharge one's being onto some purpose or other. We invented the concept 'purpose': in reality, 'purpose' is absent... One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole—there is nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our Being, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, condemning the whole…But there is nothing apart from the whole! That no one is made responsible any more, that a kind of Being cannot be traced back to a causa prima, that the world is no unity, either as sensorium or as 'mind', this alone is the great liberation—this alone re-establishes the innocence of becoming…The concept 'God' has been the greatest objection to existence so far…We deny God, we deny responsibility in God: this alone is how we redeem the world.—” Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols: Or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 32 See Andrew J. Torget, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). 33 Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Mni Wiconi and the Struggle for Native Liberation (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2017), p. 71. 34 Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis, Minnesota; London, United Kingdom: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. xix.

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Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): pp. 1737-1744. Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: The Apache Massacre and the Violence of History (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2012), pp. 13-23; Kiara M. Vigil, “Why Is Charles Curtis’s Legacy So Complicated?: The United States’ First Indigenous Vice President in Context,” Perspectives on History, January 19, 2021, https:// www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/january-2021/why-is-charles-curtiss-legacyso-complicated-the-united-states-first-indigenous-vice-president-in-context. 37 Jo Ella Powell Exley, Frontier Blood: Saga of the Parker Family (College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University, 2001), pp. 173-179. 38 David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (New York, New York: Riverhead Books, 2019), pp. 145–146. 39 For a discussion of the relationship of colonial assimilation to Marx’s critique of citizenship, see María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (Durham, North Carolina; London, United Kingdom: Duke University Press, 2016), pp. 123-124. 40 Estes, Our History is the Future, 108. 41 Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, 134-135 42 “The droits de l’homme, the rights of man, human rights, as such are different from the droits du citoyen, from the rights of the citizen. Who is the homme who differs from the citizen? None other than the member of civil society. Why is the member of civil society called ‘man’, man pure and simple, and why are his rights called human rights? How are we to explain this fact? From the relationship of the political state to civil society, from the nature of political emancipation. “Above all we confirm the fact that the so-called human rights, the droits de l'homme in contrast to the droits du citoyen, are nothing but the rights of the member of civil society, i.e. of egoistic man, of the man who is separated from other men and from the community[...] “The human right of private property is thus the right to enjoy and dispose of one’s wealth arbitrarily (as one pleases), without relation to other men, independently of society, the right of personal use. That individual freedom together with this application of it constitutes the basis of civil society. It allows each man to find in the others not the actualisation, but much more the limit, of his freedom. But above all it proclaims the human right to ‘enjoy and to dispose as he pleases of his goods, of his revenues, of the fruit of his labour and of his industry’,” Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Marx: Early Political Writings, by Karl Marx, ed. and trans. Joseph O’Malley and Richard A. Davis, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 28–56. 43 Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, p. 570. 44 Estes, Our History is the Future, 170-171. 45 Kim TallBear, “Genomic Articulations of Indigeneity,” Social Studies of Science 43, no. 4 (August 2013): 509–33. 36

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Americanism “If the mass rallies close, as they have in the past, with a few speeches and a pamphlet, we can expect no more results than in the past: two hours later the people will be Amerikans again (instead of people).” — George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (1972)1

The socialist movement of the United States grows, slowly but surely. The country experiences a crisis of identity, and a concomitant reconsideration of its history.2 The people ask —how can we change the way things work, and how can we change it so that it works for the mass of us instead of the few? They also ask: Is slavery foundational to our republic? Is Indigenous genocide? The two confrontations are interrelated, but their relation to the American nation itself is highly contentious. This is a question of how the nascent socialist movement—by extension, socialist society —must relate with identity, patriotism, and the history thereof. In the traces of a movement presently exist, there can provisionally be said to be two poles to this question which is posed between questions. On the one hand, there are those iconoclasts who advocate an absolute rejection of American identity as inherently blood-soaked with the crimes of settler-colonial genocide, slavery, and global empire. This entails a fundamental condemnation of U. S. history as a history of slavery and genocide, therefore as nothing to take pride in or identify with if one wishes to change the world. This position had its most archetypical expression with the Black Hammer Party from 2019 to 2021, when they shifted towards grifting in conservative circles.3 I am not as interested in this group here, although I certainly do not share the logic of their position.

Americanism The other pole, which I am concerned with in this essay, are those who have taken up the mantle of “patriotic socialism.” For them, the anti-Americanists are “national nihilists” blinded by a one-sided view of U. S. history. They believe that patriotism is in fact a natural form for socialism to take in the U. S. The arguments they make for why this is necessarily the case vary, but they tend to posit that a rejection of the nation or national identity is anti-populist and disconnects us from the popular history of the country. The variability within this position is quite clear when we read Joe Sims, leader in the Communist Party U. S. A., denouncing more fascist variants of “patriotic socialism” in 2021.4 Broadly, the “patriotic socialists” claim to hold a “dialectical” position in contrast to the “undialectical” view of the iconoclasts. Why? Because, in their eyes, to be “dialectical” is to see both sides of something—good and bad. The United States has engaged in horrific violence throughout its history, but this shouldn’t lead us to forget its history of egalitarianism, radicalism, populism… Thus, we should wholeheartedly identify with the unity of American patriotism and the icons of American history, from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln. With this view, we go from impotent flag burners to impotent flag worshippers. Certainly, this country’s history must be considered concretely, specifically, rather than targeted with an abstract, homogenous condemnation. Such a negation is no real negation at all, as it becomes purely an identification with the negative mirror image of what one obsesses with rejecting wholesale. But revolution is negation, nevertheless. Radical negation is dialectical negation, determinate negation, negation from within and through a grounded critique. The “patriotic socialists” in no way embody this approach, whatever they think of themselves. To put it bluntly, any concept of dialectic which defines itself merely as seeing two sides to everything is no dialectic at all. Ironically, this is something Karl Marx critiqued directly as it manifested in the French libertarian Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Against Proudhon’s good-bad approach, Marx forwarded in his The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) an approach rooted in the dialectic of immanent critique:

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez “The good side and the bad side, the advantages and drawbacks, taken together form for M. Proudhon the contradiction in every economic category. The problem to be solved: to keep the good side, while eliminating the bad[…] […]Indeed, from the moment the process of the dialectic movement is reduced to the simple process of opposing good to bad, and of administering one category as an antidote to another, the categories are deprived of all spontaneity; the idea ‘ceases to function’; there is no life left in it. It is no longer posed or decomposed into categories. The sequence of categories has become a sort of scaffolding. Dialectics has ceased to be the movement of absolute reason. There is no longer any dialectics but only, at the most, absolutely pure morality.”5

While in this context, Marx was taking aim at Proudhon’s conception of technology under capitalism as having two sides, this argument applies for such a conception of dialectic more broadly. In fact, in the very same chapter, he makes a mockery of Proudhon’s approach by analyzing slavery. Marx, about as radical an abolitionist as it got, quite presciently mocked Proudhon in this manner:

“Slavery is an economic category like any other. Thus it also has its two sides. Let us leave alone the bad side and talk about the good side of slavery[…] Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.”6

It is quite ironic and interesting to see that here Marx recognizes slavery as very much constitutive to the U. S. Here, Marx’s point is that a thing cannot be taken as an abstract, given unity. To take it as a neutral thing, having a clearly identifiable and separable good and bad side wherein the good must be separated from the bad, is to assume the unity itself is static. The appearance of givenness is necessarily the start of any dialectical critique, but it must be picked apart by the labor of the negative.

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Americanism Again and again, Marx emphasized that the “good” and “bad” side of things are not two facets, but are inherently bound up and intertwined. They cannot be separated, they cannot be spoken of on one side without the other. In his polemic with Proudhon, Marx showed that the ‘progressive’ aspects of modern technology are inseparable from the massification and standardization of human beings—their role as a weapon in class struggle and exploitation.7 The unity of a thing cannot be taken as just a neutral given, but must be understood as a determinate, contingent, historical product. Patriotism, thus, must be understood in this manner rather than as an unmediated, objective existence of a social community. Patriotism is not the immediate, ‘natural’ identity of a community of people. Patriotism more broadly is a historicalsocial product, a truth which is even more obvious when examining particular cases. Patriotisms must be analyzed and critiqued determinately rather than with a slapdash approach which merely asserts the necessity of patriotism for any mass movement anywhere at any time. In this very polemic of Marx’s, why did he attack Proudhon for his good-bad “dialectic?” Because “there is no life left in it.” Deriving good and bad sides from the unity of a reified concept destroys agency in making history, in making social relations, in making identities. This is not to say people make things as they please, but that in making history in circumstances not of their own choosing, they are very much making history out of what has been given to them by historical inheritance.8 A good-bad “dialectic” does not start with everyday life, concreteness, or contingency. In other words, it does not start with living people. It takes things as set on a categorically imposed path, on a One Destiny which it derives from the apparent inherent premises of categories it merely assumes from the outset. This is not Marx’s dialectic. It is nowhere close to any dialectic of freedom and self-recreation.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez The practical activity of the masses in history already contains immanently within it the implication of logics, of concepts. There is not a single, absolutely foundational principle prederived in this activity. To live means to live many possibilities within and through what is already given to you. There are manifold potentialities in social activity. We need not foreclose possibilities by claiming a single path, but must evaluate what is strongest, what is rooted, what is most emancipatory. “Patriotic socialism” has not even reached this point—it is still at the level of an abstract notion of the nation. It has not yet come down to earth, where the working classes live their everyday lives suffering the despotism of capital.

American Patriotism—Revolutionary? The “patriotic socialists” operate under a fundamental premise that U. S. patriotism is inherently anti-imperial—having been born out of a struggle with the British Empire—and revolutionary, and thus as natural a form for socialism to take as any. They are quite in the vein of Alexis de Tocqueville, praising the U. S. as devoid of rank, devoid of groveling, perhaps even devoid of class—save for the class of financier parasites they consider to be grafted onto the ready-made nation. Certainly, there are quite radical elements in the history of this country. There is a reason that aspects of it have been a major historical point of reference for revolutionary movements elsewhere —The French and Haitian Revolutions, the wave of Latin American independence in the 1810s-1820s, the spirit of 1848 in Europe, the early global decolonization movement... Facets of the U. S.’s society and history have served as a point of reference for those seeking to break aristocracy, monarchy, empire…9 But are these principles inherently bound up with a patriotic identity? If there are other options for a radical popular identity rooted in local history, what are they? Are there potential critiques of this patriotic approach which point to alternatives? For one, this position once again offers a quite one-sided view of the U. S. Revolution, War of Independence, and foundation of the Republic. Even if its proponents acknowledge the importance of settler-colonialism and slavery to the early Republic, their good-bad “dialectic” leads them to a very crude dismissal of that as a circumstantial flaw.

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Americanism Quite different to Marx identifying slavery as foundational to the U. S.’s morphology! They lack a critical view of the formatively conservative nature of the U. S. revolution—consider the consistent appeals to the “rights of Englishmen,” the defense of slavery and the absolute sovereignty of slaveholders as brothers in the community of private property, the horror at British paternalistic diplomatic protections of Indigenous peoples from settlers…10 Thomas Paine was the most radical figure of the early Republic, and he was ostracized for his more authentic commitment to the leveling principles verbally espoused by its leaders.11 The man was too radical for the nascent Republic, and yet while in the new French Republic he stood as a moderate.12 Compare Paine, the radical fringe of the United States, to the French communist Gracchus Babeuf, the radical fringe of the French Republic.13 Paine’s advocacy for universal suffrage, encompassing the working classes as well as the bourgeoisie, for a directly representative government, and for abolition were certainly brave positions in the US. But this tells us more about the U. S.’s foundational conservatism than anything. If America rejected rank of title, it embraced rank of race. If it rejected monarchy and praised republican government, it considered Indigenous peoples unworthy of their own selfgovernance and rendered Africans the commodified chattel of free men. If it rejected the monarchical British Empire, it embraced Thomas Jefferson’s Empire of Liberty. These pairs of twins in the history of the United States are not merely manifestations of the good and the bad sides of these concepts. They were constitutive to each other, inseparable. The U. S. was, and is, a herrenvolk (master race) democracy.14 Equality for those within the master race, for those within the universal of citizenship, and subordination for those without.15 Certainly, these themes of race, democracy, citizenship, and empire have varied quite radically. The tumultuous nature of the party systems in the 19th century proves this strikingly.16 The main point, nevertheless, is that a unity-concept like “citizenship” in U. S. history is both one of equality within and one of a constricted totality where those outside of it are damned for exploitation, genocide, and other forms of oppression. Opportunities for some were at the expense of misery and slaughter for others. W. E. B. Du Bois, in his Black Reconstruction in America (1935), offered a genuinely dialectical way of viewing this:

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“The opportunity for real and new democracy in America was broad. Political power was at first as usual confined to property holders and an aristocracy of birth and learning. But it was never securely based on land. Land was free and both land and property were possible to nearly every thrifty worker. Schools began early to multiply and open their doors even to the poor laborer. Birth began to count for less and less and America became to the world a land of opportunity. So the world came to America, even before the Revolution, and afterward during the nineteenth century, nineteen million immigrants entered the United States “The new labor that came to the United States, while it was poor, used to oppression and accustomed to a low standard of living, was not willing, after it reached America, to regard itself as a permanent laboring class and it is in the light of this fact that the labor movement among white Americans must be studied. The successful, well-paid American laboring class formed, because of its property and ideals, a petty bourgeoisie ready always to join capital in exploiting common labor, white and black, foreign and native. The more energetic and thrifty among the immigrants caught the prevalent American idea that here labor could become emancipated from the necessity of continuous toil and that an increasing proportion could join the class of exploiters, that is of those who made their income chiefly by profit derived through the hiring of labor.”17

For Du Bois, the opportunities of America and its racial division of labor and racialized exploitation were inseparable. There were not two distinct “good” and “bad” sides, but a dialectical totality of a relation of freedom through the unfreedom of others. In his narrative, echoing Marx’s mockery of Proudhon through the example of slavery, the contradictions in this relation exploded from within into the social revolution that was the Civil War. This was not a case of a tame isolation of the good from the bad, but a revolution aiming to transcend the unity of slave society and Union for slaveholders. For some, it was a struggle to be turned against herrenvolk democracy itself.

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Americanism Although not directly identified by Du Bois, this freedom-unfreedom dialectic was and is extremely important in U. S. settler-colonialism. The access to land of the landless from Europe was through the expense of Indigenous peoples, and the growing influx of ‘surplus population’ from a Europe producing paupers through enclosure, capitalist development, and war pit these settlers as holding directly contradictory interests to Indigenous peoples.18 One group gained or held land at the expense of another. Of course, this dual relation existed through various networks of alliances, often with some nations allying with the settlers against others. However, a Manichaean logic was quite evident and identified by Tenskwatawa (Shawnee). While discussing his doctrine of the Master of Life in 1805, he explained that the Euro-Americans claimed a basically distinct origin:

“another spirit who made and governed the whites and over whom or whose subjects he [the Master of Life] had no control[…] The Americans I did not make. They are not my children, but the children of the Evil Spirit.”19

Despite what “patriotic socialists” say, settlerism, bourgeois individualism, herrenvolk identity etc. continue to be constitutive to the morphology of the U. S. capitalist empire and its dominant forms of patriotism. As The Red Nation has argued, settler-colonialism informed the very earliest imperial foreign policy of the U. S., and its engagement with Indigenous nations was just as formative to its identities as with the British Empire.20 The United States has not only historically seen its targets of empire like Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and others in terms of Indigenous “savages.” It has also taken up methods of colonization and counterinsurgency which it developed in forging its continental empire, especially in strategies against guerrilla warfare.21 In the continental United States itself, settler-colonialism is not over by any means, nor is it immaterial for the morphology of U. S. imperialist capitalism. The American capitalists continue their drive to expropriate peoples from their lands and land rights, concentrating land to accrue rents, to engage in industrial agriculture, to build destructive pipelines, and generally to ensure the operation of its global empire.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Treaty disputes have a very immediate and very real relevance to everyday life and our social relations—take, for example, the ongoing dispute over Line 3 in Minnesota. Indigenous peoples continue to represent an identifiable material force in society, one which comes into conflict with capital as it seeks to dissolve and vampirize their communities. Indigenous peoples are not marginal to, but central to struggles against capital within and outside of the U. S. Now, compare the obsession of these “patriotic socialists” with Americanist identity with how they think about Israeli settler-colonialism (quite negatively) and their hypocrisy is especially evident. Few if any of them would advocate for socialists who are citizens of the state of Israel to deploy Israeli patriotism to fight for socialism. There is a general consensus, outside of the liberal left at least, that supporting the liberation of Palestine is the progressive position. Clearly, the determinate character, history, and morphology of patriotism and national identity matter. Despite what these people might say, Zionism is not very different from the Americanism they praise. After all, it was formatively anti-colonial—if one only means being against the British Empire, it has a strong value of egalitarianism among citizens, and it even holds a more constitutive connection to socialism through the strong influence of Labor Zionism and the kibbutz movement. And yet, settlerism is also formative to Zionism, and inseparable from its morphology rather than just a “bad” side to be separated from the “good.”22 In the U. S.’s morphology, settlerism is certainly more hidden today and not as loudly proclaimed anymore. But it is still formative, as demonstrated earlier. These “patriotic socialists” might say the viability of a strategy against settler-colonialism is different, since Israel is surrounded by regional opponents who have political, cultural, and community connections with the local indigenous population. Yet, this is true of the U. S. as well—the settler empire extends south of the border, as do the networks of colonized communities.23 By the mid-20th century, the project of IndoAmericanism à la José Carlos Mariátegui absolutely had conscious adherents in North America. Take, for example, the influential 1977 Haudenosaunee “Basic Call to Consciousness” given at the United Nations Geneva Conference. The rhetoric of this speech must be kept in mind in its context of a pan-American contingent of Indigenous peoples appealing for their rights:

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“The traditional Native peoples hold the key to the reversal of the processes in Western Civilization which hold the promise of unimaginable future suffering and destruction. Spiritualism is the highest form of political consciousness. And we, the Native peoples of the Western hemisphere, are among the world’s surviving proprietors of that kind of consciousness. We are here to impart that message.”24

In this country’s history, there is a consistent theme of there being radical, critical edges outside (sovereign Indigenous peoples, the Mexican Republican abolitionists, the Haitian Republic, the Cuban Republic, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China etc.) and the radical, critical edges within (David Walker, Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, Lucy Parsons, Eugene V. Debs, D’Arcy McNickle, Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, etc.) who both tend to be critical of the main threads of U. S. patriotism. Further, they tend to overlap, as in continental Indo-Americanism. Their main response to Americanism has been to challenge it, to question it, to critique it. Certainly, many of them have at various times advocated a notion of an authentic Americanism against the actuality of Americanism.25 But their coherence as distinct tendencies relative to Americanism have been in their critical edge. Of course, Americanism itself has never been devoid of a certain critical edge. Americanism, as distinct from the English-rights ideology of the early colonists’ movement, spoke quite harshly of the so-called Old World.26 In the eyes of the Americanist revolutionaries, none of the edifice of the ancien régime could be allowed to stand in this New World republic. Their anti-aristocratic discourse extended as a thread into early abolitionism and socialism.27 At the same time, this discourse was compatible with white supremacy and particularist settler interests—impediments to proletarian universalism. Throughout the history of the U. S., this thread’s mainstream form has been in the discourses of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, which in the place of “the rights of Englishmen” demand “the rights of white men.”28

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez The role of nature in Americanism is especially illustrative of this foundational herrenvolk character to U. S. democratic populism. Early U. S. nationalism identified with indigeneity and the New World.29 The Americanists invoked the myth of the noble savage, the human embodiment of wild nature, as a symbol for their own wild liberty. The framers of the 1789 U. S. Constitution drew from such a perception of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.30 In the ideology of the Founders, this was a return to the ‘primitive’ democracy of ‘savages’—the state of nature—in a higher, ‘civilized,’ rational form.31 For the purposes of the American Republic, Indigenous communalisms were reinterpreted as contract-associations of strictly distinguished bourgeois individuals. Thus, on the one hand, the state of nature became a rhetorical weapon against the ancien régime.32 On the other hand, it became a rationalization for the colonization of Indigenous peoples. As the historian Robert A. Williams Jr. (Lumbee) has shown, early U. S. colonial policy was premised on the assumption that Indigenous peoples were fated to vanish in the face of a superior, ‘civilized’ form of society.33 Ultimately, the Republic of a ‘state of nature’ was a machine—like any state. And as with any machine, and thus any state, it aimed to set nature to work and to subordinate life to labor. America emerged as an embodiment of imperial labor. As Marx noted: “The real meaning of Aristotle's definition is that man is by nature citizen of a town. This is quite as characteristic of classical antiquity as Franklin's definition of man as a tool-making animal is characteristic of Yankeedom.”34 The American Republic constructed itself as the arch-bourgeois society. That very mechanical organization of life around labor is still a central characteristic of Americanism.35 To praise Americanism is to praise the form that labor takes under bourgeois civilization, and vice versa. To realize what’s true in Americanism means to abolish Americanism. The principles it expounds–life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—were sullied by domination from the very beginning. There is no pure original for us to return to. We can only realize what’s true in it with something absolutely new. The demands for something absolutely new are those of the critical, oppositional movements to Americanism.

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Americanism Are these oppositional stances inherently, necessarily bound up in patriotism? Of course not. To position them as merely the “good” side of patriotism against the “bad” side of its actuality in the American Empire is that flat, mechanical, and abstract nonsense which Marx critiqued in Proudhon. We must reject this static conception of patriotism as posited by these “patriotic socialists.” They hope to already extend “patriotism” to the whole history of the continent and foreclose all of its possibilities. To discuss the determinate, contingent aspects of identification and ideology in material everyday situations is to leave possibilities open and to take our lead from real people instead of from an abstract, calcified concept. In looking at this history, we can see important critical examples, such as Indigenous non-identification with the American nation-state in favor of the sovereignty of distinct nations, even if articulated in the context of a dual citizenship.36 Black radical politics have a long history of nationalism, a consciousness of difference and a desire for autonomy and yet also desire for rights as an oppressed people internal to the American Republic.37 Take the example of Frederick Douglass’s engagement with the United States government in Reconstruction and afterward. Before the Civil War, he quite adamantly attacked the United States as formatively bound up with the enslavement of his people:

“Yes; the Americans, as a nation, were guilty of the foul crime of slavery, whatever might be their hypocritical vaunts of freedom. It was not his wish to condemn republicanism, but the slavery that was identified with it; but it was not a true democracy, but a bastard republicanism that enslaved one-sixth of the population.— They were free booters who wished to be free to plunder every one within their reach—stretching their long, bony fingers into Mexico, and appropriating her territory to themselves in order to make it a hot bed of negro slavery. Mexico with all her barbarism and darkness had wiped away the stain of slavery from her dominions, and now the enlightened, Christian United States had stained again what was washed. He wanted them to know, and if there was a reporter present they would know that a slave had stood up in Limerick and ridiculed their democracy and their liberty.”38

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With the burst of social revolution in the Civil War, he did in fact seek to make common cause with the Union. Yet, he also recognized a continuing non-identity of Union and Emancipation, and the possibility of the former to subordinate or even foreclose the latter. In 1880, the aftermath of Reconstruction, he positioned the relation thusly:

“In the hurry and confusion of the hour, and the eager desire to have the Union restored, there was more care for the sublime superstructure of the republic than for the solid foundation upon which it could alone be upheld….”39

In Mexicano identity-formation, there has been a long history of an insider-outsider relation and sense of distinctness from America—the “Corrido de Joaquin Murrieta,” for example, opens with the line:

“I am not American/but I understand English/forward and backward/I make any American/tremble at my feet”40

Even in the proletariat as a political bloc, there is certainly an identifiable thread of this. Taking a monopolizing, a priori concept of “proletarian patriotism” forecloses our ability to notice and comprehend this. Ralph Chaplin, member of the Industrial Workers of the World known for writing “Solidarity Forever,” penned a song for the IWW’s little red songbook which went:

“What matters now your flag, your race, the skill/Of scattered legions—what has been the gain?/Once more beneath the lash you must distill /Your lives to glut a glory wrought of pain[...]That wasted blood can never set you free/ From fettered thraldom to the Common Foe./Then you will find that “nation” is a name/And boundaries are things that don’t exist;/That Labor’s bondage, world-wide, is the same,/And ONE the enemy it must resist.”41

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While all of these threads are identifiable as elements of “America,” they cannot be foreclosed as purely internal to “America” or American patriotism. They are in a complex engagement of an insider-outsider dialectic and their main stance, as I said, is one which is critical. These revolutionary tendencies have usually been critical of Americanism because of the class bloc and web of social relations which represent the actuality of America. America’s actuality was built on slavery, genocide, colonialism, and the exploitative instrumentalization of the working classes. There are pitfalls in patriotism tied to this determinate, actual character— one cannot make a simple separation of the spirit of a thing from its history. It is not that an already-given concept of “America” has manifested itself at various points in history, here more pure and here more distorted. It is that the ideals and actualities of America have emerged through concrete practices, which are formative to the dialectics of its identification. To defer purely to patriotism risks making peace with what is, taking up the logic of what one seeks to transform right back into oneself. This has had real historical manifestations even in the most radical of social movements. Take, for example, the late 19th century wave of the Grange, People’s Party, and Free Silver movements. Its organizations were famous for their multiracial composition and appeals for unity between Black and white people. This wave, taking up an idea of the “real America” against the rise of a capitalist plutocracy, also at various points fell into racist populism.42 By the early 20th century, with the failure to break the two-party system, many former adherents—like the Bolshevik-sympathizing race baiter, Thomas E. Watson—would join the ranks of the anti-immigration movement and other forms of white supremacy.43 The notion of “American” has historically been closely bound up with “white”—even such a foundational document as the Naturalization Act of 1790, defining eligibility for citizenship, immediately specified a prerequisite of “being a free white person.”44

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Uncritically taking up these categories as unities, as-is, can lead to an internalization of this logic. That internalization introduces a rot. In the People’s Party, the fixation on a white American identity as an identity within a multiracial historical bloc unfolded into a more straightforwardly white supremacist populism. One must engage in a historical critique, inquiring about the history and actuality of social categories and identities as things inherently bound up with relations and practices. To implicitly or explicitly organize around “white” in a multi-racial approach takes a category as-given, a category which has historically been produced as a means of exclusion and oppression. To make peace with whiteness is to simultaneously make peace with the identification of the not-white as the not-citizens or not-Americans, an excluded category which is a means of social control and social warfare blocking the proletariat from composing itself as a class. The very same pitfall lies immanent in a fetishistic adoption of patriotism. Yet another genuinely “undialectical” element of the “patriotic socialists” is their obsession with rejecting and attacking the iconoclastic flag burners without asking: Why is there a significant rejection of U. S. patriotism among leftists today? After all, the rhetoric is quite dramatic. What is the reason for it? This calls for a serious investigation and consideration rather than dismissively fitting reality into abstract, polemical categories like “petit-bourgeois radicalism.”45 To engage with this and to follow its threads is to engage in a dialectical immanent critique. Without getting too off track, the immediate roots of the contemporary disillusionment with patriotism can be traced to that of the New Left, where the myth-making of 20th century, post-World War II America was shattered by its horrendous behavior in the Vietnam War. Groups like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and New Communist Movement organizations began to reject patriotism.46 This isn’t necessarily the first time this occurred—in a real sense, it was a radicalization of an existing anti-imperial critique with history going back to the opposition to Mexican-American War and earlier. Even a man like Ulysses S. Grant, stricken with guilt over his participation, said of it “I am always ashamed of my country when I think of that invasion.”47

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Americanism Yet there is clearly an identifiable qualitative shift from seeing the U. S. as becoming the very tyranny its values are founded on rejecting to a historical re-evaluation of these values to their very core—but why? To understand this, we must comprehend the masses as the makers of meaning, thus reconsidering and re-orientating of history. As Walter Benjamin said in 1940:

“To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was.’ It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject.”48

The contemporary ‘Indigenous turn’ is not a product of some delusion or pathology. This re-evaluation of Americanism, going into its very historical roots, certainly is very different to the early to mid-20th century radical rhetorics on Americanism which spoke of redeeming the authentic America from the actual America. To consider this as merely a degeneration is to approach the question without historicity. Or, to use a favorite rhetorical club of the “patriotic socialists” once again, to be “undialectical.” This problematic or line of inquiry has emerged historically through the political action of colonized Indigenous peoples within the United States. In particular, the global wave of decolonization and the concomitant Pan-Indigenous sovereignty movement of the mid-20th century provoked, in a very practical sense, a reconsideration of history. Indigenous masses forced themselves into visibility and, through such actions as the 1971 Alcatraz Occupation, the 1977 appeal to the United Nations, and the 1978 Longest Walk, directly exposed the formative ties of settler-colonialism and American historical morphology. Pan-Indigenism itself had emerged as a new force in this period due to those very colonial assimilatory and paternalistic policies of the late 19th and early 20th century which had rendered “Indian” a practically coherent category among many distinct nations by standardizing their political relationship to the colonial state.49 Further, Indigenous movements of the Americas united with Palestinian and South African indigenous militants in critiquing what became termed “settler-colonialism,” creating a common global indigenist discourse.50

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Today, Indigenous movements are highly visible and stand at the forefront of action against capital. They act through such avenues as food sovereignty, legal autonomy, opposition to encroachment, opposition to colonial violence, and opposition to ecological destruction. Thus, this more foundational critique has a practical basis—the direct exposure of settler colonialism’s continuity, and a growing global consciousness of this relation. “Indigenous” is a popular identity and categorical logic of mobilization on local, national, continental, and global levels. Indigenous critiques of Americanism are quite unique in their relationship with the mainstream of the United States as the Original Peoples of this region. They suffer a constitutive colonial relation to the country. That is, they were the first people the country turned to as ‘outside’ and wished to render an object of its actions and goals—whether through subordination, assimilation, or extermination. While today, they are ‘inside’ of the U. S.’s society through the extension of citizenship in the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, they are also distinct and sovereign from Americanism. Indigenous communities today are the ultimate insider-outsiders here, looking upon the U. S. from within, yet from a highly distinct social tradition. Thus, people like Luther Standing Bear (Sičhą́ǧu Oyáte and Oglála Lakhóta Oyáte) offer such insight as that “The white man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America.”51 In his view, the American Empire stands as without relatives. This analysis has been echoed in the modern day by Nick Estes (Khulwíčhaša Oyáte).52 This critique is the indigenous insider-outsider critique of what settlers are familiar with through the notion of virgin land. The two notions are inseparable in the context of a settler-colonial world and its relations, and are identifiable as part of one unity. Yet they are also very much distinct. This has become evident even in the contemporary popularization of “Turtle Island” as an alternative name to “America.” Turtle Island originates from Great Lakes and Eastern Woodlands peoples rather than being a truly Pan-Indigenous nomenclature in origin, but its ‘authenticity,’ in the sense of preceding colonialism, is not so important as what it signifies within and against the colonial relation.

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Americanism This is not by any means to imply that Indigenous peoples are homogenous, of course. There are distinctions within these communities in forms and degrees of assimilation, of sovereignty, of gender relations, class distinctions and others. There is a reason, however, that it is the Federal-aligned bureaucracy and (minuscule) capitalist classes who tend to favor Euro-’modernization,’ and it is the working class radicals who tend to favor ‘traditionalism.’53 When Indigenous peoples struggle for their sovereignty, they do not do so as an “Indian” race. To be a race rather than a nation means to be colonized. This racialization is already implied in the colonial relation of domestic dependent nationhood. The attempts by EuroAmerican assimilationists to use the courts against the concessions to Indigenous selfdetermination—such as the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act—only seek to fully realize the racialization of Indigenous peoples against their sovereignty, against their distinct political status as “Indians.” True sovereignty thus demands extending beyond bourgeois law and state-centered contracts. Sovereignty cannot be realized in the terms of nation-states—it must be community autonomy, revitalization, internationalist work with global decolonial movements. But this is already the dominant tendency among radicals. The “patriotic socialist” approach either threatens to block it or to stand in direct hostility to it. This is a concrete consequence of their dogmatic worship of Americanism. Ultimately, my point—following from Marx and the history of North American radicalism—is to emphasize the need for contingencies in revolutionary identities. This requires an immanent engagement with history, and the people who are now making history, rather than any a priori, good-bad “dialectic.” A new unity cannot be built from the abstractions haunting our discourse, not the least “patriotism.” These historical situations and the concepts emerging from them have many possibilities and means of expressing themselves. We benefit by keeping our eyes open for this. Think of the claim that U. S. patriotism is necessarily anti-colonial, because it opposed the British Empire. This is certainly formative to Americanist morphology, but there are many colonialisms and many anti-colonialisms—many forms of domination and resistance—in local history. The U. S. opposition to British colonialism went hand in hand with the notion of an Empire of Liberty expanding into Indigenous homelands, and with the liberty of the enslaver over the enslaved.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez To analyze in the realm of contingency, refusing to foreclose possibilities, means to analyze according to determinate situations and ask what is immanent, what has the greatest actuality and greatest potential for revolutionary universalism. An example I have identified as a powerful vehicle for revolutionary rhetoric is the history and legacy of abolitionism. Abolitionism was the mother of feminism, Black liberation, anti-imperialism, the labor movement, and radical concerns for Indigenous peoples in North America.54 Marx identified the centrality of abolition and opposition to racist exploitation to the proletarian movement quite insightfully:

“In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose.”55

Patriotism is by no means the only or even a fit form for life-affirming, emancipatory movements. The real question is: what is mobilizing people, and what can mobilize people? Right now, it is quite bread and butter concerns—rent, wages, cost of living, debt…. Bread and butter already represents a universal, in that it necessarily includes everyone regardless of race, gender, citizenship, ability, or anything else. This is not to say it is sufficient, but that it is a radical start. There is a potential pitfall in obscuring human particularities, but its initial universalism is an important and revolutionary step. In Marx’s analysis of the working class struggle to limit the working day, he argued that there was an implicit revolutionary philosophy in struggle for everyday concerns.56 Even everyday struggles today are saying something about life affirmation, about freedom, about identity which cannot and should not be foreclosed within the abstract notion of narrow patriotism. The workers struggling to unionize Starbucks and Amazon are not really interested in patriotism so much as practically defining a distinction between a good life versus a shit life, the time and concerns of the workers as individuals versus the exploitation and one-dimensionality of capitalism.

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Americanism Revolution means seizing concrete possibilities, blasting open the potentialities immanent in life. Communism must be the revolution of the manifold working people against the vampiric force of capital. Communism has no ready-made formulas, it is a project of sweat and blood. There are no easy solutions. We have to work through the present state of things to destroy them as they are. To make revolution, one can neither become disconnected from what is, spindling away at intellectual utopias, or merely affirm what is in one form or another. Each leads to complacency and to conservatism. They do not bring us one step closer to a new world. Against both of these, we must become the inheritors and makers of history and realize the immanence of revolution.

Marx—Advocate of Patriotism? Having taken a step to redeem our local histories from “patriotic socialism,” let us now take an extended excursion to redeem Karl Marx from their damning and distorting praise. They lay a claim to legitimacy for their position in depicting Marx as an advocate of patriotism more broadly, and American patriotism in particular. This is more or less a lazy appeal to a respected authority rather than showing actual respect to the man by following along with him in living his method. Nevertheless, it brings up a real need to examine the legacy of Marx as a foundation of our method, and to ask to what extent our previous critique applies to him, or whether these people are accurately representing him. As argued earlier, a conception of dialectic as seeing two sides in everything is patently alien to Marx’s method of immanent critique. Rather than expressing dialectic as redeeming the “good’ from the “bad” of a unity-category, Marx discussed dialectic thusly:

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez “In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.”57

Thus, the basis for our previous rejection of anything which explicitly or implicitly takes unity-concepts as pure givens. I argued earlier that “patriotic socialism” is guilty of this in its logic of the nation. I think Marx preceded me in this argument within his own work. Namely, through his engagement with the nationalist economist Friedrich List, who—not coincidentally —expressed a quite similar ideology to the more vulgar of the “patriotic socialists.” List, furthermore, appeared to be influenced in part by early U. S. economic policy and philosophy.58 As in his condemnation of Hegel for becoming complacent with the actuality of the Prussian state, Marx condemned List’s logic as preserving a bad unity in the form of the national community. In 1845, Marx said:

“The nationality of the worker is neither French, nor English, nor German, it is labour, free slavery, self-huckstering. His government is neither French, nor English, nor German, it is capital. His native air is neither French, nor German, nor English, it is factory air. The land belonging to him is neither French, nor English, nor German, it lies a few feet below the ground. Within the country, money is the fatherland of the industrialist.

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Americanism “Thus, the German philistine wants the laws of competition, of exchange value, of huckstering, to lose their power. at the frontier barriers of his country! He is willing to recognise the power of bourgeois society only in so far as it is in accord with his interests, the interests of his class! He does not want to fall victim to a power to which he wants to sacrifice others, and to which he sacrifices himself inside his own country! Outside the country he wants to show himself and be treated as a different being from what he is within the country and how he himself behaves within the country! He wants to leave the cause in existence and to abolish one of its effects! We shall prove to him that selling oneself out inside the country has as its necessary consequence selling out outside, that competition, which gives him his power inside the country, cannot prevent him from becoming powerless outside the country; that the state, which he subordinates to bourgeois society inside the country, cannot protect him from the action of bourgeois society outside the country. “However much the individual bourgeois fights against the others, as a class the bourgeois have a common interest, and this community of interest, which is directed against the proletariat inside the country, is directed against the bourgeois of other nations outside the country. This the bourgeois calls his nationality.”59

These hardly sound like the words of a patriot. Here, he quite clearly positions the nation as a bad unity for the working classes, and merely an instrumental pretext for the bourgeois. One might argue that this evaluation is specific to the Germany of his day, which was incredibly fragmented. However, List and Marx both spoke of the nation-state, and while they certainly had Germany in mind, they considered their approaches as referring to general principles. To be fair, in this period Marx underestimated the continuing role of nationality and the state, believing that the abstract universal of money would render the homogenization of the world. His basic point on the actuality of the nation as a bad unity, however, is correct and continues to ring true.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Contrast this to one of the inheritors of List’s nationalism, Oswald Spengler. Spengler advocated an organicist nationalism which united all ‘productive’ classes into a unity (in Marx’s view, a bad unity) rather than into a transformative, universalist revolutionary identity.60 Marx would consider this ridiculous, a narrow provincialism, and would likely mock it in about the same terms as he did List. In the 1848 Communist Manifesto, Marx continued to elaborate a very distinct view— opposed to anything which forecloses revolutionary, transformative possibilities within a patriotic spirit. There, Marx and his partner Friedrich Engels commented on the relationship of proletarian revolution and the nation thusly:

“Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.”61

What Marx is talking about here is not a struggle which is necessarily “patriotic” (“not in substance”), but a transcendence of the nation-state-based global capitalist system from its own premises. The point for him is the analysis of determinate historical conditions and traditions of struggle and transformation, not a petty deference to a patriotically mythologized history. Marx refused both utopian attempts to entirely escape the ground of history and conservative positivists who merely reproduce or produce apologetics for what is. This is the meaning of immanent critique. He continued this critical discourse on nationalism upon the birth in 1871 of the Paris Commune—for him, the Paris Commune represented a realization of a proletarian form of governance. On its relation to the nation, he said:

“The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence.”62

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In his evaluation of its organization, he considered their treatment of the nation not as premised in abstract patriotism, but in the nation as a social-spatial unit. Instead of the national system of List, promoting a bad unity, the Commune refused this and embraced more radical popular identities. The commune realized a new unity and universalist identity, based on the real, concrete social relations of the national unit rather than the bourgeois one-sided spirit-forms.63 Of course, the French Republican relation to nationalism must be considered in light of determinate French history. Unlike the United States, France was not founded on settlercolonialism. Further, there was already an immanent potential in the outburst of the French Revolution in a radical antithesis of French Nation and French Empire, as manifested through the slave revolutionaries of Haiti initially taking up Frenchness as an identity of mobilization.64 However, where the actuality of Frenchness became one based on the preservation of slavery in the wake of the Thermidorian Reaction, the existing potential for a distinction between Haiti and France as between colonized and colonizer burst forth. This is the meaning of JeanJacques Dessalines renaming the island from Saint-Domingue to Haiti, after its Taíno name, and declaring “I have avenged America.”65 Clearly, patriotism in revolution cannot be considered always as equivalent to the French Revolutionary experience— or even the experience in all of its facets. This problematic of patriotism emerges once again in Marx’s engagement with the Union cause during the American Civil War. This period is about the most contentious for contemporary Americans more broadly. For “patriotic socialists,” Marx’s writing and activism during this period serve as a major basis for their argument that he advocated in the absolute for American patriotism. Certainly, Marx threw his weight behind the Union cause. The man was a staunch abolitionist, and from the outset he and Engels critiqued the Union’s refusal to align the cause of re-Union with Emancipation.66 This was quite similar to the stance of Black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany. He did not support the actuality of the Union unconditionally, but as a vehicle for the history of freedom. Even in the very oft-cited January 28, 1865 letter he penned on behalf of the International Working Men’s Association to President Abraham Lincoln, he conditioned his praise:

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“From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?”67

For him, it was not that America inherently embodied this nascent social revolution, but that it was in so far as Union and Emancipation aligned. As an aside, Marx’s invoking of “virgin soil” is entirely historically inaccurate and lends itself to historical distortion and underestimation of the settler-colonial relation. This issue will be elaborated later, however. Marx continued later in the letter:

“While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.”

From this, it is quite clear that Marx rejected any vulgar populist patriotism. He did not spare the workingmen of the United States from critique, and his main aim was revolutionary emancipation which could not be subordinated to the Jacksonian or Republican patriotism of many American workingmen. Like the most radical of the abolitionists, he would align with Americanism only insofar as it served a more radical universalism. Further, it shows quite clearly that Marx rejected the simple race-class distinction and considered the distinct oppression of Black people as just as much formative to the unity of the Union as its drive for “free soil” was.

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Americanism Marx and Frederick Douglass, in this regard, quite closely mirror each other in their consideration of patriotism as a vehicle for greater universalism. This includes a revolutionary break with the actuality of American laws—Douglass was himself a fugitive. Both Marx and Douglass shared a high estimation of the Republic’s radical principles, but both refused an unconditional fealty to the Republic or to posit a simple separateness between the actuality of values and the institution of slavery. Where they diverged most is in their evaluation of the Union in the wake of the Civil War. Douglass, living as a Black man in America, expressed much greater caution about President Andrew Johnson than Marx did, who assumed his poor white background would drive him to social revolution against the plantocracy.68 In actuality, Johnson was a disaster to Reconstruction and especially to freedmen. Here, Douglass’s more cautious and determinate analysis of the American working class, from his own experience as a worker, won out. Douglass had a stronger understanding, in a method of knowledge echoing Marx’s own method, of the relation between race and class among the working people of America. This is not to say that Marx was an idiot on this issue, and completely uncritical of Americanist principles, but that he was not a god. Marx’s own work in the wake of the Civil War expressed a certain radical critique of those very principles perhaps preceding the work of W. E. B. Du Bois:

“In the place of the pompous catalogue of the 'inalienable rights of man' there steps the modest Magna Carta of the legally limited working day, which at last makes clear 'when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins'. Quantum mutatus ab illo! [What a great change from that time!]”69

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez His point here is that the working class cannot be taken abstractly, nor are abstract principles fitting for the proletariat’s struggles. Douglass realized this principle quite clearly in his emphasis on the fact that the working class is racialized, that Black people are racialized as a working race-class.70 Black people are a racialized class and a classed race. Race is not merely an illusion or delusion, but social relations and the division of labor reified into a pseudobiological category. This is true of “Black” just as much as white. Because race is based in concrete practices of categorization through division of labor, legal status, and exploitation, there is an immanent potential for taking racial categories as-given in the relation of oppression and transforming them into a vehicle of resistance against that very oppression. Blackness became a force of reason in history because of the logic of Blackness has been a concrete force in the everyday life of history. The slave trade took Africans as a target of commodification, and melded many distinct peoples into one category. The institution of chattel slavery confined itself to these commodified Africans, making a certain common coherence in Blackness by means of the slave trade and slave labor. State and capital conflated Africanness with Blackness with Slaveness in the division of labor, and so Blackness was born in history as a race class and class race. Douglass’s approach, as well as Marx’s own realizations in his most critical moments, blast apart the notion of a homogenous working class, of an opposition of race and class, and of a single Spirit of patriotism. For Marx, the working class’s everyday struggles already hold immanently within them a determinate, revolutionary universalism in all of their concreteness. They are not bound to the bad unity of some abstract, Spiritual nationalism, but reach into the radical limits of possibility. Central to Marx’s critical theory is the critique of the domination of concrete, living things by abstract, dead things. The rise of Indigenous critiques as a force within the U. S. and thus engaged in an internal-external dialectic represents an expression of a sibling critique, and also something which Marxism must engage with to hone itself. The material force of this critique now exposes in a practical sense the formative settler-colonialism in the United States, the exterminatory logic of American capitalism.

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Americanism Where Marx assumed the land was “virgin,” Indigenous critique quite practically demonstrates that it is not. Not a land without a people, but peoples with homelands. Peoples in relation to the space of homelands, and with long spatial histories of mutual making and being made by these environments. The land of this region is not virgin, but the sedimentation of Indigenous and colonial histories.71 Marx in his own life engaged with nascent Indigenous critiques, just as he engaged with working class critiques and Black critiques.72 Marx valued the genius in the organic critiques of regular working people, considering their concrete practice to be the midwives of theory rather than the other way around. Marx was often very cautious, taking care to take his lead from determinate situations and practices rather than falling into the mistake of imposing an alldevouring, all-enclosing abstract dogma on everything. We must follow Marx’s method rather than merely tailing behind him, and this means engaging with Indigenous critiques as an alternative to his own deficiencies. This was a thread he had begun to follow in his late life before he died. If we work to study the actual the actual determinate history of organizing and identity in the U. S., including oppressed peoples, we see critiques offer a red thread which must be taken up again—Indigenous struggles for sovereignty, the abolitionist movement, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Partido Liberal Mexicano, the African Blood Brotherhood, the National Congress of American Indians, the National Indian Youth Congress, American Indian Movement, the Congress of Industrial Workers, Black Panther Party, Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, and others. By engaging with these practical histories and their critiques, we find a much greater wealth of immanence than any a priori formula of taking the good from the bad sides of patriotism. Marx took his lead from the real struggles of working and oppressed classes, and so should Marxists. Marx considered communism to represent a new, disalienated relation to spacetime, with the establishment of a universal gemeinwesen or community.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez This is not the patriotic nation—he condemned that as an alienated abstraction. In his commentary on the Paris Commune, he considered its actualization of the nation to not be premised in a spiritual, mystical, myth-making patriotism, but in the realization of a concrete universal community in all of its facets.73 Community is not abstract, but concrete, and manifold. It is the ensemble of social relations, identity through community, the realization of the individual through the community and the community through the individual. This identification with concrete, social-historical time-space and identification through relationality, once again, has a sibling in Indigenous philosophies. Indigenous peoples identify themselves based on their linkages in community social relations, bound up in particular historical and relationally infused spaces—homelands. As Vine Deloria Jr. argued, Indigenous philosophies refuse the domination of space by time, of the living by the dead, or of land by humans.74 Further, Indigenous peoples engage with historical ancestors not as externalized, as alien, but as living through vivacious social relations and everyday social practices.75 This is a living alternative to bourgeois modernity and its wealth of alienations, exploitations, and destructions. Once again, this is not to homogenize Indigenous peoples—this tradition of critique has largely been kept alive by the “traditionalists,” and has been expressed in history by people like Tecumseh (Shawnee), Tenskwatawa (Shawnee), Geronimo (Ndendahe), Wovoka (Numa), Ohiyesa (Isáŋyathi Dakȟóta), Luther Standing Bear (Sičhą́ǧu Oyáte and Oglála Lakhóta Oyáte), Zitkála-Šá (Iháŋktȟuŋwaŋ Dakȟóta), Vine Deloria Jr. (Íŋyaŋ Woslál Háŋ), Winona LaDuke (Ojibwe), Nick Estes (Khulwíčhaša Oyáte), and many others. Indigenous philosophies do not exist in a vacuum, but exist as living philosophies, living critiques, and living alternatives. Indigenous engagements with the nation are especially fruitful for the question which concerns us—namely, their role in bringing forth the approach of universal kinship. This is a refusal of a homogenous nation, especially assimilation into one citizenship. It is an embrace of unity-in-difference, and a vision of identity wherein Indigenous sovereignty is essential. It is a rejection of colonialism, a vision of decolonization. In history, Indigenous world-views have been very people-place specific and consider the universal and particular to be one.

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Americanism This communalist and egalitarian tendency was radical within, but also contained the seeds of its own negation in its limitation to the inward and its frequent allowance for enslavement or humiliation of outsiders.76 This was the basis for the rise of class distinctions which colonial diplomacy made so much advantage of, being easier to engage with than a manifold society based on complex networks of reciprocity.77 Through Indigenous engagements with and critiques of this colonial world, these ways of thinking hold a potential for a new universal. Where the colonial capitalist world is a bad universal, a universal domination of the abstract, Indigenous communities represent a vision of a concrete, manifold community. Indigenous philosophical conceptions of this universal community as a new conception of the community’s notion of itself run through Karl Marx, José Carlos Mariátegui, Emiliano Zapata, Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, Rigoberta Menchú the neozapatistas, and many other figures and movements. They point us towards a conception of communism as the reconciliation of individual, particular, and the universal. Indigenous peoples have been teachers of reciprocity, and were themselves teachers of Marx. In the realization of a new unity, of a new community, we must follow Marx and other radicals in history in emphasizing on freedom in history and not subordinating ourselves to alienated abstractions like “patriotic socialism.” Like Marx, we must reject the domination of the living by the dead, the concrete by the abstract.

Patriotic Socialists—Genuine Marxists? Having engaged in an extensive critique of “patriotic socialism,” we come to this question—are they even Marxists? Contrast their conception of a socialist volksgeist (peoplespirit) to Marx’s determinate, polyvocal, contingent situations of freedom. Marx’s mockery of Friedrich List for his deference to the pure abstraction of the nation, his “patriotism,” certainly contrast to their impotent worship of the flag.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez In Marx’s German context, the thread running from List onward in fact leads to a certain revealing knot. List held quite a similar way of thinking about patriotism and nationality to Bruno Bauer and Eugen Dühring, who Marx and Engels respectively attacked. After Marx’s death, Engels had to engage in a struggle with völkisch (folkist) socialists who considered a populist appeal to the German traditions of antisemitism to be a productive manner of getting in line with the German working classes’ “spirit.”78 In the late 19th century, this völkisch ideology was on the rise as a response both to the socialist movement and bourgeois society, very much echoing List’s attack on bourgeois and proletarian egoism alike in the name of the nation. In fact, the movement considered itself a third force, beyond the ‘materialism’ of capitalists and socialists alike, committed to a respiritualization of life through a popular patriotism.79 They considered the unity of the nation to be the means of disalienation, of escaping what they considered to be the nihilism of bourgeois and proletarian socialist specificity. Sound familiar at all? Völkisch ideology must serve as a reminder to us that a critique of capitalism is not necessarily revolutionary. Its critique is premised on the preservation of bad unities—bad unities which we aim at the transcendence of. The point is not merely to oppose capitalism, but to posit an emancipatory alternative to it. To merely fixate on negation leads one to create a mirror image of what one wishes to negate, and thus leaves one unable to seriously realize an alternative. What völkisch nonsense has to offer is not a revolutionary negation, but a one-sided, moralistic critique of capital. It critiques capital from the standpoint of a collective which stands above the individual and imposes itself on them, rather than an association where “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”80 It does not see the determinate, immanent potential for mass transformation, but merely posits one world-vision to another and depends on the ‘re-spiritualization’ of life, a role to be taken up by führers and heroes to realize its Romantic bad unity.

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Americanism Like the völkisch movement, “patriotic socialists” impotently flounder at conjuring up a unity and organic coherence by elevating the flag and nation as fetishes. They obsess over the absence or presence of “patriotic” symbols or rhetoric at this or that demonstration, seemingly believing that a strike’s entire success lies in whether it has an American flag present, and whether it displays it prominently enough. On the one hand, this is quite easy to mockingly dismiss as obsessive and pathological (it certainly is). On the other, there’s a real reasoning behind it which appears rational to its adherents, trapped within a genuinely undialectical thinking. While in a practical sense, the presence or absence of the flag usually isn’t very relevant, in the thinking of “patriotic socialists,” the flag and the nation it represents become objects of fetishism. A specific form of fetishism in a symbolic, mystical sense—one born out of a disconnect from the everyday labor of the working class movement, an impatience with the day-to-day struggle to build and rebuild mass working class culture and institutions. In other words, one disconnected from immanence, one which is caught up in the static and arithmetical framework of the good-bad “dialectic.” They are compensating for this disconnect from immanence. Or, what they perhaps see as a lack of revolutionary potential in those everyday concrete practices which aren’t necessarily beholden to patriotism. They frantically search for a ready-made identity which can act as an immediate force of cohesion and inspiration. In a sense, they are searching for a Spear of Longinus, a holy artifact-fetish which has the power to magically create cohesion where they think day-to-day, drab toil falls short. They compensate for a disconnect from the immanence of real, everyday forms of mass working class identification by identifying with the fetish-forms of “working class” massproduced by the right-wing of the culture industry and media empire like Fox News, Newsmax, and the array of right-wing talking heads on social media. They think merely copying this strategy of mass appeal as-is, sloppily slapped into the context of socialism, will magically work to bring the “working class” (the fetish-form of it in their heads, at least) to socialism.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Without the immanence of the real, concrete, pluralistic proletariat, they fall back on a magical, symbolic working class and try to uncritically imitate the Donald Trump Presidential campaign’s populist strategy. No determinate analysis, no immanent critique, not even a serious attempt to understand the class bloc and historically inherited strategies, rhetorics, and categories at play among Trump supporters. Just a pathetic, shallow, desperate drive for a miracle by offering a mediocre substitute for something which already exists, something which swims in bourgeois society like a fish in water. This logic is not Marxist. It is hardly even socialist. It treats the working class more like a ready-made interest group rather than a project, a political community which can compose itself, re-compose, and decompose. They take the fetish-form of the interest group “working class” as it’s given to them, as it is produced for bourgeois politicking, and try and deploy it for what amounts to a sad imitation of right-wing populism. Ultimately, their attempt to derive socialism from the ‘spirit’ of American patriotism is closer to the fascist Oswald Spengler than Karl Marx, that German Jewish Communist whom Spengler despised so much:

“As far as this momentous question is concerned, Prussianism and socialism are one and the same. Up to now we have not realized this, and even today it is not yet clear. The teachings of Marx, together with class egoism, are guilty of causing both the socialist labor force and the conservative element to misunderstand each other, and thus also to misunderstand socialism. “But now it is unmistakable that they both have identical goals. Prussianism and socialism stand together in opposition to our ‘inner England,’ against a set of attitudes that has crippled and spiritually debilitated our entire people. The danger is very great. Woe to those who hold back at this hour because of selfishness or ignorance! They will ruin others and themselves. Solidarity will mean the fulfillment of the Hohenzollern idea and at the same time the redemption of labor. There is salvation either for conservatives and workers together, or for neither.”81

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Americanism What a forefather of “patriotic socialism” Spengler was! Defending the bad unity of the patriotic nation against the narrow egoism of Marx, appealing to the special patriotic role of labor within this bad unity! Fantastic, this strategy is much greater for winning over working class white supremacists than Marx’s silly focus on the emancipation of Black labor! This approach, already ridiculed in embryo in the form of List’s national community, entails a rejection of transcendent struggle and an embrace of whatever promotes organic cohesion in the Volksgemeinschaft, or people’s community. Contrast this to Marx’s commitment to the destruction of bad unities, to his identification in the American Civil War as an opportunity for social revolution and remaking the world anew. The “patriotic socialists” commit themselves to a bad unity, even where they believe they commit themselves to class struggle. Their a priori reasoning, foreclosing of the possibilities of struggle and self-creation to the metaphysic of “patriotism,” and their good-bad dialectic represent a fundamentally conservative reason. Spengler saw Marx’s proletariat as narrowly egoistic and the Marxists as committed to an impossible universalist International, while Marx aimed at the realization of a revolutionary, universal unity of particulars through the shattering of bad unities. For Marx, the emanation of the universal or the community is from individuality, from freedom, rather than the universal being an external, positivistic Thing standing above and forcing the many contradictions of individuals together into a nation-statist ‘community.’ The “patriotic socialists” of today are so much the children of these völkisch men. They look up fondly at their völkisch fathers, those men who committed themselves to the patriotic ‘spirit’ and often considered themselves to be socialists in this commitment to an abstract notion of the common weal. In the völkisch defense of bad unity, in their mystical reasoning, and in their critique of bourgeois and proletarian egoism—’materialism’—from the perspective of a spiritual national community, it is no coincidence that they became fascism’s parents. To their emphasis on national particularity, on the manifestations of patriotic “spirit,” in their general reasoning, Marx would respond in his own self-defense and critique of them:

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez “To hold that every nation goes through this development [capitalist industrialization] internally would be as absurd as the idea that every nation is bound to go through the political development of France or the philosophical development of Germany. What the nations have done as nations, they have done for human society; their whole value consists only in the fact that each single nation has accomplished for the benefit of other nations one of the main historical aspects (one of the main determinations) in the framework of which mankind has accomplished its development, and therefore after industry in England, politics in France and philosophy in Germany have been developed, they have been developed for the world, and their world-historic significance, as also that of these nations, has thereby come to an end.)”82

Not all of these “patriotic socialists” are necessarily headed in this direction. That is not my point. Rather, it is on the general immanent tendency in this reasoning and in this form of practice. They are a potential fascism or reactionary socialism growing from within the logic of socialism more broadly.83 The U. S. Empire is self-consciously in a period of domestic and global decline, and Americans are disillusioned with our contemporary alienated world of networked capitalism. We turn to anything, any restoration of authenticity, of autonomy, of community in our desire to escape alienation. False disalienations and false revolutions represent a pitfall in this pursuit. Revolution must be universalist, it must be the realization of true newness from within the premises of the old. Methods of abstract critique that do not start with everyday life, everyday creation and self-creation, and the immanence of the masses merely render people machines and vehicles of destiny or grand concepts. These grow in their appearance of rationality, in their ‘common sense,’ in conjunction with a disconnect from the everyday life of the working classes and an underestimation of the potential already immanent in its struggles.

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Americanism The proletariat are not stupid, they are not devoid of creative and universalist thinking. They do not need to have the fetish of “patriotic socialism” jangled in their faces for them to already understand that life in capitalism is shit and what must be for everyone is separate from and directly antagonistic to what belongs to capital. I have spent much time critiquing “patriotic socialism.” I wish to also refer back to their iconoclastic opposite to illustrate its own issues, so that I do not give the impression that I am operating on an either/or conception. This approach engages in an indeterminate, abstract negation of the actuality of America, lazily condemning it as purely the Bad. If the “patriotic socialists” posit that there are good and bad sides to everything, these people posit a total separateness of the Good from the Bad. They cannot comprehend the complexities of settler-colonialism, slavery, and capitalism. For them, the participation of Indigenous nations in colonial conflicts and extermination against each other, such as in the 1871 Camp Grant Massacre, is incomprehensible. They see “Indigenous” as purely a homogenous category. Further, they cannot comprehend the ownership of Black slaves by free people of color in the Antebellum South. Nor can they comprehend that the Euro-American working classes have often been used as cannon fodder in the borderlands of American empire, in subjection to the danger of colonial conflict and in severe exploitation. They wish to merely separate the history of “America” as bad and to posit a totally distinct and separate world-vision, without engaging in an immanent critique. Thus, they produce a mere negative mirror image, a refusal which is purely a refusal in reference to what is refused. This approach fails to see the agency of the working classes in making history in everyday ways. It fails to see the potentials and possibilities even in, as in Marx’s favorite example, such mundane things as the struggle to reduce the working day. It is a very all-or-nothing vision, and so easily leads to fatalism and disillusionment. If Utopia, the totally not-what-is, fails to be immediately realized, then all is lost.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez In this sense—their disconnect from everyday immanence—they are very much the siblings of the “patriotic socialists,” even if the two despise each other. Where they offer an allor-nothing, Manichaean view, the “patriotic socialists” engage in an uncritical patriotic appropriation of what is given, and foreclose all possibilities within an abstract spiritualization of it. They appropriate unchanged, ready-given categories, identifications, ideologies, blocs, and practices along with what is immanent within them—including histories of white supremacy, of genocide, and of bad unities. In this sense, this approach is like taking in a Trojan Horse, which poises to destroy the revolutionary edge of socialism and transform it into a purely rhetorical negation of things as they are. This approach and caution is quite evident in Marx’s actual engagement with the nation and with patriotism. He rejected the patriotism of Friedrich List as an abstract, bad unity obscuring exploitative relations, though in the Union of the American Civil War he saw a temporary confluence of commitment to a nation-state and a commitment to social revolutionary Emancipation. For him, the main thing was Emancipation, and he always measured nations according to this goal. He refused fealty to the abstraction of “patriotism.” Thus, he identified the Paris Commune not as the realization of the “substance” of the nation, but its “form”—it was not a spiritual “patriotism” but the actuality of a new community, in all of its manifold facets. The new unity of revolution is not to be a spirit nation, but an inheritor of and realization of determinate, specific historical struggles into new institutions of popular working class power—struggles local, national in form, but not foreclosed within this in substance. Marxists can throw their weight neither with the iconoclasts nor with the “patriots,” but with the working classes. The working classes are not foreclosed within the abstract idea of “patriotism,” but are engaged in a continuous process of historical creation and self-composition against the decomposing forces of capital. Against these abstractions, and against alienated approaches, we must take up immanent critique as the path to realize a new unity.

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Americanism Footnotes 1

George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (Baltimore, Maryland: Black Classics Press, 1996), pp. 76-77. popularity of the New York Times’ 1619 Project from 2020-2021 was especially representative of this. 3 Chris Joyner, “The Radical Rise and Cultish Fall of the Black Hammers,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 15, 2022, https://www.ajc.com/news/investigations/the-radical-rise-and-cultish-fall-of-the-black-hammers/ C7LZ3BIV2FCZJKF6FLG2T7W5EM/. 4 “Of course, we must remain vigilant as we bring members in. Over the last years, we’ve encountered and overcome challenges from both left and right, including attempts to unduly influence and penetrate the party from the outside. “Here the NC should take note of emerging trends that appear left but are actually pushing right-wing positions based on national chauvinism, racism, and fake populism, some of whom seek to link themselves to our history and reputation. We’re speaking specifically of an outfit calling itself the Center for Political Innovation along with the InfraRed webcast. They’re even calling for people to join the CPUSA in order to take it over. “Why is this happening? Some want to lay claim to our prestige and history. Others want our resources: our national infrastructure, properties, and capital funds. But to what end? That’s the real question. “The main point is to divert us from the mass democratic movement and the class struggle that underlies it. The goal is ideologically hijack the radicalization of our youth, particularly its communist contingent, confuse the left and turn the working-class movement in the direction of right-wing nationalist and chauvinist positions. In fact, some are employing the canard of “socialist patriotism” in an effort to do so. But this “patriotism” has little to do with our concept of it: the national pride in our multi-racial working class and its basis in anti-racism along with workingclass internationalism, but has more in common with influences of Trumpian America First nationalism. We’re not using the term patriotism in the same way,” Joe Sims, “An Upsurge Worth Fighting For” (Communist Party USA, November 1, 2021), https://www.cpusa.org/article/an-upsurge-worth-fighting-for/. 5 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Paris, France: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), pp. 102, 105. 6 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 103. 7 Christian Fuchs, Rereading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism (London, United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 2019), pp. 42–53. 8 “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue,” Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York, New York: International Publishers, 1994), pp. 15-16. 9 See Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York, New York; London, United Kingdom: New York University Press, 2009). 10 William F. Swindler, “‘Rights of Englishmen’ Since 1776: Some Anglo-American Notes,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 124, no. 5 (May 1976): 1083–1103, https://doi.org/10.2307/3311594; Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York, New York: New York University Press, 2005), pp. 18-21. 11 Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World, pp. 27-29. 12 Carine Lounissi, Thomas Paine and the French Revolution (New York, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 178-185. 13 Ian H. Birchall, The Spectre of Babeuf (London, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), pp. 1-3. 2 The

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“The competitive type of race relations represents the polar opposite of the paternalistic type. It is characteristic of industrialized and urbanized societies with a complex division of labor and a manufacturing basis of production. The dominant group is frequently a majority or a large minority (more than 20 or 25 per cent) There is still a color bar, and racial membership remains ascribed, but class differences become more salient relative to caste; that is, there is a greater range of class status within castes, whereas the gap in education, income, occupation, and living style between castes tends to narrow. Typically, there is even an overlap in class status between castes, so that the caste line is best described as oblique rather than horizontal. Racial membership still plays a role in the division of labor, but achieved criteria of selection take precedence over strictly ascriptive ones. In a complex industrial economy that requires high skill levels the labor force has to be relatively free and mobile, and race is no longer workable as the paramount criterion for job selection; at least a heavy price in productivity has to be paid if racial ascription of occupations is to be retained. The political system often takes the form of a ‘Herrenvolk democracy,’ that is, a parliamentary regime in which the exercise of power and suffrage is restricted, de facto, and often de jure, to the dominant group,” Pierre L. Van den Berghe, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (New York, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1967), p. 29; Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2003), pp. 148-150. 15 This logic extends even into radical democracy, revealing the necessity to look upon democracy as limited from the perspective of communism. The Argentine philosopher Ernesto Laclau famously argued that “the people,” the subject of democracy, could become a vehicle for a revolutionary openness: “In other words: popular identity becomes increasingly full from an extensional point of view, for it represents an ever-larger chain of demands; but it becomes intensionally poorer, for it has to dispossess itself of particularistic contents in order to embrace social demands which are quite heterogeneous. That is: a popular identity functions as a tendentially empty signifier. “What is crucially important, however, is not to confuse emptiness with abstraction—that is to say, not to conceive of the common denominator expressed by the popular symbol as an ultimate positive feature shared by all the links in the chain. If it were, we would not have transcended the logic of difference. We would be dealing with an abstract difference, which would nevertheless belong to the differential order and would be, as such, conceptually graspable. But in an equivalential relation, demands share nothing positive, just the fact that they all remain unfulfilled. So there is a specific negativity which is inherent to the equivalential link,” Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2018), p. 96. Yet, as Laclau himself acknowledges (Laclau, On Populist Reason, pp. 203-205), the very emptiness of this signifier enables the articulation of racism— not everyone is of “the people,” and this can mean something in line with herrenvolk democracy. The signifier is open, but not strictly empty. The historical weight bound to the signifier matters, “the people” of democracy is a signifier haunted by white supremacy in a herrenvolk democracy. Of course, “the people” is still flexible—the Black Panthers famously used it in a sense directly hostile to this fascist tendency. 16 Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, pp. 355-356. 17 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York, New York: The Free Press, 1999), p. 17. 18 Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America, vol. 2 (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2012), pp. 39-41; Gerald Horne, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century (New York, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), pp. 85-87. 19 Russell David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), p. 38. 20 Editorial Council of The Red Nation, “Revolutionary Socialism Is the Primary Political Ideology of The Red Nation,” The Red Nation (blog), September 7, 2019, therednation.org/revolutionary-socialism-is-the-primarypolitical-ideology-of-the-red-nation-2/. 21 Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Mni Wiconi and the Struggle for Native Liberation (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2017), pp. 194-198. 22 See Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2nd ed. (London, United Kingdom: Oneworld Publications, 2007). 23 For discussions of migrant Pan-Indigenism its relationship to settler empire, see Robin Maria Delugan, “Indigeneity across Borders: Hemispheric Migrations and Cosmopolitan Encounters,” American Ethnologist 37, no. ` (February 2010): 83–97; Maylei Blackwell, “Geographies of Indigeneity: Indigenous Migrant Women’s Organizing and Translocal Politics of Place,” Latino Studies 15 (2017): 156–81, https://doi.org/10.1057/ s41276-017-0060-4; Lourdes Alberto, “Coming Out as Indian: On Being an Indigenous Latina in the US,” Latino Studies 15 (June 28, 2017): 247–53, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-017-0058-y.

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Six Nations Confederacy, “Spiritualism: The Highest Form of Political Consciousness,” in Basic Call to Consciousness, ed. Akwesasne Notes, 2nd ed. (Summertown, Tennessee: Book Publishing Company, 1991), p. 79. 25 See, for example, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Letter To American Workers,” ed. and trans. Jim Riordan, August 20, 1918, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/20.htm; C. L. R. James, American Civilization, ed. Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart (Cambridge, Massachusetts; Oxford, United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishers, 1993); Raya Dunayevskaya, American Civilization On Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard, 4th ed. (Detroit, Michigan: National Editorial Board of News & Letters, 1983). 26 Yehoshua Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology (Baltimore, Maryland: Peregrine Books, 1966), pp. 42-46. 27 Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology, pp. 270-278; Mark A. Lause, Long Road to Harpers Ferry: The Rise of the First American Left (London, United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 2018), pp. 98-100. 28 Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, pp. 109-120; Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2018), pp. 22-24; Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Eric Foner (New York, New York: Noonday Press, 1989), pp. 215-218; Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: A History of the American Left, 3rd ed. (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2013), pp. 22-23. 29 Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 40-49; Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology, pp. 42-43.. 30 Donald A. Grinde Jr. and Bruce E. Johansen, Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy (Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 191-197. 31 Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology, pp. 119-120. 32 Marx commented on this, saying “Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within these forms. But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product. These formulas, which bear the unmistakable stamp of belonging to a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite, appear to the political economists' bourgeois consciousness to be as much a self-evident and nature-imposed necessity as productive labour itself. Hence the pre-bourgeois forms of the social organization of production are treated by political economy in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treated pre-Christian religions,” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, Vol. 1., Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1976), pp. 173-175. 33 Robert A. Williams, Jr., Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization (New York, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012), pp. 209-219. 34 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 444. 35 For later analyses, see Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, by Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, 11th ed. (New York, New York: International Publishers, 1992), 277–320; James Boggs, “The Challenge of Automation,” in The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook, by James Boggs (New York, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1963), 33–41; Samir Amin, The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World (New York, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004); Gary Cross and Rick Szostak, Technology and American Society: A History, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2005); Intan Suwandi, Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (New York, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019), pp. 140-141. 36 See Kevin Bruyneel, “Indigenous Politics and the ‘Gift’ of U. S. Citizenship in the Early Twentieth Century,” in The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U. S.-Indigenous Relations, by Kevin Bruyneel (Minneapolis, Minnesota; London, United Kingdom: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 97–121. 37 See the historical texts collected in John H. Bracey Jr., August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick, eds., Black Nationalism in America (Indianapolis, Indiana; New York, New York: The Bobbs-Merill Company, 1970). 38 Frederick Douglass, “Slavery and America’s Bastard Republicanism: An Address Delivered in Limerick, Ireland, on 10 November 1845” (Yale MacMillan Center, November 11, 1845), The Frederick DOuglass Speeches, 1841-1845, https://glc.yale.edu/slavery-and-americas-bastard-republicanism. 39 Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (De Wolfe, Fiske, & Co., 1892), p. 611.

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Los Madrugadores, Corrido de Joaquín Murrieta, 2002, University of Texas, www.laits.utexas.edu/jaime/cwp4/ JMG/corido.html. 41 Ralph Chaplin, “The Red Feast,” in Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology, ed. Joyce L. Kornbluh (Oakland, California: PM Press, 2011), p. 329. 42 Noel Ignatiev, “Whiteness and Class Struggle,” in Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity, by Noel Ignatiev, ed. Geert Dhondt, Zhandarka Kurti, and Jarrod Shanahan (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2022), 268–75. 43 Noel Ignatiev, “Rainbow Coalition or Class War?,” Hard Crackers: Chronicles of Everyday Life (blog), September 15, 2017, https://hardcrackers.com/rainbow-coalition-class-war/. 44 United States Congress, “An Act to Establish an Uniform Rule of Naturalization” (1790), https:// immigrationhistory.org/item/1790-nationality-act/. 45 This framework is used by many “patriotic socialists,” drawing from a critique originating in Gus Hall, “Crisis of Petty-Bourgeois Radicalism,” 1970, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/hall/1970/crisispetty-bourgeois-radicalism.htm. 46 Stokely Carmichael, “Pan-Africanism: Land and Power,” The Black Scholar 27, no. 3/4, Kwame Ture/Stokely Carmichael: Tribute to a Life of Struggle (Fall/Winter 1997): pp. 58–64; Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che (New York, New York: Verso Books, 2018), pp. 133-135. 47 John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant (Baltimore, Maryland; London, United Kingdom: John Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 377. 48 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, by Walter Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, New York: Schocken Books, 2007), p. 255. 49 See Hazel W. Hertzberg, The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements, 1st ed. (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1971); Donald L. Fixico, The Urban Indian Experience in America (Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1989)’ Bruce D’Arcus, “The Urban Geography of Red Power: The American Indian Movement in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, 1968-70,” Urban Studies 7, no. 6, Special Issue: Cities, Justice and Conflict (May 2010): 1241–55. 50 Estes, Our History is the Future, pp. 236-237; Fayez Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Beirut, Lebanon: Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center, 1965); Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: A Selection of Writings (San Francisco, California: Harper & Row, 1986); Arghiri Emmanuel, “White-Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism,” New Left Review 1, no. 73 (June 1972), pp. 35-37. 51 Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle (Lincoln, Nebraska; London, United Kingdom: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), p. 248. 52 “To be called ‘Wasicu’ was the highest insult. It meant that a person behaved selfishly, individualistically, with no accountability, as if they had no relatives. Such behavior was normally punished by alienation or banishment, ‘Wasicu’ became synonymous with the United States, a nation that behaved as if it had no relatives,” Estes, Our History is the Future, p. 80. 53 Bordertown Violence Working Group., Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation (Oakland, California: PM Press, 2021). pp. 100–101; Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 143–44. 54 Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York, New York: Vintage Books, 1983), pp. 30-45. 55 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., p. 414. 56 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., p. 416. 57 Karl Marx, “Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital Vol. 1,” 1873, Marxists Internet Archive, https:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm. 58 G.A. Matile, “Preface,” in National System of Political Economy, by Friedrich List, trans. G.A. Matile (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1856), pp. vii-viii. 59 Karl Marx, “Draft of an Article on Friedrich List’s Book: Das Nationale System Der Politischen Oekonomie,” 1845, History Is A Weapon. 60 Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 336-337.

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Americanism 61

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto (New York, New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 221. 62 Karl Marx, The Civil War in France: The Paris Commune (New York, New York: International Publishers, 1989), p. 58. 63 Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2016), pp. 11-22. 64 Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The Belknap Press, 2004), pp. 102-105. 65 Jean Jacques Dessalines, “Liberty or Death. Proclamation. Jean Jacques Dessalines,” Connecticut Herald (New Haven, Connecticut), June 12, 1804. 66 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Civil War in the United States (November 7, 1861),” in The Civil War in the United States, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 2nd ed. (Colorado Springs, Colorado: Portage Publications, 2003), pp. 83-84. 67 Karl Marx, “Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America” (Marxists Internet Archive, January 28, 1865), www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/ documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm. 68 Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, pp. 467-469; Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2016), pp. 111– 13. 69 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., p. 416. 70 Joe William Trotter, Jr., Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019), pp. 68-70. 71 Alexa McKay, “The Wilderness Myth,” Nature Ecology & Evolution 6, no. 21 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41559-021-01630-w. 72 Anderson, Marx at the Margins, p. 1-3. 73 In 1891 Marx’s partner, Engels, specifically identified the American Republic as the opposite of what a dictatorship of the proletariat, in the form of a democratic republic, would have to look like: “Nowhere do ‘politicians’ form a more separate, powerful section of the nation than in North America. There, each of the two great parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the separate states, or who make a living by carrying on agitation for their party and on its victory are rewarded with positions. “It is well known that the Americans have been striving for 30 years to shake off this yoke, which has become intolerable, and that in spite of all they can do they continue to sink ever deeper in this swamp of corruption. It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions. and nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends – and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality exploit and plunder it. “Against this transformation of the state and the organs of the state from servants of society into masters of society – an inevitable transformation in all previous states – the Commune made use of two infallible expedients. In this first place, it filled all posts – administrative, judicial, and educational – by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, with the right of the same electors to recall their delegate at any time. And in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers. The highest salary paid by the Commune to anyone was 6,000 francs. In this way an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism was set up, even apart from the binding mandates to delegates to representative bodies which were also added in profusion,” Friedrich Engels, “Introduction,” in The Civil War in France: The Paris Commune, by Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and Friedrich Engels (New York, New York: International Publishers, 1989), pp. 20-21. 74 Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, 3rd ed. (Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 2003), pp. 61–71, 98–100

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Historian and anthropologist Joanne Rappaport describes this succinctly in the case of the Cumbales of Cumbal, Colombia: “[...]when the past is located in front of the observer, it lends a historical nature to the activities of the present and of the future. But in order for a linguistic feature to acquire significance, the Cumbales themselves must express the concept in some way. Their explanation of their particular space-time frame centres on practice as opposed to fact: although events occurred in the past, we live their consequences today and must act upon them now. For this reason, what already occurred is in front of the observer, because that is where it can be corrected. History is, therefore, most relevant to the present and is of the present,” Joanne Rappaport, “History and Everyday Life in the Colombian Andes,” Man 23, no. 4 (December 1988): p. 721, https://doi.org/10.2307/2802601. 76 Heather A. Brown, Marx on Gender and the Family: A Critical Study (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2014), pp. 208–210. 77 Estes, Our History is the Future, pp. 78-84. 78 “Furthermore, we are far too deeply indebted to the Jews. Leaving aside Heine and Börne, Marx was a fullblooded Jew; Lassalle was a Jew. Many of our best people are Jews. My friend Victor Adler, who is now atoning in a Viennese prison for his devotion to the cause of the proletariat, Eduard Bernstein, editor of the London Sozialdemokrat, Paul Singer, one of our best men in the Reichstag – people whom I am proud to call my friends, and all of them Jewish! After all, I myself was dubbed a Jew by the Gartenlaube and, indeed, if given the choice, I'd as lief be a Jew as a ‘Herr von'!” Friedrich Engels, “On Anti-Semitism,” April 19, 1890, Marxists Internet Archive. 79 George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, New York: Schocken Books, 1981), pp. 13–16. 80 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 231. 81 Oswald Spengler, “Prussianism and Socialism,” trans. Donald O. White (JR Books Online, 2013), p. 83 https:// jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/PrussianismAndSocialism.pdf. 82 Marx, “Draft of an Article on Friedrich List’s Book.” 83 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, pp. 235-237.

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Part II: Ancestors, Descendants, Kin

Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques*

Karl Marx has something of a reputation for being a Promethean. From various standpoints, he is pelted with accusations of thinking in terms of ends-justify-the-means, millenarianism, and an eternal march of history towards “Progress.” Marx was simply a naive, narcissistic idiot with his head in the clouds, forever dreaming of a utopian future. “Indigenous” and “thought” are considered as antithetical — how can complex thought, much less advanced critiques of Western modernity, come out of “primitive” peoples? In essence, the “modern” world looks upon Indigenous peoples and their thought as dinosaurs or museum exhibits, even where they pretend to sympathize with them. Indigenous peoples are in the past, while the world moves forever in the present and towards the future. Each are considered as irreconcilable with the other, whether by denouncers or advocators of either. Russell Means (Oglála Lakhóta Oyáte), for instance, once said that “Marxism is as alien to my culture as capitalism and Christianity.”1 There is Marx and there are Indigenous peoples, and never the twain shall meet. And yet, neither of these are true to their distorted mis-representations. Nor are they fundamental, antagonistic opposites. What we will trace here is the confluence of their critiques of the modern, Euro-bourgeois world. Let it be clear that we do not aim at a forced, homogenous identity of the two into one thing. Just as Marxists and Indigenous peoples are not identical in real life, so the two lines of

Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques inquiry and critique should not be forced into one. Those Marxists who aim to entirely subordinate Indigenous worldviews to Marxism become exactly what Means once said they were  — another variant on the same old colonizer.

Indigenous Grounded Normativity In order to understand Indigenous critiques of our modern world, with Western capital at its center, it is important to understand Indigenous standpoints themselves. Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) described Indigenous ways of life as critiquing from a:

“place-based foundation[…] [called] grounded normativity, by which I mean the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time.”2

This standpoint is one deeply rooted in a relation to space, specifically a space sedimented with people-place-specific relations. In a word, relation of and to land is key for all social relations in Indigenous ways of life. Indigenous peoples live and think from the particularity of ancestral homelands. Vine Deloria Jr. (Íŋyaŋ Woslál Háŋ) strongly emphasized this importance of space to Indigenous peoples in his critique of the ways of thinking and being brought to the Americas by European colonizers.3 For him, the problem of space and time is fundamental to the distinction between Indigenous and Western approaches, such that:

“The very essence of Western European identity involves the assumption that time proceeds in a linear fashion; further it assumes that at a particular point in the unraveling of this sequence, the peoples of Western Europe became the guardians of the world[…]”4

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez The French Situationist Guy Debord wrote of this way of living as one of irreversible time, wherein “Those for whom irreversible time truly exists discover in it both the memorable and the danger of forgetting[…]”5 This irreversible time, in a sense, represents the domination of the living by the dead, and in some ways by a dead or static concept of the future. In bourgeois society, we live a life dominated by flat quantities in time and elsewhere. Time is interchangeable  — as on the intervals of a clock or a metronome — and of a single, homogeneous substance. It operates by measure, and thus limitation. Karl Marx identified this situation in the domination of living labor — the working class  — by dead labor — capital — in the production process of capitalism.6 The core of the capital relation for Marx is one in which “past labour confronts living labour as independent and superior.”7 The past is the fundamental dead weight on the present in capitalist society, it is embodied in a very literal way in the sedimentation of capital. Capital is not a sedimentation of the past as in the soil of an ancestral homeland, but is in a temporal domination, as Deloria Jr. speaks of such a space-time relation. This past dominates the future as well, as in the form of fictitious capital and credit money which are in truth claims on future production of values.8 The dependency of our modern global capitalist society on this fictitious or speculative capital is essentially on a foreclosed, predictable future which is subordinated to the demands of dead labor (capital) to grow, “vampire-like.”9 In this capitalist way of life, the past is not a relative. It is a threat, a prison, a ball and chain, a supernatural power. The figure of the phantom, often invoked by Marx, is an important expression of this. Compare this phantom, haunting and feeding off of the living, to Indigenous relationality with sedimented history in ancestral homelands. In their emphasis on the specificity of people-places, and on reciprocity with ancestors (as in the Wyandot Feast of the Dead), they maintain a “living” relation to the dead rather than a parasitic and haunting relation. This is not to suggest an idyllic, homogenous — static — situation whatsoever. In Indigenous traditions, there are certainly instances of what we might call “haunting.” Rather than this being a fundamental state of being in the world, this is usually a sign of disharmony or a disruption to the rhythm of existence.10 In capitalist society, we are living in a permanent state of disharmony and sickness.

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) noted that her people traditionally:

“[…]have no such thing as capital. We have relatives. We have clans. We have treaty partners[…] Resources and capital, in fact, are fundamental mistakes within Nishnaabeg thought, as Glenna Beaucage points out, and ones that come with serious consequences — not in a colonial superstitious way but in the way we have already seen: the collapse of local ecosystems, the loss of prairies and wild rice, the loss of salmon, eels, caribou, the loss of our weather.”11

This is of course not to say that exchange was or is alien to Indigenous traditionalism —  the pre-colonial continental Americas thrived with networks of exchange such that the Mississippian Mound Building peoples had items from coastal Mesoamerica.12 Rather, exchange of equivalent values was not the heart of their societies. Marx spoke of this distinction of communal ways of life from capitalism as one where the former puts humanity as the aim of production, while the latter makes production and the accumulation of capital as the aim of humanity.13 This humanist, or perhaps more accurately life-affirming, ethic remains at the heart of Indigenous communities and their identities as specifically distinct from the mainstream of Western bourgeois society. They are not apart from it, as after all colonization was and is itself a capitalist encroachment and domination. The global system of our world is capitalism, this is a fact. Insofar as they are not assimilated — that is, insofar as they are Indigenous, as long as they remain in continuous ties with their ancestral relations and as distinct peoples, capital has not penetrated into and reconstructed their very hearts in its image. Indigenous identities are community identity, and their coherence depends on principles alien to that of capitalist identities. Indigenous peoples have successfully resisted the debilitating capitalization of their subjectivities for 500 years and counting. Simpson and other Indigenous critics of capital

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez recognize that it represents a quasi-autonomous, impersonal power which corrodes all community-based ways of life in the name of its vampiric drives. Indigenous relations to global capital today can be characterized through Marx’s own distinction between formal and real subsumption to capital. Indigenous communities, by their life-affirming modes of existence and resistant autonomy against capitalist instrumental reason, have not been thoroughly penetrated by the real subsumption of capital. The real penetration means total transformation of a way of living and laboring with capital at its center, and thus far from Indigenous ethics or ways of thinking and being. Marx discussed this distinction thusly:

“‘Production for production’s sake’ — production as an end in itself — does indeed come on the scene with the formal subsumption of labour under capital. It makes its appearance as soon as the immediate purpose of production is to produce as much surplus-value as possible, as soon as the exchange-value of the product becomes the deciding factor. But this inherent tendency of capitalist production does not become adequately realized — it does not become indispensable, and that also means technologically indispensable — until the specific mode of capitalist production and hence the real subsumption of labour under capital has become a reality.”14

For Marx, the real subsumption of labor had to take the form of “free labor.” He meant this in a dual sense. On the one hand, in the sense of workers owning their labor-power as their own commodity to sell. On the other hand, in the sense of completely untethered by any relations which might impede their circulation as a commodity rather than a relational person.15 This is why he specifically identified wage labor as the natural or “true” form of labor for the capitalist mode of production, although it can be argued that the real subsumption to capital can take other forms which represent a “deep” or thorough penetration of capital. One, for example, is chattel slavery as it existed in the Atlantic world. Marx recognized this as a capitalist form of labor, but not distinguished it from the capitalist form of labor.16 The point in capitalist labor, ultimately, is that “production [is] an end in itself” — capital is the subject of capitalism, not living relations. The heart, the center, of capitalism is capital.

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques This is what people are expressing, on the level of immediate appearance, when they say that money is the god of this world, and that we are all living to work instead of working to live. Taiaiake Alfred (Kanienʼkehá:ka), like Simpson, recognized this in his critique of those who advocate “red capitalism” as a strategy of liberation for Indigenous peoples. He warned that any strategy premised on capital accumulation threatens to undermine Indigenous sovereignty, even if initially deployed in its name. Against this bourgeois, elitist strategy, he advocated for a traditionalist economy premised on relationality rather than disintegrative exploitation.17 Both Alfred and Simpson, as well as many other traditionalist Indigenous radicals, recognize in capital what Marx did — an impersonal power, a spell which overtakes the subjective intentions of human beings who conjure it. It cannot be used merely as an instrument  — the instrumental reason of capital, where living ends are irrelevant, overcomes any use of it as an instrument with our ends. The subjects who summoned it through their specific relations, which birthed capital, become dominated by a power produced by their own subjectivity. Alfred and Simpson note that this phantom-like objectivity, this power from us yet outside of and above us, pushes us almost like a spell to disharmonic ways of thinking and being. It becomes a gravitational pull, like a black hole, forever destroying the world which creates it. Capital is a spell, it is a sickness, it is human subjectivity turned back in on itself. Although Marx had a powerful critique of capital which overlaps in many ways with Indigenous critiques of capitalist society, it is important to recognize his limitations in his own engagement with Indigenous grounded normativity as a standpoint of critique. Coulthard, for instance, argues that his primary focus on temporal domination of capital leads to a failure to understand the domination of Indigenous communities by capital spatially — through colonization of land, genocide, and the severing of relations to ancestral homelands and inheritances.18 I would condition this by noting that Marx partially emphasized temporality because of how capital quite literally dominates space by time. It represents the form of temporal experience identified by Deloria Jr. and others in their critiques of colonial Christianity and other forms of

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Western thought brought by settlers. Of course, it can certainly be said that in his critique of temporality as a domination, he went too far within temporality himself. Further, his concept of living (though formally subsumed) ways of life tended to be disparaging or dismissing. Although he was speaking of pre-capitalist societies in this context, his evaluation of “animism” in general leaves much to be desired. He considered it to reflect a limited development of productive powers, with humans worshiping a nature which they did yet not have the capacity to dominate.19 Marx essentially dismisses “animism” as a philosophy of an underdeveloped society. He implies that this way of thinking is more or less one of the past, and not something which can play a role in the future of communism — “production by freely associated men.” In his eyes, at least upon the publication of Capital in 1867, these “animistic” ways of thinking and being were primarily one of subordination to “given” natural conditions. Gregory Cajete (Khaʼpʼoe Ówîngeh), on the other hand, described this “animistic” way of thinking and being as one of harmony with the rhythm of spatially and relationally specific life. While Marx sees this as an early dependency on nature (almost like Freud’s concept of infantile narcissism or the desire for oneness with nature as a desire to return to the womb), Cajete characterizes it as a science. Cajete describes Native science as:

“[…]a metaphor for a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking, acting, and “coming to know” that have evolved through human experience with the natural world. Native science is born of a lived and storied participation with the natural landscape. To gain a sense of Native science one must participate with the natural world. To understand the foundations of Native science one must become open to the roles of sensation, perception, imagination, emotion, symbols, and spirit as well as that of concept, logic, and rational empiricism.”20

These philosophies are not pre-rational — they are not a superstitious submission to a despotic nature. They are rational expressions of a people-place-specific rational way of thinking and being.

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques Had Marx, in this period, been more familiar with the worldviews of Indigenous peoples, rather than speaking entirely out of turn, he ought to have had a different evaluation. This was certainly one of his moments of a certain Eurocentric hubris. At the time of writing Capital and living in London, he could have potentially learned through the literature by and about people like William Apess (Pequot), George Copway (Mississauga Ojibwe), or Handsome Lake (Onödowáʼga:). In his later life, Marx did study Indigenous ways of thinking and being, particularly that of the Haudenosaunee. From this experience, he changed his evaluation of these living alternatives to capitalism as sources of resistance.21 Famously, this led to his re-evaluation of the mir, or traditional peasant communes, in the Russian Empire as an organic form of an alternative to capitalism.22 Marx’s view on the resistance of these communities to the formal subsumption of capital represent an attempt “to remain traditional which makes him revolutionary,” in the words of Eric R. Wolf.23 Of course, he still lacked a complete evaluation of communal ways of life as independently valuable or vigorous alternatives. Thus, Marxism cannot be considered as sufficient unto itself, even in its original expression by Marx. Indigenous critiques are not merely valuable as additions to Marx’s critical theory of capitalism — they are independently valuable. A forced assimilation is undesirable and means the degeneration of Marxism itself.

Criticism of Heaven and Criticism of Earth Indigenous critics of bourgeois modernity consistently identify Christianity as an essential target, contrasting it directly to Indigenous “animist” philosophies. This is true of authors including Vine Deloria Jr. (Íŋyaŋ Woslál Háŋ), Ohiyesa (Isáŋyathi), Luther Standing Bear (Sičhą́ǧu Oyáte and Oglála Lakhóta Oyáte), Viola Cordova (Jicarilla Dindéi), and many others.24 Much of this is because the most immediate encounter with colonial power and the encroachment of bourgeois society for Indigenous peoples has historically been through their encounters with Christian missionaries. The Christians are the vanguard of “civilizing” efforts, and thus Indigenous critics of “civilization” tend to aim their sights first and foremost at Christianity.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Karl Marx, like many young German students in his generation, began his career in the criticism of religion. His father was a German Jew who had converted to Lutheranism in order that he and his son could have the rights of Prussian citizens and pursue a middle class, professional career in law. Lutheranism was the state religion of Prussia, and so critics of the Prussian social order tended to begin with criticism of religion. Marx noted that:

“Thus, the critique of heaven is transformed into the critique of the earth, the critique of religion into the critique o f law [Recht], the critique of theology into the critique of politics.”25

He, of course, went much further than this. He famously spoke of religion as “the opium of the people.” This phrase is often misrepresented, whether in characterizing religion as a pure delusion or as an acceptable medicine. Marx is here speaking primarily of “otherworldly” religions — those which posit a distinction between the heaven and earth, namely — or those which otherwise emphasize some form of escape from or sanctified meaning for everyday, miserable life. For him, insofar as real human society is disharmonic — as long as that world is riven between thinking and being, man and nature, individual and society, and so on — it cannot be transparent to itself. Instead, it appears to its participants in a mystified form — for historical necessity, not merely due to a collective delusion. Religious appearance is a necessary appearance given certain conditions. By “opium of the people,” Marx means that religion both helps the religious cope with the suffering of the real world and is a source of suffering and dependency. Religion for him, although fundamentally an expression of a wrong or “inverted” world, is multifaceted. It can be a force of cohesion in a bad unity (a class society), a sanctification of the existing order, a refuge from worldly suffering and oppression, or a body of resistance. Marx, coming from a Prussian Lutheran background and closely familiar with Hegel’s own religious framework, likely had in mind the history of Christianity in Germany — the Roman Catholic Church, the Protestant Reformation, the Peasant Wars… That is, his understanding of

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques religion was of something which is displaced from “secular” everyday life, something which projects and abstracts from. It can either express a peace with the world on this basis, or declare in Manichaean terms that “all that comes to be/Deserves to perish wretchedly[…]”26 Either way, Marx considered atheism to be a more natural vehicle for modern social revolution. Because of his unrepentant atheism and identification of the abolition of religion with the struggle for communism, Marx’s relation to Indigenous traditions is controversial. Many have argued that Marx was a typical colonial adherent of the Enlightenment and considered European scientific atheism to be the peak of human development — such as Russell Means (Oglála Lakhóta Oyáte):

“Europeans may see [Marxism] as revolutionary, but American Indians see it simply as still more of that same old European conflict between being and gaining. The intellectual roots for a new Marxist form of European imperialism lies in Marx’s-and his followers’-links to the tradition of Newton, Hegel, etc[…] “Revolutionary Marxism, as with industrial society in other forms, seeks to ‘rationalize’ all people in relation to industry, maximum industry, maximum production. It is a materialist doctrine which despises the American Indian spiritual tradition. our cultures, our lifeways. Marx himself called us ‘precapitalists’ and ‘primitive.’”27

Immediately, there is one issue with this: Despite many of his followers certainly making it appear so, Marx’s philosophy did not translate to a pure mechanical, Newtonian materialism. In fact, one of the aspects of Hegel which he admired the most was his critique of bourgeois Enlightenment materialism.28 As early as in his 1844 manuscripts, Marx critiqued such mechanical materialists as practicing an abstract materialism in antithesis to abstract spiritualism.29 Rather than advocating for one over the other, he already saw communism as uniting both.30 In doing so, he emphasized a concern echoed in Indigenous discourses about Western bourgeois technology as a potential

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez source for autonomous development insofar as it is integrated into Indigenous grounded normativity. Another issue — Do traditionalist Indigenous peoples practice “religion” in Marx’s sense, as explained above? Or should we consider this primarily as a Native mode of life, following from Coulthard? Religion and philosophy are typically identified in Marx as abstracting from real life, due to a disjuncture or disharmony in that life. Key to both is an antithesis of thinking and being, particularly as manifested out of the growing division between intellectual and manual labor (or head and hand). Viola Cordova, Luther Standing Bear, and Gregory Cajete (Khaʼpʼoe Ówîngeh) all emphasize the unity of thinking and being in Indigenous traditions, expressed in the context of a monist or holistic way of thinking about the world as opposed to Christian dualisms of heaven and earth.31 In their elaboration of their traditional worldviews, they do not express an otherworldliness or projection as Marx identified in German Christianity. In fact, they quite strongly echo Marx’s own critique of Western Christianity as otherworldly, as lacking a practical meaning for Indigenous peoples. This otherworldliness is directly related to its abstractions from everyday life — the soul abstracted from the worldly, specific qualities of the body, the Cartesian Subject from his dubitable existence as an Object, the Holy from the Worldly. Marx continued his critique of Christianity later into his career, stating even more damningly that Christianity, especially Protestantism or Deism, is the natural religion for capitalist society.32 Like capital, it regards humanity in basically abstract terms, with the churches seeing humans as abstractly equivalent in their souls and the capitalists seeing humans as abstractly equivalent in their values. This expression is a close relative to the critique Ohiyesa (Isáŋyathi) made of the missionaries he came into contact with and worked for:

“A new point of view came to me then and there. This latter [missionary Christianity] was a machine-made religion. It was supported by money, and more

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques money could only be asked for on the showing made; therefore too many of the workers were after quantity rather than quality of religious experience.”33

Both critics emphasize abstraction as the quality yielded by the absolute domination of quantity. For Marx, the abstract equality of all human beings on the level of a homogeneous substance —tending towards the destruction of all difference — is the qualitative basis and expression of the domination of value in society. Ohiyesa recognizes this exactly when he identifies missionary Christianity with capitalist ethics — for his people and for others, the missionaries were a force of capitalist penetration. They were the smiling, condescending face of encroaching bourgeois society. For Marx and Indigenous traditionalists alike, the standpoint from which they critique capitalist antagonisms is one of a renewed harmony of thinking and being, subjects and objects, humanity and the rest of nature. Their dissections of dead, abstract bourgeois Christianity identify it as the heart of a heartless world — a heart stricken with the very same sickness as the diseased social body itself. The disharmony, the wrongness of that world births the need for this “religion,” in Marx’s sense. Both move from a criticism of heaven to a criticism of earth. In our descent from the lofty abode of Gods to the everyday life of mortals, it is important that we recognize the potential for a “religiosity” even in that which is not typically considered religious. There is a reason that Marx and Indigenous traditionalists alike consistently identify a near identity between religion and philosophy in the bourgeois West. Philosophy, even where it claims not to be philosophy (as in the ridiculous conceptual opposition to conceptual thinking among scientific positivists), retains the character of a disharmonic ideology expressing its disharmonic world. This holds even where it expresses moments of truth. All thinking is mediated. Marx’s followers forget that, despite or rather because of his deep interest in natural sciences, Marx himself approached the (often hidden) philosophical claims even of secular scientific knowledge with skepticism. Of Charles Darwin, for instance, he noted sarcastically:

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez “It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’. It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes [war of all against all] and is reminiscent of Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which civil society figures as an ‘intellectual animal kingdom’, whereas, in Darwin, the animal kingdom figures as civil society.”34

Marx’s criticisms of Darwin, although not coming from a scientist, have been vindicated by the Marxist biologists Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins (among others).35 Marx would not smugly critique Indigenous “animism” from a secure evaluation of atheism — as many of his more naive followers do. Most of his lifetime was not spent on criticism of the heaven-peddlers, but on secular or even atheistic ideologies — namely, political economy. If what he called “religion” was an expression of disharmony, then there are many ideologies of this disharmony. Not the least that scientism or positivism which is born out of the antithesis of intellectual and manual labor, and which expresses bourgeois rationality even among moments of truth.36 In short, atheism, too, can be a superstition or simply another form of religion — whether expressed by Ludwig Feuerbach or Richard Dawkins. Against this narrow, naive form of empiricism — which assumes “immediacy” is not mediated, that one can observe the world of objects beyond one’s subjectivity, that one can think of the non-conceptual without the use of concepts even while thought is fundamentally mediated by language — Marx thought in terms of a “new materialism.” The bourgeois materialism of the Enlightenment expressed a certain antithesis of ideas and reality in its discourse of “superstition” versus “facts.” Superstitions are mere delusions, existing only by the fantasies of the human brain, and the truth of objective reality must be reached by cutting out the subject’s influence as much as possible. On the other hand, Marx expressed a theory wherein conceptual categories, even those which might be considered “superstitious,” exist in a very tangible sense. This is what is called real abstraction — abstract concepts or categories which, even from their birth out of social relations, have a thing-like or object-like quality.

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques Marx, quite far from positivism, explained this in developing his concept of commodity fetishism:

“The objectivity of commodities as values differs from Dame Quickly in the sense that ‘a man knows not where to have it’. Not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values; in this it is the direct opposite of the coarsely sensuous objectivity of commodities as physical objects. We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish; it remains impossible to grasp it as a thing possessing value. However, let us remember that commodities possess an objective character as values only in so far as they are all expressions of an identical social substance, human labour, that their objective character as values is therefore purely social.”37

Is this notion of commodity fetishism closer to naive positivism, which thinks of the world through the eyes of a “machine-made religion,” or to Indigenous thought about human creations taking on a power of their own when they become disharmonic? He was not mincing worlds — religion is directly related to the domination of human beings by their own creations as in the form of capital.38 Marx went as far as to say that the capitalist commodity literally has metaphysical or theological qualities in the real world — created by social relations, yes, but still exerting themselves on human beings as real.39 Having made a detour into the issue of Marx’s atheistic materialism, let us return to the relation of philosophy and religion. These two standpoints of critique we have been speaking of identify the transcendence of “religion” as we know it in this bourgeois society with the restoration of harmony in the world. Marx, as a young man, stated famously:

“In a word: You cannot transcend [aufheben] philosophy without realizing [verwirklichen] it.”40

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez The kind of philosophy he means here is different to the philosophy that someone like Viola Cordova speaks of. It is the philosophies within the antitheses of intellectual and manual labor, of contemplative and practical knowledge, and of the concrete and abstract. That is, it is of a type wherein it is merely an extension of religion, representative of the same basic alienation.41 Here we have come to what Marx meant when he said that the abolition of religion must mean the abolition of real misery, by means of his critique of contemplative philosophy. The realization of philosophy does not mean the total identity of subject and object, or of thought and reality. The identity of thought and reality is classically idealist thinking, which assumes that the Subject is the core of the world. This realization instead means the restoration of the transparency of society — the abolition of the veil rendered upon it by those class societies which necessitated philosophy. This is an abolition of the disharmony which leads to bifurcation and dualistic otherworldliness (either of heaven, inwardness, or a false oneness). Luther Standing Bear identified this disharmony as at the heart of the settler’s alienation from nature. The Promethean element in Christianity, which calls on humanity to dominate nature as its own God-given instrument, comes to the fore as a target of attack. In analyzing the settlers who expropriated him and his people, he said:

“The white man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative processes. The roots of his tree of life have not yet grasped the rock and soil. The white man is still troubled with primitive fears; he still has in his consciousness the perils of this frontier continent, some of its vastness not yet having yielded to his questing footsteps and inquiring eyes. He shudders still with the memory of the loss of his forefathers upon its scorching deserts and forbidding mountain-tops. The man from Europe is still a foreigner and an alien. And he still hates the man who questioned his path across the continent.

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques “But in the Indian the spirit of the land is still vested; it will be until other men are able to divine and meet its rhythm. Men must be born and reborn to belong. Their bodies must be formed of the dust of their forefathers’ bones.”42

Standing Bear identifies the consistent dualism and tension experienced by settlers in America as something which appears rational from an alienated context. It is a false way of living, but it certainly appears true based on a certain kind of experience. In this way of thinking and being, one does not look upon this earth as an ancestral homeland — a people-place deeply vested with significance, with sedimented history. Settlers do not experience that sedimented history as one of relationality — a continuing connection to ancestors and non-human relatives in a holistic, mutual interconnection. They experience this land as an enemy, as a “wilderness” to struggle against. The past of bourgeois society is not one of relatives, but one of phantom despots and bloodthirsty vampires — dead labor. The dead are dead, and when they live, they live only by a dominating and parasitic relationship to the living. In the capitalist mode of production, relations become things, things with a spellbinding power that dominates us. In Indigenous communalist ways of life, what in capitalism we consider dead, inanimate things are relatives — the entire world is relational.

Humanity and Nature Viola Cordova (Jicarilla Dindéi) expressed Indigenous conceptions of nature as essentially forms of monism:

“[…]everything that exists is perceived as being the manifestation of one particular thing. In effect, everything that is, is one thing. The oneness is ascribed to the fact that everything is, essentially, Usen, the life force.”43

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Interestingly, she identified a sibling of this monism in that of the Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza.44 Cordova and Spinoza’s emphasis on the oneness of nature relate closely to their concept of humanity’s position in it as natural beings. Of the relation between humanity and nature, Cordova said:

“The ethical system of the Native American extends beyond man’s relationship with others and the institutions that men create. The Native American includes the earth and everything in it in his ethical system[…]”45 “Humans sustain their being by acting in a manner that is balanced with the rest of the environment. They exist best in harmony with the land. Their ethical principles are drawn from the universe at large: balance, harmony, beauty, rightness.”46

While Cordova considers Indigenous thinking to be “humanist” to a certain extent, this is far from anthropocentrism or bourgeois Prometheanism. Rather, humanity’s relation to the rest of nature must be from their standpoint as humans. They are subjects who must work in everyday life, in the mundane, to maintain a subjective and objective rhythm with nature. Of Marx’s view of nature, Russell Means (Oglála Lakhóta Oyáte) characterized him in pure Promethean terms:

“Revolutionary Marxism is committed to even further perpetuation and perfection of the very industrial process which is destroying us all. It is offering only to ‘redistribute’ the results, the money maybe, of this industrialization to a wider section of the population.”47

As an aside, Means’ comment on communism being a redistribution of money shows a blatant lack of familiarity with Marx even in claiming to definitively dismiss him. His definition of Marx’s goal would fit in better with Franklin D. Roosevelt and other social democrats than any revolutionary communist, who wish to abolish the exchange society entirely. Howard Adams (Métis) said it best: “Means describes Marxism as an evil industrial movement that crushes

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques indigenous tribal Peoples. His discussion is an extremely unsophisticated and superficial analysis of Marxism. He fails to develop even the most rudimentary principles.”48 This nature-be-damned, industrialization-at-all-costs characterization of Marx is far from hitting the mark. Marx was deeply concerned with humanity’s relation to nature as natural beings throughout his entire life — from dawn, with his studies in Epicurean philosophy of nature, to dusk, with his theorizations in ecology.49 In his philosophy itself, he expressed the very centrality of the concept of nature in a holistic way directly echoing Cordova. As early as 1844, he wrote of humans as fundamentally natural beings related to other natural beings experienced as both interconnected and separate from themselves.50 This relational, naturalist conception of human beings is very close to that of Cordova. This is an early expression of his naturalism. It is still in a period where he held to a notion of an anthropological essence — species-being — of humans. Yet already, the relationality between subject and object without their homogeneous identity is in his heart. Humanity for Marx is distinct from the rest of nature because humanity labors. Labor represents a potential of transcendence, a potential for conscious and speculative thinking being realized through labor. The human subject is distinct from itself as an object, but it can only be a subject through its objectivity. Labor is a natural, objective process, but it is also a conscious, subjective engagement with the world of objects through that objective process. Labor can represent harmony or disharmony with the rest of nature, but it is basically fundamental for the human relation to the world. As an old man, Marx would defend the non-identity of nature with humanity or with the human subject against the Promethean thinking and labor-fetishism of his Lassallean rivals.51 Such thinking, to Marx, represented an internalization of capitalist ideology. Capital is a subject, and it seeks to subordinate whatever it can to its subjectivity — to render out of nature real abstractions and continue reproducing and gorging itself off of its flesh. Marx acknowledged where this Promethean approach to nature leads us:

“At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.”52

The domination of nature leads directly to the domination of natural human beings. The reduction of the natural world into mere mechanical abstractions, potential capital to be realized, means the reduction of human beings into mechanical abstractions. Humans and nature alike become appendages to capital as if it were an automatic subject — although it is in truth a spell. Is it not ironic that this is exactly what Means accused Marx of aiming to do?53 In his emphasis of the continued autonomy of nature from human subjects, Marx did not engage in a strict dichotomy of human beings and nature. In the Grundrisse (1857–1861), he said that:

“[…]for, just as the working subject appears naturally as an individual, as natural being — so does the first objective condition of his labour appear as nature, earth, as his inorganic body; he himself is not only the organic body, but also the subject of this inorganic nature. This condition is not his product but something he finds to hand — pre-supposed to him as a natural being apart from him.”54

By nature as the working subject’s “inorganic body,” Marx meant that it is their body apart from their bodies as an organism — their body beyond the periphery of their skin (to borrow a phrase from Silvia Federici). This expression, of course, still appears tinged with a certain anthropocentrism. It is nature that is the body of humans in this formulation. In the very next sentence, however, he turns this around in saying that humanity is “the subject of this inorganic nature.” What this means is that human beings are the coming-toconsciousness of nature. They are a part of nature which has the potential to become a rational mediator of the whole in the interests of the whole. This is not human beings becoming identical to the rest of nature, but a collaboration through metabolism. This is embracing a conscious and natural-rational rhythm on a world

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques scale.55 Marx was thinking in terms of a universal form of living in harmony, even while working through the distinction of humans and the rest of nature by labor.56 This is held out by later comments in his Notes on Adolph Wagner (1881):

“[Humans] begin, like every animal, by eating, drinking, etc., hence not by ‘standing’ in a relationship, but by relating themselves actively, taking hold of certain things in the outside world by action, and thus satisfying their need[s]. (Therefore they begin with production.)[...] Men assign to these things only a particular (generic) name, because they already know that they serve for the satisfaction of their needs, because they get hold of them through activity which is repeated more or less often, and they also seek to retain [them] in their possession; perhaps they call them ‘goods’, or something else which expresses the fact that they need these things practically, that these things are useful for them, and they believe that this useful character is possessed by the thing, although it would scarcely appear to a sheep as one of its ‘useful’ properties that it is edible by man.”

Though Marx remains with the perspective of human beings, he directly posits this theory of needs and labor with an understanding that other living beings—in this case, sheep—have their own perspectives. Need is a relationship, as is labor. It is a relationship from one’s perspective, and implicitly, a relationship between perspectives. One cannot think and act except from one’s relational position in the world. He came quite close to “animist” perspectivism here.57 This leads us to consider—what does it mean to produce, to relate universally? For humanity to be the self-consciousness of nature? This would have to mean humanity relates its perspective consciously to the perspectives of all beings. It would mean to be good kin to all, and we are good kin to all by understanding their needs (and thus their perspectives). In Marx’s identification of labor as what distinguishes human beings from the rest of nature, we come to the relation of this to Indigenous thinking on human beings. Viola Cordova spoke of the concept of humanity as one wherein:

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“The Native American view of human beings and their role in the world is very different from that of the Western/Christian view. It could be said that human beings have an instinct that draws them to others. It is this instinct that provides the basis for cooperative behavior. Cooperative behavior is ‘right’ or ‘normal’ behavior. Persons act ethically because they want to maintain their membership in the group. “In order to maintain membership in a group, the survival of the group is as important as is the survival of the individual, perhaps more so. The individual is dependent on the group for his survival, and the group is dependent on its individuals for survival. The group, in turn, as well as the individual, is dependent on the particular conditions of the area that it occupies for its continued survival. Other areas contain people equally dependent on the conditions of their area for their survival. “One very important fact here, a fact that is missing from the Western/Christian perspective, is that human beings are seen as groups occupying specific niches. The existential and geographical circumstances of the group will provide the basis for the ethical considerations of the group. Since each group occupies a specific area, each group will have its own ‘code of conduct.’”58

Here, we have a direct confluence with Marx in the importance given to cooperative labor and the metabolism of laboring activity and nature. Cordova considers human individuals as context-specific and relational — they are inseparable from what she calls their “matrix.”59 For Cordova, humans are simply what they are — the ensemble of their relations. They are not defined by any abstract, anthropological species-essence.60 Their definition varies by matrices, depending purely on reference to other beings and the life of the people-place. Cordova speaks of Jicarilla Dindéi communities holding a concept of a person humanizing from infancy to adulthood.61 This means coming into relation and becoming an autonomous being among other autonomous beings — distinct, but still a part of One. In

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques Cordova’s elaboration of Indigenous thought, humans are distinct from the rest of nature —  distinguished in a network of references or relations in their matrix — but they are not superior.62 She does not have a foundationalist definition of human beings — contingency is very important rather than seeking to pin down a metaphysical truth. What she does identify as key to humanizing or becoming-human is a continuous ethical commitment to rhythm with the world, varying by the specific “world,” or people-place, of communities.63 This implies a related concept to Marx’s concept of labor as a metabolism, albeit in a less anthropocentric form. Although he remained anthropocentric, he did not retain his youthful anthropological or “human essence”-thinking. As an older man, he expressed a concept of humanity in a form closely related to Cordova’s description of humanity as an endless becoming in a contingent, holistic world. In the Grundrisse (1857-1861), for instance, he said:

“In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming?”64

In Capital, Marx spoke of “animism” and a conception of the sacredness of nature — an immediate oneness with nature — as representing a backwardness in the development of labor. Ironically, it is this “animism” which offers a related and deeply insightful expression of holism and “the absolute movement of becoming[.]” This rejection of measure, of boxing in, and of alienated potentialities is not irreconcilable whatsoever with “animist” holism, which sees the whole of nature as sacred.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Marx himself recognized that our “civilized” way of living, opposed to “animism,” wherein “man” and “nature” are antithetical comes about with capitalist instrumental reason:

“For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production.”65

Marx recognizes this as originating in socially specific activity and social relations of life activity of humans — although still acting as natural beings. That is, this is not the only way humanity can relate to nature. Other ways of thinking and being are possible, as is critique and transcendence from within. Luther Standing Bear (Sičhą́ǧu Oyáte and Oglála Lakhóta Oyáte) also identified this human-nature antithesis as expressed in the difference between capitalist settlers and communalist Indigenous peoples:

“We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth, as ‘wild.’ Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness,’ and only to him was the land ‘infested’ with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it ‘wild’ for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the ‘Wild West’ began.”66

In the concept of “wilderness,” the human subject condemns a non-conformity of nature with the process of its own externalization of its subjectivity. The subject wishes to transform nature into an instrument, and insofar as nature does not revolve around them as its absolute center, they consider it something to be “struggled” against and “tamed.” The concept of

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques “wilderness” is a disharmony of subject and object — in this case, wrought by the drive of capitalization. Winona LaDuke (Mississippi Band Anishinaabeg) thus characterizes capitalism as an alldevouring, nature-destroying subject:

“Now, I’m an economist by training, and I refer to our current economic system as Wiindigoo Economics. In our Anishinaabe stories, the Wiindigoo is a giant murderous monster that used to rampage through the north woods, fueled by an insatiable greed and a relentless desire for human flesh. Fossil fuel era capitalism is like the Wiindigoo: a predator economics, the economics of a cannibal. It is a system based on colonization, wastefulness and ravenous greed, a system that destroys the very source of its own wealth and well-being, Mother Earth.”67

This Wiindigoo metaphor is extremely insightful, and shows the deep independent creative value of Indigenous knowledge. This metaphor of ravenous cannibalism expresses the manifold moments of capital: capital emerges from a specific way of living among natural human beings, it becomes like a spell or disease compelling them towards destructive behavior, regardless of any opposing subjective desires, and it ultimately transforms into a domination and destruction of those very same natural beings. Wiindigoo Economics is nature turned in on itself. It is a historical rather than a fundamental destiny. It is a disease which is a consequence of a certain way of life — devouring another human being, or what’s all the same, exploitation of human by human. For LaDuke and other Indigenous traditionalists, an ethic of human commitment in relation to the rest of nature is a medicine against this disease. This is an alternative way of life with a different logic to that which capital is born out of and reinforces. The idea of oneness with nature is not entirely missing from settler critiques of capitalism. It does not, however, take an identical form to Indigenous holist ethics. In the figure of someone like John Muir and the American ideology of preservationism, we see continued thinking in terms of human vs. nature. Settler “oneness with nature” is still abstract — it is merely

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez making a natural reserve, subjectively and objectively. It remains contemplative and lacking practical relationality. Indigenous concepts of oneness take another form by the fact of their concreteness and practical character. This oneness is mundane or everyday, it is not an antithesis of everyday life. Oneness with the rhythm of nature is not a clearing away, but is measured by the rhythm of the everyday. Gregory Cajete (Khaʼpʼoe Ówîngeh) explains this through the example of Indigenous botanical knowledge. Indigenous peoples developed deep experiential knowledge of their local plants, coming to know the essences of botanical characteristics, mechanisms, and needs from their own human perspectives.68 This is labor that understands itself as a metabolism between humans and the rest of nature, a oneness which is participatory. This does not seek to force nature to conform with instrumental mechanical principles or try to cleave apart humanity and nature, but collaborates with nature. This in many ways embodies Marx’s theorization of humans as the consciousness or subjectivity of nature. Marx dismissed the capacity of “animism” for scientific knowledge — and yet this is very much in the same realm as his own explication of science:

“Only when it proceeds from sense-perception in the twofold form both of sensuous consciousness and of sensuous need—that is, only when science proceeds from nature — is it true science.”69

In both Cajete and Marx, the philosophical importance of lived experience — in particular to scientific knowledge — cannot be overstated. Immediate, individual lived experience is mediated through the inheritances of history (through language, symbolism, memories etc), but is still deeply important as the way we exist and perceive. This experience of immediacy is at the heart of the human relation to the world in the everyday. To emphasize the truth of the whole and individual immediacy is not irreconcilable. To recognize the mediated perspective, or the necessity of immediacy in relation to the whole doesn’t negate the reality of lived experience for human subjects.70

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques Marx and Indigenous traditionalists both stand against any kind of philosophy of nature which attacks the everyday oneness represented by the metabolism of man and nature. They oppose any notion of a foundational Being or ontology — a concern with a fundamental or abstract question of what it is “To Be,” any concern to find a metaphysical truth of the “Is” beneath the debris of the things that are. Instead, they speak and act in favor of contingency as the site of oneness. There is oneness in abstraction, there is Being which is Nothing, and there is oneness in manyness, in rhythm, in Becoming. The “ontological difference” of the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger —  between merely incidental and dependent beings and foundational Being — is alien to Indigenous thought. Indigenous thought concerns the being of beings rather than the Being of beings. As Cajete says:

“The Native American paradigm is comprised of and includes ideas of constant motion and flux, existence consisting of energy waves, interrelationships, all things being animate, space/place, renewal, and all things being imbued with spirit[…] The constant flux notion results in a ‘spider web’ network of relationships. In other words, everything is interrelated. If everything is interrelated, then all of creation is related. If human beings are animate and have spirit, then ‘all my relations’ must also be animate and must also have spirit. What Native Americans refer to as ‘spirit’ and energy waves are the same thing.”71

Traditional Indigenous ways of thought are thinking and living in Becoming, not searching for any fundamental experience of Being.72 This informs Indigenous critiques of abstraction or otherworldliness brought by Westerners. That includes otherworldliness which claims to be being-in-the-world but shrinks away in disgust from the mundane — in Heidegger the inauthentic being of das Man (the They) — and excludes it from authentic Being. With Heidegger, we see a Romantic, or even proto-fascist, concept of Being that also informed much of the American settler naturalist movement. This thinking drives one to abstractly become one with nature instead of becoming one through contingency — through

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez forms of labor. It is a fear of engaging with the world as a subject and an object, becoming merely a negative mirror image of the typical bourgeois war of the subject against objects.73 Marx also did not strive towards any such “Being of beings,” and instead concerned himself with the being of beings. Clearly echoing Heraclitus, he spoke of the relation of labor to Becoming—Its transformation of both objective materials and the laborer themselves undermines any appearance of fundamental solidity to either.74 Labor transforms and reproduces the contingency of nature in its metabolism with it. Labor challenges all static, all contemplative certainty of static existence. Labor here is mediation of a oneness with nature, but a contingent and rhythmic oneness. This desire for a static, abstract oneness that we see in settlers and expressed by reactionary critics of bourgeois society must be understood as part of the psychology of the white, Western man spoken of by Luther Standing Bear. Theodor W. Adorno hazarded a diagnosis on the historical basis of this ontological need:

“What I mean is that this peculiar allergy [in the face of beings] which pervades philosophy, but which has probably never been as acute as it is in these ontological philosophies, arises from the memory that our existence depends upon bodily labour and actually lives from such labour. But, in spite of this, up until very recent developments, bodily labour was itself looked down upon as something demeaning or even base. And anything that might recall this distinctive involvement on the part of labour with the level of mere being, with the merely natural, is repressed in the medium of thought. And the priority of what we call mind or spirit over the material world on which it lives and depends is once again consolidated and transfigured through this allergy, which now effectively decrees the absolute purity of all that is mental or spiritual as the domain of true being in contrast with the mere domain of beings.”75

The purification of beings out of Being is a pathology at play, for instance, in the expropriation of Indigenous peoples by National Parks in the name of “protecting nature.” This

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques concept of nature is one of a marble garden instead of a living, breathing, bleeding, eating, laboring dying, birthing oneness. We should emphasize once again that Marx’s concept of nature, despite confluences, is still not identical to Indigenous concepts of nature. He retained a certain anthropocentrism in his implication that human beings are the “end” of nature, while someone like Viola Cordova refuses such teleological reasoning and sees humans as related to all nature, which are also beings.76 Cordova’s approach certainly seems stronger in thinking of a transcendence beyond capitalist civilization. It, in fact, extends from what Marx had begun to realize at the end of his life. Thus, the importance to Marxism of learning from independent Indigenous traditions if it wishes to be living instead of dead.

Within and Against Capital? Inka Garcilaso de la Vega, in his histories of his ancestors, wrote an interesting observation of the role of gold in their world—They did not treat it as state currency, or as money at all. Gold did not function as a tribute, but as a gift valued for its aesthetic and symbolic weight alone.77 For the Inka, gold did not appear as a power unto itself — the quality which incentivizes the demand of tribute in gold. Gold was valued for its “beauty and brilliance” — its use-values —  rather than taking on a form and power as value. It was not money, but ornamentation. This is not a situation where money, or more accurately production, stands as the point of life. Human beings remain at the center of labor — albeit with the Sapa Inka at the center of human beings. This society is quite transparent, easy to understand as a member of it, compared to that of capitalism. Gold, or more accurately, money, holds a thing-like spell for those in bourgeois society. Gold is “superfluous” and “[can] not be eaten,” and considerations of its beauty are secondary to its power in exchange. Money for us is not only a thing that mediates relations between people —  it emerges beyond that and becomes something that mediates between enchanted objects. It becomes like a living thing we have a relationship with, a supernatural being that digs its claws

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez into us and feeds off of us. Our world is one of living commodities before it is a world of living beings. Marx observed of the difference between non-capitalist and capitalist forms of class society:

“The antagonism between the power of landed property, based on personal relations of domination and servitude, and the power of money, which is impersonal, is clearly expressed by the two French proverbs, ‘Nulle terre sans seigneur’, [‘No land without its lord’] and ‘L’argent n’a pas de maltre’ [‘Money has no master’].”78

Capital is an impersonal power — it is a power indifferent to who holds it. Thus, a commoner can rob a bank and use that money as purchasing power while a commoner cannot so easily rob the personal titles or ranks of aristocrats and hold that as their own. Capital is indifferent to particular personality, except as it serves the overall ends of valorization. Capital is also a power over the human beings who create it. It is human, yet inhuman. It appears as having these qualities completely autonomously from the human beings whose activities create it and grant it this power.79 To an outsider from this fundamentally sick mode of production, its participants appear stricken with a disease of the mind and stomach. Here we come back to the concept of Wiindigoo Economics introduced by Winona LaDuke (Mississippi Band Anishinaabeg). This fundamental, insatiable drive to subordinate and devour is that of capital. Its influence on human beings creates personalities in its image, even in the agency and choices of those beings. Even if their conscience cries out, even if they are nagged by a strong sense that what they are doing is wrong, they turn from the face of their God and continue their bloody feast. This is the sickness which drove the barbaric Spanish conquistadores to build the first death camps in history to squeeze as much gold (yellow or white in the form of sugar) from the living beings of the “New World” as they could. This is the power of an instrumental reason.80 It is society made in the image of a machine, something where on a social level there are no living ends but endless means. The end of capital is not an end at all — it is compelled to feed itself with renewal in order to survive,

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques exactly like the Wiindigoo. It is sickness embodied. This is disharmony as a “phantom-like objectivity.”81 Contrast this to the characterization of Taiaiake Alfred (Kanienʼkehá:ka) on Indigenous conceptions of the world as one of living ends-unto-themselves rather than instrumental means:

“Nowhere is the contrast between indigenous and (dominant) Western traditions sharper than in their philosophical approaches to the fundamental issues of power and nature. In indigenous philosophies, power flows from respect for nature and the natural order. In the dominant Western philosophy, power derives from coercion and artifice — in effect, alienation from nature.”82

As Marx already recognized, this qualitative alienation from nature and from human beings as natural beings leads to the “stultifi[cation]” of humans into mere “material force.”83 As qualitatively mere material force, humans and nature alike figure to capital first and foremost as quantities. This rule of abstraction, of quantity, means the domination and extraction from living things in a fundamentally imbalanced and unsustainable way.84 The “natural order,” the manysided matrixes of the relations of all things, appears in capitalist thinking as so many values to extract. This quantification is a consistent theme of critique in Indigenous traditionalism Ohiyesa (Isáŋyathi) expressed such critique in the context of the quantified religion of Christian missionaries in his book From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916). Another Indigenous critic of Euro-bourgeois society, Laura Cornelius Kellogg (Onʌyoteˀa·ká), expressed a direct critique of industrial capitalism. Her influences from both Onʌyoteˀa·ká traditions and the contemporary social-democratic labor movement are very evident:

“Some of the gravest problems in this country today are to be found in the industrial world of the white man. With all his acumen, with all his advantages, with all his training, the great masses of labor (who make the things he wears and the things he eats, and who serve the money despots) are by no means rewarded for their toil or

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez taken care of when they need care, much less have they the leisure or the means or the energy for higher education[…] “The factory system is then at once responsible for some of the biggest problems for the Caucasian mind. Here are some of the evils to which it has given birth: child labor, employed in place of adult employment, with light-running machinery because it is cheaper; industrial accidents, due to large machines without protective appliances, because protection is an item of expense to the employer and the laborer himself is still too ignorant to demand protection before he takes the work that at any moment may take his limb and life; factory regulation and unemployment; unsanitary conditions and long hours — though the last two have been improved by legislation in the past few years, they are by no means above reproach today. Unemployment is the result of the invention of labor-saving machines and the unsettled condition created by differences between labor and capital.”85

Here, Kellogg directly critiques the wage labor indoctrination that many Indigenous peoples were forced through at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. For her, wage labor and “the factory system” are at the heart of the extremely different values and ethics identified by Alfred. Kellogg then goes as far as to identify “communistic” cooperativism and autonomous community economies on such a basis as a means of survival for her nation and others against the real subsumption of capital.86 In this she preceded Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene), who today discusses Indigenous ethics as a “mode of life” apart from Euro-capitalist society, and points to the example of the 1975 Dene Declaration program as also aiming at cooperative societies for autonomy.87 Kellogg and Coulthard both take influence from the nonNative working class movement in the form of socialist critique from within the very heart of capitalist society, while retaining their distinct Indigenous standpoints. Marx in Capital (1867) also identified capitalist and the “factory system” as representing the, real subsumption of capital, and thus its “heart.” The rise of automation does away with handicrafts and disintegrates specialization, realizing the new principle of the specifically capitalist mode of production in its place.88

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques Marx also distinguished between absolute and relative surplus-value as a means of explaining this distinction. In absolute surplus-value extraction, the theft is primarily in terms of quantitative time — the separation between what is the worker’s and what is capital’s is relatively clear. He saw this as the primary form of exploitation taken in formal subsumption of capital, echoing or often taking the form of tribute demand.89 Relative surplus-value extraction, on the other hand, represents a deeper penetration of capital into the production process, a deeper transformation of the worker and of labor. It increases the productivity (for capital, measured by value-quantity) of labor by changing the character of labor — most importantly, through the power of machines in such practices as the “factory system.” It means the quantification of life begins to infect the “root” of the laborprocess itself, and thus we reach what he considers a specifically capitalist way of life.90 Thus, Marx considered his project as one critiquing the capitalist mode of production from within. He was primarily concerned with how proletarians, especially industrial proletarians, can transcend capital from within the real subsumption of capital. Generally, he considered the real subsumption to capital — in his eyes taking the form of universal wage-labor  — to be the main tendency and drive of capital and labor. In his focus on wage-labor, Marx critiqued first and foremost from a Euro-proletarian perspective — he focused on the industrial factory as the core image of capitalist class struggle, despite his historical multilinearism. Yet, Marx was also influenced by the traditions of Indigenous peoples — albeit largely mediated by non-Indigenous authors.91 Although he focused on Western Europe and more specifically England as the form real subsumption to capital (and thus the capitalist mode of production) takes, he did not really consider this the only path taken by either capitalism or its transcendence.92 His elder life’s theory of revolution, disalienation, and communism was influenced by the society and ethics of the Haudenosaunee.93 His later critiques of bureaucracy, of the “first negation” of capitalism being its negative mirror image or still referring to “bourgeois right,” and his characterization of capital as an impersonal power were thus all influenced in some way by his engagements with the Indigenous. He died before he could coalesce these threads more deeply, and so the task for Marxists is to continue that work. In terms of real social movements, that means to learn by listening and leading by obeying.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Marx’s critique of the “factory system” was not intended to exhaust all the ways capital, as an impersonal power, comes to penetrate the world in the capitalist mode of production. His focus was not the “factory system” unto itself. He was first and foremost appreciative of the ways that bourgeois society is haunted. It profanes all of the sacred, and yet is itself still plagued by the figures and characteristics of spirits, phantoms, vampires… In such terms, he famously spoke of it in a famous line of the Communist Manifesto (1848) as akin to the sorcerer’s apprentice.94 This is a society of disharmony, spiritual sickness. The spell cast conjured by human beings now haunts the entire world. It is not merely a spell that has escaped our control — it is a spell which now puts us to work and controls us. For Marx this is the Subject coming to dominate itself, it is not the same as a “primitive” relation to nature as “dominating” the Subject. As a young man in 1842, he in fact connected two forms of fetishism:

“The savages of Cuba regarded gold as a fetish of the Spaniards. They celebrated a feast in its honour, sang in a circle around it and then threw it into the sea. If the Cuban savages had been present at the sitting of the Rhine Province Assembly, would they not have regarded wood as the Rhinelanders’ fetish? But a subsequent sitting would have taught them that the worship of animals is connected with this fetishism, and they would have thrown the hares into the sea in order to save the human beings.”95

Marx’s critique of bourgeois society as having a “second fetishism” is interesting, but limited in his assumption that this “first fetishism” is also an abasement or submission in the same way that submission to the fetish of gold is. This is, once again, a disparaging and unfair concept of “animism” and its relation to nature. For him, the rational engagement of collective humanity — as natural beings — and the rest of nature in a communist society must be very different to this “fetishism.”

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques Yet, this is where Indigenous “animist” views of the hauntedness of bourgeois society are enriching in a way that is lacking in Marx. In language of motion and morphology, Black Elk (Oglála Lakhóta Oyáte) stated of his people’s engagement with bourgeois society:

“You realize that in the sacred hoop we will multiply. You will notice that everything the Indian does is in a circle[…] “Everything now is too square. The sacred hoop is vanishing among the people[…] “Even the birds and their nests are round. You take the bird’s egg and put them in a square nest and the mother bird just won’t stay there. We Indians are relative-like to the birds. Everything tries to be round — the world is round. We Indians have been put here [to be] like the wilds and we cooperate with them[…] “Now the white man has taken away our nest and put us in a box and here they ask us to hatch our children, but we cannot do it. We are vanishing in the box.”96

Black Elk’s morphological thought refers to the rhythms and flows of everyday life. There are those that are harmonic with the way of all living things, and there are those that are disharmonic. A square is machine-like, is rigid and without a smooth, rhythmic flow. It is riven in different directions, it is centrifugal. A circle is a oneness which encompasses all directions in a centripetal force, a harmony. Marx came somewhat close to this in speaking of capital’s disharmonic metabolism with nature, and of the need for human beings to rationally regulate their engagement with nature as natural beings. This, however, is a fuller expression from within an “animistic” standpoint. To become harmonic with the rhythm of all living things does not mean returning to a static natural order, but a rational and balanced intercourse with other beings.97 To become disharmonic harms all living beings in the webs or networks of life, including human beings.98 Marx’s concept of the human subject as the subjectivity of nature is on the way to this Indigenous knowledge — but he lacked a full expression of the independent liveliness of other living beings. Nevertheless, that he recognized and began to follow this thread is important.99

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez It is important not to fall into a one-sided concept of Marx and to dismiss him purely as Western, colonial, and useless for the tasks of decolonization. Indigenous critics like Viola Cordova, Gregory Cajete, Glen Sean Coulthard, Taiaiake Alfred, and Vine Deloria Jr. (Íŋyaŋ Woslál Háŋ) have all expressed the need for dialogue and mutual learning between non-Native and Native ways of thinking and critiquing.100 To aspire to a form of universalism like Marx does not inherently mean a homogenizing universalism. Capital is already a worldwide system aspiring to become a closed totality — it is already a bad unity or bad universal. We cannot escape the fact that the globe exists as a global society in capitalist society. We can, however, aspire to a good or harmonic unity which does not demand a flat homogenization and is premised on free association. As a critic of capitalism, Marx also holds value insofar as his thought is an alternative to fatalism or despair of those deeply infected by the capital-relation. From the European working class, he learned and taught ways within and against capital and pointed the way out and beyond it. Importantly, he spoke of moral indignation against capital as both coming from pre-capitalist sources and from a rational transcendence of capitalism.101 That is, a disharmony against disharmony itself. He also left us lessons which remind us to stay vigilant of how, even within and against capital, proletarians are still themselves of capitalist society and risk projecting this character into visions of communism. He gave very important and insightful warnings on the ways capital can infect our attempts to reach ways of living beyond capitalism — such as through the “factory system” and unchanged capitalist methods of production, through merely “equalizing” a commodity producing system, or by demanding a communism of universal sameness.102 The second is particularly significant insofar as it is something Laura Cornelius Kellogg advocated and something that many traditionalists like Taiaiake Alfred warn against.103 While there is a danger of critiquing too much from within and losing the character of transcendence, there is also a danger of the same consequence coming from an attempt to critique entirely from outside. Georg Lukács said of Ludwig Feuerbach, for instance:

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques “However, if this genesis, this demonstration of the real roots of the concepts, is only the appearance of a genesis, the two basic principles of his world-view, ‘alienated’ man and the dissolution of this ‘alienation’, solidify into rigidly opposed essences. He does not dissolve the one into the other, but rejects the one and affirms (morally) the other. He opposes one ready made reality to another ready-made reality, instead of showing how the one must arise — in the dialectical process — out of the other. His ‘love’ allows the ‘alienated’ reality of man to survive unaltered, just as Kant’s Ought was incapable of changing anything in the structure of his world of being.”104

This total apartness, this total concern with something uninfected, in truth implies a pessimism and complacency with the world as it exists. It is not medicine to treat the sickness —  it is hallucinating from its symptoms. This view encourages fatalism among those who are penetrated to their hearts by the heart of capital, it tells them that if they are not totally of an Ought, then they are doomed to remain what Is. This dichotomy of Is and Ought is also what is evident in many settler attempts to critique settler ways of life. They try to critique from an Ought, and end up purely within the capitalist settler society they disdain the infection of. This Romanticism can take the form of naturalism, false claims by settlers to Indigeneity, and attempts to establish utopian societies apart from capitalist society itself. They are criticizing from an impotent standpoint of Ought in their absolute, abstract condemnation of Is. Indigenous critiques which are just as radically against the bourgeois Is don’t repeat the same patterns of an Is and Ought dichotomy. They come from the perspective of real, existing concrete communities and alternative ways of life. Indigenous traditionalist critiques come from the perspective of grounded normativity in living non- and anti-capitalist alternatives. This is a longstanding, deeply internalized ethic from which they critique, where the workers Marx learned from largely critiqued with an eye to possibilities beyond their Is. Though, of course, as an old man he began to re-evaluate living alternatives in their relation to the revolution from within capital.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Fausto Reinaga (Quechua Aymara) spoke of this Indigenous alternative as already representing an Indigenous socialism to re-capture the spirit of and avoid the risk of reproducing the capitalist Is:

“If in the future of humanity — as the greatest thinkers, politicians and philosophers point out — the commune awaits us (it is the indigenous community!) and its moral forms of government, it is foolish to look for it in that future, still unknown, if we have it as an exhausted experience in our pre-American past. As the duty of every alienated revolutionary is to shorten paths of pain and sadness, in reciprocity to the pain that torments our peoples, that path is shortened by the task of reunion. What happens in the USSR and People’s China, or within the so-called socialist world, serves as an experience and orientation; but we are better served by the experience and orientation of a socialism with more than eight thousand years of validity in our past. “This is shortening paths, it is categorically asserting that it’s true: the future of humanity is to be communitarian, communal, ideally identical to that of our ancient indigenous communities. Socialism is very much ours for being a patient product and elaboration of our stubborn and admirable continental reality. Socialism that was a luminous concrete reality, thousands of years before Marx, Engels and Lenin had been born or even dreamed of. Which is better, to see it in reality or to continue looking for it in the dreams of the Marxist-Leninists? Let us go, then, towards the reunion with our true history!105

Reinaga then spoke of the relation of this living alternative to the modern, Euro-bourgeois world, arguing that:

“The racial struggle precedes the struggle of classes.”106 “Marx, it was not only that he had not studied pre-capitalist society. The slave who ‘is of a different essence than the gentleman’ Westerner, did not deserve his

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques attention. The brilliant ‘Moor’ had not imagined the racial ravages to which capital led in its imperialist stage. Marx had studied in society nothing more than two irreconcilable classes: the exploiting and the exploited. He did not suspect the extremes that white Western civilization would go, with respect to men of another skin color and another color of conscience[…]”107

To some degree, we can agree with Reinaga’s critique — Marx certainly expressed a certain haughty Eurocentrism towards “animism” and other Indigenous ways of living and thinking in multiple instances. He, further, certainly dedicated most of his focus to the “exploiting and exploited” of the capitalist mode of production rather than the “slave.” However, Marx did not understand class struggle as dichotomous. He recognized many classes, even in capitalist society, and in his talk of the famous duality primarily emphasizing the forms of struggle between rulers and producers.108 His dualism of “bourgeois and proletarian” was explicitly meant to refer to capitalist tendencies wrought by capital remaking world.109 Both the bourgeoisie and proletariat are capitalist — capital, in fact, is labor. Reinaga’s struggle of races, rather than an antithesis to class struggle entirely unfamiliar to Marx, can also be understood as a struggle between modes of life. There are two “glues” or forms of coherences, thus morphologies, of society at struggle. This is something of what Marx was getting at in his concept of formal and real subsumption to capital. It is a civilizational struggle, if you like. In the Bolivia of Reinaga’s day, there was certainly a real antithesis of metropolitan or “cholista” official Marxism and Indigenous forms of anti-colonial anti-capitalism. Thus, such an absolute dichotomy was a valid and true expression. In North America, we also have a historical situation which echoes this. Our official Marxism has a history of often being relatively conservative compared to many other countries, in particular in relation to Indigenous traditionalism. For a large part, this is because settler factions have dominated official Marxism. They live in a world, or “civilization,” apart from Indigenous peoples, and bring the baggage of settler subjectivity when they do engage with them. Here, there has been no equivalent for Marxism and

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Indigenous peoples to the concrete investigations and learning-by-listening represented by Marx’s worker’s inquiries.110 When American Marxists even bother to theorize Indigenous issues, they tend to fall flat. They engage from within a separation of Is and Ought, lacking meaningful knowledge about the everyday lives of Indigenous peoples. Thus, their knowledge is contemplative and distorting rather than the practical, participatory knowledge spoken of by Gregory Cajete (Khaʼpʼoe Ówîngeh). In the “golden ages” of American Marxism, in the Haymarket generation and that of American Bolshevism, the proletariat was often directly antagonistic to Indigenous peoples because they represented the encroaching capitalist society. As capitalist labor and capital alike, settler labor acted as a force colonizing and scarring ancestral homelands and Indigenous peoples themselves. This is not to express an anti-proletarian position, but to say that the fact that the proletarian is within capitalism has a practical and historical meaning. Even with the mass proletarianization of Indigenous peoples and the rise of radical PanIndigenism from these urban Natives in the 1960s and 1970s, Marxists still tend to express a direct or indirect repetition of the “virgin soil” myth, or claim that settler-colonialism is irrelevant today. The weakness of this official Marxism should be a warning against treating Marxism as a closed system or a closed totality. Marxism becomes conservative when it loses the character of participatory science, a principle with a similar heart to Cajete’s description of Native science. The North American trope that Marxism is fundamentally incompatible with Indigenous ways of thinking and living, and vice versa, is an infection of the fundamental possibilities of critical theory itself by the current state of things. It is a consequence which must be appreciated as present, but should not limit all possible futures. A practical and theoretical dialogue of Indigenous traditionalism and Marxism is very much possible, and holds fruit for both as distinct bodies. There is a possible alternative approach to the relation of Marxism and Indigenous tradition in the theory and practice of the Partido Liberal Mexicano and Ricardo Flores Magón. They worked significantly with Indigenous communities seeking to reclaim their homelands, and

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques Magón was himself from a Mazatec community. Of the relation between these two forms of critique, Magón pointed out the long tradition of self-governing communalism among both Indigenous Mexicans and mestizos. On the basis of this historical inheritance, which he describes as having become almost an instinct, these working masses whom the PLM worked with had a natural proclivity to what we think of as communist sentiments.111 We can agree here strongly with what Magón traces in the relation of communalism and communism. The two can, and should, recognize similar hearts in each other. Magón worked to trace a relation between the practical critique of capital from within and the struggle against the real subsumption of capital which this activity is within. Both of these movements are at the heart of a revolution in everyday life and the need to transform our way of life entirely. Had Marx followed this thread further, he would have also explicitly recognized the living ethics of a communist society beyond the dead quantification and instrumental reason of bourgeois society. The deep insight Marxists gain by listening to Indigenous peoples cannot be exaggerated — it leads us to think more deeply about how we go outside of and beyond capital from within and against it. Eric R. Wolf, although influential to Marxists coming to appreciate rural revolutions, warned of the inward, community focus of peasant or traditional revolutions. He saw them as, on this basis, limited.112 Some Marxists may use this argument to dismiss the revolutionary potential of Indigenous nations confined to rural reservations. This can be responded to by an opposing argument by Howard Adams (Métis), who emphasized especially that the link between town and country made by the relation of urban and reservation Natives makes for a revolutionary potential:

“Realistically, our decolonization has to be developed through our role as revolutionary people in the present colonial system. No longer are we needed as a labor force to meet the needs of economic development. Indians and Métis, particularly the young, are a potential revolutionary force inside Canada, yet we have not acknowledged the need for the revolutionary organization, ideology, and

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez action that must be developed if we are ever to be free. We are reluctant to tackle the responsibility of revolutionary politics.”113

Even when they are “no longer needed as a labor force to meet the needs of economic development,” or are not primarily labor-as-capital, they are a revolutionary force by their exclusion, by their desire to defend their homelands against capitalist encroachment, and by the fundamental bondage of colonialism to capitalism. A true preservation of traditional, communalist ways of life means an ultimate confrontation with capital. As Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) said, “For Indigenous nations to live, capitalism must die. And for capitalism to die, we must actively participate in the construction of Indigenous alternatives to it.”114 He and Adams alike recognize the need to actively struggle against capital to live Indigenous ethics. Rather than continuing to operate in the dichotomy of the urban working class movement and that of Indigenous autonomy, this points to a need for a coalition of movements, a unity-indifference including where there are personal overlaps between the two. There are lessons for an approach to this in the traditionalist emphasis on many forms of Indigeneity coexisting even within Pan-Indigenous movements, as by Taiaiake Alfred.115 This means an interdependence and cooperation of many projects against capital, not a total homogeneity. Of his own political time, Vine Deloria Jr. (Íŋyaŋ Woslál Háŋ) observed:

“The meaninglessness and alienation discernible in our generation results partially from our allowing time to consume space.The shift in thinking from temporal considerations to spatial considerations may be seen in a number of minimovements by which we are struggling to define American society. Ecology, the new left politics, self-determination of goals by local communities, and citizenship participation all seem to be efforts to recapture a sense of place and a rejection of the traditional American dependence on progress—a temporal concept — as the measure of American identity.”116

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques In his identification of a need for a restoration of a sense of space rather than the quantitative and bourgeois concept of time, Deloria Jr. pointed towards something which Marxists can learn from. He opposed claiming fake Indigeneity, or Pretendians, and deeply resented hippies who treated Indigenous peoples as a Museum of Authenticity. He did, however, advocate that settlers learn from Indigenous ways of thinking and being as a means to realize a new world.117 The universal society, or free engagement of many different peoples, which he sought leads ultimately to Marx’s own concept of communism. In one of his famous, explicit descriptions of communism, Marx described it as a way of life wherein:

“In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”118

This is not a homogenous unity, but a unity premised on the right to difference. The bad unity of bourgeois society means homogenization, even genocidal homogenization. We should think of communism as a universal communalism — the ethic of communal societies realized on a universal scale. It is a community of communities, a gemeinschaft of gemeinschaften—a realized gemeinwesen. It is a universal of many particulars, an open and contingent “humanity” rather than a false universal of “humanity” which marks some as inhuman. Theodor W. Adorno described the very potential for this laying within society in the sense of gesellschaft:

“The very concept of society requires the relations between human beings to be grounded in freedom, even though such freedom has not been realized to this day, which implies that this society, for all its rigidity and predominance, is a kind of deformation.”119

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez This is the demand for a gesellschaft which is of the heart of gemeinschaft, a gemeinwesen. A society of communities, a free association. A society of rhythm and harmony instead of one which lives and moves like a violent, thrashing machine. For this reason, and seeking this transcendence, we ought to oppose those Marxisms which seek totalization. This leads to degeneration, and mere abstract gesellschaft at best. Marx refused this method of work and thought time and time again, and instead learned by listening as through his worker’s inquiries. After all, on the relation of Communists to all workers, he famously refused to coalesce independent movements to the Party or to engage in sectarianism within the working class movement. This means opposition to any homogenous assimilation, any attempt to preclude anything in a single “objective” plan which despotically forgets its source from a subject. While Marx here speaks only of the working class struggling within capital, we must account for and work with resistances other than just industrial proletariat or the smallholder peasants, independent workers, and petit-bourgeoisie whom Marx called for a democratic coalition with. This popular democratic character must be extended and renewed, and this is done through his own principle of “leading by obeying.”

Reviving the World The opportunity for dialogue and relation between the two critiques, that of Marx and that of Indigenous peoples, is a rich one. In following it, we can learn from the many radical Indigenous radicals who have picked up this thread before us—Laura Cornelius Kellogg (Onʌyoteˀa·ká·), Ricardo Flores Magón (Mazatec), Howard Adams (Métis), Nick Estes (Sičhą́ǧu Oyáte), Glenn Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene), Viola Cordova (Jicarilla Dindéi), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg), Melanie K. Yazzie (Bilagáana/Diné), and many others. Both of these critiques have related hearts, even if their regional and social-historical origins are quite different. Both denounce the modern bourgeois world, but not from the standpoint of any bad, alienated unities. They denounce it from the real potential for disalienation and a way of living which is life-affirming.

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques Viola Cordova (Jicarilla Dindéi) spoke of the sacredness of everyday life and everyday people in Indigenous cosmologies:

“Everything that is becomes a part of a whole that we deem ‘sacred.’ We live in other words, in a Sacred Universe[…]”120 “The Native American is admonished to maintain the sacredness of the entire whole. It is difficult to explain that the mundane is actually the sacred. But it is even more difficult to explain how it is that Native Americans, despite the many and continuing attempts to eradicate their belief and value systems, persist in thinking, knowing, that their descriptions are the right ones — for this ‘world.’”121

What this represents is a vision of everyday life which respects its everydayness instead of trying to mythologize it or subordinate it to something it isn’t. It isn’t taking things as they are, passively submitting to them, but working with their rhythm. It is a free association. Karl Marx, for all of those criticisms which disparage him as de-spiritualizing life, said as a young man:

“An animal produces only itself, while man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, while man freely confronts his product. An animal forms things in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, while man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms things in accordance with the laws of beauty.”122

Here we are reminded both of the differences between Marxist and Indigenous traditions and their confluence. Marx here speaks in an anthropocentric tone, but expresses a vision of humanity as returning to the heart of natural rhythms. Both consider humans — and life as a

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez whole — as an open, harmonic totality. Both express a life-affirming and universal relationality against the spell of the impersonal, vampiric power of capital.

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Karl Marx and Indigenous Critiques *Special thanks to the Cosmonaut Magazine editorial team for help in editing this article. The Cosmonaut version of this is available as Nodrada, “Karl Marx and Indigenous Radical Critiques of Capital,” Cosmonaut, February 10, 2023.

Footnotes 1

Russell Means, “The Same Old Song,” in Marxism and Native Americans, ed. Ward Churchill (Boston, Massachusetts: South End Press, 1992), p. 33. 2 Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis, Minnesota; London, United Kingdom: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), p. 13. 3 Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, 3rd ed. (Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 2003), p. 121. 4 Deloria Jr., God is Red, p. 62. 5 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Brooklyn, New York: Zone Books, 1995), p. 98. 6 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, Vol. 1., Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1976), p. 342. 7 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach, Vol. 3., Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981), p. 524. 8 Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, p. 599. 9 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 342. 10 Deloria Jr., God is Red, pp. 171-179; Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle (Lincoln, Nebraska; London, United Kingdom: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), pp. 197-198; Black Elk and John G. Neihardt, The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings given to John G. Neihardt, ed. Raymond J. DeMallie (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), pp. 316-317, 391-393. 11 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis, Minnesota; London, United Kingdom: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), p. 77. 12 Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, 2nd ed. (New York, New York: Vintage Books, 2011), pp. 24, 32-33. 13 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1973). 14 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 1037. 15 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 272-273. 16 John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Brett Clark, “Marx and Slavery,” Monthly Review, 2020, https:// monthlyreview.org/2020/07/01/marx-and-slavery/. 17 Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 18 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, pp. 8-10.

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“Those ancient social organisms of production are much more simple and transparent than those of bourgeois society. But they are founded either on the immaturity of man as an individual, when he has not yet torn himself loose from the umbilical cord of his natural species-connection with other men, or on direct relations of dominance and servitude. “They are conditioned by a low stage of development of the productive powers of labour and correspondingly limited relations between men within the process of creating and reproducing their material life, hence also limited relations between man and nature. “These real limitations are reflected in the ancient worship of nature, and in other elements of tribal religions. The religious reflections of the real world can, in any case, vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man, and man and nature, generally present themselves to him in a transparent and rational form. “The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process, i.e. the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control. This, however, requires that society possess a material foundation, or a series of material conditions of existence, which in their turn are the natural and spontaneous product of a long and tormented historical development.” Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp.172-173. 20 Gregory Cajete, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Clear Light Publishers, 2000), p. 2. 21 Franklin Rosemont, “Karl Marx and the Iroquois,” Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion 1, no. 4 (1989): 201–213. 22 Karl Marx, “The Reply to Vera Zasulich (March 1881),” in Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and “the Peripheries of Capitalism,” ed. Teodor Shanin (New York, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 123–26. 23 Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (London, United Kingdom: Faber and Faber, 1973), p. 292. 24 Deloria Jr., God is Red, pp. 105-107; Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa), From the Deep Woods to Civilization: Chapters in the Autobiography of an Indian (Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown and Company, 1916), pp. 142-143; Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, pp. 198-203; Viola F. Cordova, How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova, ed. Kathleen Dean Moore et al. (Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 2007), pp. 183-185. 25 Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Marx: Early Political Writings, by Karl Marx, ed. and trans. Joseph O’Malley and Richard A. Davis, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 58. 26 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1987), p. 161. 27 Means, “The Same Old Song,” pp. 21, 26. 28 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Includes: Theses on Feuerbach and the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (New York, New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), p. 569. 29 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto (New York, New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 173. 30 “Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism distinguishes itself both from idealism and materialism, constituting at the same time the unifying truth of both. We see also how only naturalism is capable of comprehending the act of world history,” Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, p. 154. 31 Cajete, Native Science, p. 2; Eastman (Ohiyesa), From the Deep Woods to Civilization, p. 141; Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, p. 249; Cordova, How It Is, pp. 54-60. 32 “For a society of commodity producers, whose general social relation of production consists in the fact that they treat their products as commodities, hence as values, and in this material [sachlich] form bring their individual, private labours into relation with each other as homogeneous human labour, Christianity with its religious cult of man in the abstract, more particularly in its bourgeois development, i.e. in Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion.” Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., p. 172. 33 Eastman (Ohiyesa), From the Deep Woods to Civilizatioon, p. 141. 34 Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels in Manchester,” June 18, 1862, Marxists Internet Archive, https:// marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1862/letters/62_07_30a.htm. 35 Richard Levins and Richard C. Lewontin, Biology under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health (New York, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007), pp. 31-35; 59-63. 36 Theodor W. Adorno, “Introduction,” in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, by Theodor W. Adorno et al., ed. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London, United Kingdom: Heinemann Educational Books, 1977), pp. 19-20.

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Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 138-139. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, p. 74. 39 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 163. 40 Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” p. 163. 41 “[…]philosophy is nothing else but religion rendered into thoughts and thinkingly expounded, and that it has therefore likewise to be condemned as another form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man[…]” Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, p. 144. 42 Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, p. 248. 43 Cordova, How It Is, p. 114. 44 Cordova, How It Is, pp. 109-110. 45 Cordova, How It Is, p. 123. 46 Cordova, How It Is, pp. 212-213. 47 Means, “The Same Old Song,” p. 26. 48 Howard Adams, “Marxism and Native Americans – Reviewed by Howard Adams (1984),” M. Gouldhawke (blog), July 25, 2020, mgouldhawke.wordpress.com/2020/07/25/marxism-and-native-americans-reviewed-byhoward-a dams-1984/. 49 John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Marxism and the Dialectics of Ecology,” Monthly Review, October 2016, https://monthlyreview.org/2016/10/01/marxism-and-the-dialectics-of-ecology/. 50 “Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand furnished with natural powers of life — he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities — as impulses. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his impulses exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects of his need — essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers. To say that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being full of natural vigor is to say that he has real, sensuous, objects as the objects of his being or of his life, or that he can only express his life in real, sensuous objects. To be objective, natural and sensuous, and at the same time to have object, nature and sense outside oneself, or oneself to be object, nature and sense for a third party, is one and the same thing. Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to satisfy itself, to be stilled. Hunger is an acknowledged need of my body for an object existing outside it, indispensable to its integration and to the expression of its essential being. The sun is the object of the plant an indispensable object to it, confirming its life — just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life-awakening power of the sun, of the sun’s objective essential power. “A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being, and plays no part in the system of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being. A being which is not itself an object for some third being has no being for its object, i.e., it is not objectively related. Its be-ing is not objective.” Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, pp. 154-155. 51 Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx: Later Political Writings, by Karl Marx, ed. Terrell Carver, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 208–26. 52 Karl Marx, “Speech at Anniversary of the People’s Paper” (Marxists Internet Archive, April 14, 1856), https:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1856/04/14.htm. 53 Means, “The Same Old Song,” pp. 22-23. 54 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 488. 55 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 74-76. 56 Marx, Capital Vol. 1, pp. 133-134, 283-285. 57 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds (Chicago, Illinois: Hau Books, 2015), p. 245 58 Cordova, How It Is, pp. 183-184. 59 Cordova, How It Is, p. 61. 60 Cordova, How It Is, pp. 159-167. 61 Cordova, How It Is, pp. 81-82, 166-170. 38

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Cordova, How It Is, pp. 201-202. Cordova, How It Is, pp. 184-185, 194-197. 64 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 488. 65 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 410. 66 Luther Standing Bear, “Indian Wisdom,” in The Great New Wilderness Debate: An Expansive Collection of Writings Defining Wilderness from John Muir to Gary Snyder, ed. J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1998), p. 201. 67 Winona LaDuke, To Be a Water Protector: The Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers (Black Point, Nova Scotia; Winnipeg, Manitoba: Fernwood Publishing, 2020), p. 83. 68 “Because plants are rooted in the Earth and are intrinsically important to the life of humans, they are prime symbols for the life focus of Native science. Direct experience is the cornerstone of plant knowledge. Through experience, careful observation, and participation with plants, Native people came to possess a deep understanding of plant uses and relationship to humans, animals, and the landscape[…]” “In the intimate relationships with their plants, Native people became sensitive to the fact that each has its own energy. “Coming to know,” or understanding the essence of a plant, derives from intuition, feeling, and relationship, and evolves over extensive experience and participation with green nature. This close relationship also leads to the realization that plants have their own destinies separate from humans, that is, Native people traditionally believed that plants have their own volition. Therefore, Native use of plants for food, medicine, clothing, shelter, art, and transportation, and as ‘spiritual partners,’ was predicated upon establishing both a personal and communal covenant with plants in general and with certain plants in particular[…]” “Through the application of keen intellect, imagination, and a mythological sense of the diverse forms and functions of the plant world, Native cultures have evolved sophisticated ways of plant gathering, gardening, food preparation, and cooking that embody the essence of the participatory nature of Native science.” Cajete, Native Science, pp. 109-111. 69 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, p. 111. 70 Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2006), pp. 20-22. 71 Cajete, Native Science, p. x. 72 Cajete, Native Science, p. 13, 53; Cordova, How It Is, p. 210. 63

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“The first thing we have to do is to discover exactly how we get to this claim that being transcends subjectivity – and I have just drawn your attention to Heidegger’s characterization of being as the transcendens par excellence. He is weary of the subjective prison-house of knowledge into which we have been driven through merely epistemological reflection, and which only obstructs our access to things. This was already implied by Husserl’s watchword ‘to the things themselves’ – something which of course becomes even more obvious and emphatic in Heidegger’s concept of being. There is no intention that the latter should be regarded as anything like an objective thing, for a thing suggests something fixed and solid, something specific and clearly defined. ‘Being’ has the distinctive merit of not being thing-like at all, of not possessing any such substantive or objective determinacy. It is this weariness with the subjective limitations of knowledge, with its mediated character, which leads Heidegger to assure us that what transcends subjectivity is something immediate for subjectivity, something that is not contaminated by conceptuality, by anything that is arbitrarily produced or fabricated by subjectivity, as I pointed out last time.4 Along with romantic trends such as the Youth Movement, fundamental ontology actually feels itself to be anti-romantic. In protest against the limiting and disturbing moment of subjectivity it believes it can ‘overcome’ all this – to use a fatal word expressly deployed by Heidegger himself in his Introduction to Metaphysics (see page 155 of that work). This hideous talk of ‘overcoming’ imagines that the whole cultural and intellectual world consists solely of enemies who somehow have to be confronted directly or indirectly before finally being overcome; that every dark and negative aspect of consciousness, like the so-called phenomenon of nihilism, must be overcome; that the experienced negativity of a thing is already proof that it has no right to exist and must therefore be thought away. It is quite true that this climate of thought is only occasionally betrayed or named as such by Heidegger through this kind of lapsus linguae, but it effectively pervades his entire philosophy. But since subjectivity cannot just think its mediations out of the world, it wishes back levels of consciousness which precede all reflection on subjectivity and mediation. This miscarries. Where Heidegger’s thought turns its back on subjectivity, as it were, hoping to cling directly to things as they show themselves to be, attempting to do material justice to things themselves in a way that seems at once archaic and soberly objective, he removes and withdraws every determination from what is thought – just as Kant once proceeded with the transcendent dimension of his philosophy, namely the thing in itself as the unknown cause of its own appearances,” Theodor W. Adorno, Ontology and Dialectics: Lectures 1960-1961, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Nicholas Walker (Medford, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2019), p. 298. 74 “Objectified labour ceases to exist in a dead state as an external, indifferent form on the substance, because it is itself again posited as a moment of living labour; as a relation of living labour to itself in an objective material, as the objectivity of living labour (as means and end [Objekt]) (the objective conditions of living labour). The transformation of the material by living labour, by the realization of living labour in the material — a transformation which, as purpose, determines labour and is its purposeful activation (a transformation which does not only posit the form as external to the inanimate object, as a mere vanishing image of its material consistency) — thus preserves the material in a definite form, and subjugates the transformation of the material to the purpose of labour. Labour is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time.” Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 360-361. 75 Adorno, Ontology and Dialectics, pp. 69-70. 76 Cordova, How It Is, p. 111. 77 “Since, as everyone knows, the Incas possessed great quantities of gold, silver, and precious stones, it might be thought that it all came to them through compulsory tribute, which was not at all the case. “Nothing could be bought or sold in their kingdom, where there was neither gold nor silver coin, and these metals could not be considered otherwise than as superfluous, since they could not be eaten, nor could one buy anything to eat with them. Indeed, they were esteemed only for their beauty and brilliance, as being suitable for enhancing that of royal palaces, Sun temples and convents for virgins. “The result was that when the Indians brought gold and silver to the Inca, it was not at all by way of tribute, but as a gift, for it would not have occurred to them to pay a visit to a superior without bringing him a present, even if it were only a little basket of fruit, as was often the case.” Garcilaso de la Vega, The Incas, ed. Alain Gheerbrant, trans. Maria Jolas (New York, New York: The Orion press, 1961), p. 162. 78 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., p. 247 n1. 79 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., pp. 165-166. 80 Adorno, History and Freedom, pp. 155-160. 81 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., p. 128. 82 Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness, p. 60. 83 Marx, “Speech at anniversary of the People’s Paper.” 84 Marx, Capital Vol. 1., p. 638.

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Laura Cornelius Kellogg, “Industrial Organization for the Indian (1911),” in Laura Cornelius Kellogg: Our Democracy and the American Indian and Other Works, by Laura Cornelius Kellogg, ed. Kristina Ackley and Cristina Stanciu (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2015), pp. 143-144. 86 Kellogg, “Industrial Organization for the Indian,” pp. 149-152. 87 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, pp. 62-66, 172-173. 88 “It is machines that abolish the role of the handicrafts man as the regulating principle of social production. Thus, on the one hand, the technical reason for the lifelong attachment of the worker to a partial function is swept away. On the other hand, the barriers placed in the way of the domination of capital by this same regulating principle now also fall.” Marx, Capital Vol. 1., p. 491. 89 Marx, Capital Vol. 1., pp. 344-345. 90 Marx, Capital Vol. 1., pp. 347-348. 91 John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Marx and the Indigenous,” Monthly Review, February 2020, monthlyreview.org/2020/02/01/marx-and-the-indigenous/. 92 Karl Marx, “Letter from Marx to Editor of the Otecestvenniye Zapisky [Notes on the Fatherland],” 1877, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm. 93 Rosemont, “Karl Marx and the Iroquois,” pp. 211-213. 94 “Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 214. 95 Karl Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” October 1842, Wikirouge, https:// marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1842/10/25.htm. 96 Black Elk, The Sixth Grandfather, pp. 290-291. 97 Cordova, How It Is, p. 70. 98 Cajete, Native Science, pp. 174-175. 99 John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Marx and Alienated Speciesism,” Monthly Review, December 1, 2018, monthlyreview.org/2018/12/01/marx-and-alienated-speciesism/. 100 Cordova, How It Is, pp. 1-4; Cajete, Native Science, pp. 7-9; Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, pp. 7-9; Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness, p. 28; Deloria Jr., God is Red, pp. 72-75. 101 Marx, Capital Vol. 1, pp. 415-416. 102 Marx, Capital Vol. 3, p. 511; Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” pp. 208-209; Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Paris, France: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), pp. 67-70; Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, pp. 100-101. 103 Kellogg, “Industrial Organization for the Indian,” p. 152; Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness, pp. 114-118. 104 Georg Lukács, “Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics,” in Tactics and Ethics, 1919-1929: The Questions of Parliamentarianism and Other Essays, by Georg Lukács, trans. Michael McColgan (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2014), p. 209. 105 Fausto Reinaga, La Revolución India, 4th ed. (La Paz, Bolivia: Movimiento Indianista Katarista, 2010), p. 16. 106 Reinaga, La Revolución India, p. 109. 107 Reinaga, La Revolución India, p. 122. 108 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, pp. 209-210. 109 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, pp. 215-220; Marx, Capital Vol. 1, pp. 799-800. 110 Hilde Weiss, “Die ‘Enquête Ouvrière’ von Karl Marx (1936),” trans. Zurowski (Notes From Below, July 9, 2022), https://notesfrombelow.org/article/hilde-weiss-die-enquete-ouvriere-von-karl-marx-193.

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“Four million Indians live in Mexico who, until twenty or twenty-five years ago, lived in communities possessing the lands, the waters, and the forests in common. Mutual aid was the rule in these communities, in which authority was felt only when the tax collector appeared periodically or when ‘recruiters’ showed up in search of men to force into the army. In these communities there were no judges, mayors, jailers, in fact no bothersome people at all of this type. “Everyone had the right to the land, to the water to irrigate it, to the forests for firewood, and to the wood from the forests for the construction of small houses. The plows passed from hand to hand, as did yokes of oxen. Each family worked as much land as they thought was sufficient to produce what was necessary, and the work of weeding and harvesting was done in common by the entire community — today, Pedro’s harvest, tomorrow Juan’s, and so on. Everyone in the community put their hands to work when a house was to be raised. “As regards the mestizo population which is the majority of the people of Mexico — with the exception of those who inhabited the great cities and large towns — they held the forests, lands, and bodies of water in common, just as the indigenous peoples did. Mutual aid was also the rule; they built their houses together; money was unnecessary, because they bartered what they made or grew. “But with the coming of peace, authority grew, and the political and financial bandits shamelessly stole the lands, forests, and bodies of water; they stole everything. Not even twenty years ago one could see in opposition newspapers that the North American X, the German Y, or the Spaniard Z had enveloped an entire population within the limits of ‘his’ property, with the aid of the Mexican authorities. “We see, then, that the Mexican people are suited for communism, because they’ve practiced it, at least in part, for many centuries; and this explains why, even when the majority are illiterate, they comprehend that rather than take part in electoral farces that elect thugs, it’s better to take possession of the lands — and this taking is what scandalizes the thieving bourgeoisie,” Ricardo Flores Magón, “El Pueblo Mexicano es Apto para el Comunismo,” Regeneración, September 2, 1911, 4a época 1910-1918, Archivo Digital de Ricardo Flores Magón. 112 Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, pp. 294-295. 113 Howard Adams, Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View, 2nd ed. (Saskatoon, Canada: Fifth House Books, 1989), p. 180. 114 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, p. 173. 115 Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness, p. 88. 116 Deloria Jr., God is Red, pp. 72-73. 117 Deloria Jr., God is Red, pp. 74-76. 118 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 231. 119 Adorno, Ontology and Dialectics, p. 209. 120 Cordova, How It Is, p. 230. 121 Cordova, How It Is, pp. 231-232. 122 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, p. 77.

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New Unity

Building a new society demands beginning somewhere, and that means somewhere still within the dominant society. Some choose to push themselves even harder into the dominant society’s values, to outpace it. Perhaps they claim “patriotic socialism.” Others refuse the dominant society’s values and search for a system of values of their own. They desire to become something otherwise. ‘Minority’ nationalisms, the nationalisms of the colonized, should not be thought of as one-dimensional foils to “patriotic socialism.” Their relationship to communist revolution in the U. S. is much more tangled, stretching out from a knot into multifarious directions. The duty of dominant-nation workers—the ‘full citizens,’ in this case those considered white—is clearer. As the Bolshevik Vladimir Lenin declared on behalf of the Communist International, “the duty of rendering the most active assistance rests primarily with the workers of the country the backward nation is colonially or financially dependent on.”1 The internationalist duty of white workers is to refuse their whiteness, their white particularity, in favor of the universality of the proletariat (the dispossessed). Whiteness is an identity of possessors, a class-collaborationist social form. The proletariat is the identity of the dispossessed—the non-identity of capitalist society. For those of us who are ‘minorities,’ our tasks are messier. We can take certain lessons from our predecessors as guidance. If we are oppressed as distinct peoples, we must respond as distinct peoples. But our response as distinct peoples are always still within the presently existing world, which arranges us into white and non-white, Westerner and non-Westerner, citizen and non-citizen, etc. Lenin’s formula is helpful in thinking of this:

New Unity

“Victorious socialism must achieve complete democracy and, consequently, not only bring about the complete equality of nations, but also give effect to the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, i.e., the right to free political secession.”2

The self-emancipation of nations, of “the people” (population) of oppressed nations is part of the struggle for democracy. “The people” are the subject of democracy. Therefore, where peoples—as distinct peoples—are excluded from citizenship (whether de jure or de facto, as second-class citizens) in a nation, then they must pursue their own self-determination as a means to more radically realize democracy. But the demands of the globalized capitalist world demand that any radical movement extend beyond democracy. Struggles for universal enfranchisement, popular rights, and self-determination of themselves lead to a revolutionary thread beyond democracy:

“Of course, democracy is also a form of state which must disappear when the state disappears, but this will take place only in the process of transition from completely victorious and consolidated socialism to complete communism.”

Socialism, or the primary stage of communism, is still a struggle within and against bourgeois society. Thus it is democratic. It is a struggle for the self-governance of “the people.” It is communism relative to capitalism, and so still struggles against capitalism in ways marked by it. Even in a socialist struggle, the oppressed find themselves struggling on a national terrain (or, struggling as distinct peoples whose coherence as groups emerges from the modality of their colonization—Black, Indigenous, Chican@, etc.) but refuse “the historical obligation to racialize their claims[...]”3

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez For to do so would leave them fully within the old imperial bourgeois melting-pot, or perhaps the more ‘inclusive’ bread basket. A race cannot be sovereign. A race is either a dominator or dominated. The task of communist decolonization is to destroy racialization, and to transcend the nation as a form by means of national liberation itself. Worded differently, the nation is a form which decolonization takes up, but in order for decolonization to be completely successful, it must birth forms of association far beyond the nation. The slogan of “Land Back” rings with undeniable historical truth. It is a great strength that, today, the tasks of decolonization are now grouped under such a blunt, clear declaration. But “Land Back” is still only an open signifier, and it opens the necessity to think through what the decolonization of American space will look like. Indigenous national self-determinations do not emerge in isolation. The United States is, after all, a “prison of peoples.”4 Any project of decolonization must think through the entire field or matrix of colonized peoples and oppositional movements. At the forefront of this opposition within U. S. history has been Black radicalism. The U. S. empire was built on the backs of enslaved Black laborers. Slavery, expropriation, genocide, and dispossession are all foundational to America. Historically, Black nationalism emerged as a response to this racialized colonialism. From the very outset, self-conscious Black nationalism formulated itself in internationalist terms. The revolutionary abolitionist David Walker declared the need for Black autonomy against Americanism in his 1829 Appeal for a slave social revolution:

“Our sufferings will come to an end, in spite of all the Americans this side of eternity. Then we will want all the learning and talents among ourselves, and perhaps more, to govern ourselves.—’Every dog must have its day,’ the American’s is coming to an end.”5

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New Unity In his eyes, this position of Black people aligned them directly with all of the oppressed people of the world—prime among them, his “beloved brethren” in “[t]he Indians of North and South America.”6 Thus, Walker made himself part of a long history of Black radical internationalism. This history stretches deep into the historical ties of Black resistance and Indigenous sovereignty—a thread which coalesces into what we today think of as decoloniality. In modern Black nationalism, such as the proposition for a Republic of New Afrika, nationalists consider the ties of Black nationalism and Indigenous nationalism to be extremely important. They emphasize their respect for Indigenous sovereignty and desire to work with Indigenous nations in formulating some kind of a territory-sharing system.7 They draw inspiration from the history of collaboration and kinship between Black slaves and Indigenous peoples, particularly in the maroon communities of the North American southeast.8 Black slaves and Indigenous peoples would often form communities together, developing forms of common territorial-spatial autonomy and means of resistance against EuroAmerican settler-colonization.9 Such resistant kin-making extended throughout the Americas, including maroon communities and other forms such as the quilombos of Brazil.10 The insight offered by the Afro-feminist Beatriz Nascimento, discussing the Brazilian context, is useful for thinking through Black nationalist sentiment’s historical continuity with slave resistance more broadly:

“We propose that while the quilombo officially came to an end with Abolition, no longer had the same name, and did not suffer the same type of repression, it persisted as a resource for resistance and confrontation with official, established society. Black people and others continue to be oppressed in favelas and in the urban peripheries, thanks to the marginalization of labor and racial marginalization. Quilombo, transformed, endures. One proof is that in Rio de Janeiro the geographical areas of former quilombos, such as Catumbi (one of the largest), Lebron, Corcovado, and others, have transformed into favelas. They survive, though physically transformed, into our own time.”

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Black specificity rendered by racialized chattel slavery continued well after abolition. Thus, the claim for Black people’s autonomy as a distinct people. Despite abolition taking a far more radical form in the U. S. than in Brazil, a similar pattern emerged here—particularly after the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Instead of becoming settler-citizens, Black people found themselves branded as second-class ‘citizens,’ spatially and socially segregated as a distinct group, and treated as a despised and inconvenient race. Malcolm X bluntly summarized the situation: “So we're all black people, so-called Negroes, second class' citizens, ex-slaves. You're nothing but. an ex-slave.”11 The brands of colonization still sear hot. This branding continues to today, even if in a new arrangement of a basically (neo-)colonial society. Consciousness of this situation leads some Black people to respond, up to today, in nationalist terms. An especially radical formulation of this nationalism was offered by the New Afrikan People’s Organization (NAPO) in 1984:

“We call for the establishment of an independent Republic of New Afrika in the territory now known as the states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana and on any neighboring Black Belt land our Nation needs and to which it is entitled, subject to and in solidarity with the just claims asserted by Native American Indian Nations for Sovereignty over land in the New Afrikan Black Belt area.”12

This is a spatial-territorial response to a spatial-territorial domination. But when we are imaging a new association, a new unity, this proposition becomes more problematic. The NAPO’s land claims necessarily overlap with those of Indigenous nations across the South— though they try to acknowledge this, they do not acknowledge just how pervasive the overlap is. The Black Belt is directly within Indigenous homelands because racialized chattel slavery was a fundamentally settler-colonial endeavor.

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New Unity Further, since the Great Migration, this national-territorial spatialization of claims becomes more complex. Though Black people are still overwhelmingly concentrated in the Black Belt, today there are significant Black communities across the entire U. S. Their concerns must also be addressed in a way which is primary to any formulation of decolonization rather than an addendum to a nation-state’s security, territory, and population. This is without even getting into the issue of Black diasporic peoples, who made major contributions to the history of Black liberation (i.e. Marcus Garvey, Claudia Jones, Claude McKay, C. L. R. James, Kwame Ture). The pitfalls of national consciousness have very practical consequences visible in the history of Black autonomy in the Americas. Maroon communities, for example, wouldn’t always have seen Indigenous peoples as natural allies against the U. S., nor would they even offer unconditional support to other fugitive slaves in all cases. Often, they collaborated with imperial powers to maintain their particular community sovereignty, even if at the expense of others.13 This isn’t to say that those communities were puppets or traitors (they would not have had such a broad sense of a “Black nation”), but that there is a need for internationalism and internationalist foreign policy. For this reason, we must exercise caution against the nation-state form—it introduces the dynamics of bourgeois class society into whatever autonomous movements attempt to wield it as a tool.14 Therefore, Lenin’s earlier advice is important, but we must take it further. After all, it is exactly the system based on an association of nation-states system in the Soviet Union which played a major part in facilitating the collapse of the Union.15 Instead, the democratic demands he posited must be a revolution extending beyond the nation-state in the very course of struggle. We can work through this by means of another example of ‘minority’ nationalism, with direct logical-historical means of transcending its own nationalism.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Chicanism@ has become quite controversial in the 21st century—both in spite of and because of its origins. Chican@ emerged into the. Mainstream as a political identification in the mid-20th century. The term was specifically used in opposition to the white assimilationism embedded in the identities of hispano, latino, and Mexican-American.16 Chican@s refused Anglo-bourgeois respectability and embraced their stand as proletarians. The name “Chican@“ itself originates from mocking stereotypes of Mexicano working class dialect.17 During the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, radicals took Chicanism@ as having a more or less unproblematic relationship to other forms of decoloniality. It was common to pair the slogans of Black Power, Red Power, Brown Power, and Yellow Power.18 The radical edge of this decolonial moment coalesced quite unanimously around this understanding. In California, the Indigenous radical movement and Chican@ movement were extremely closely tied, manifesting in such events as the joint founding of the D-Q University in Davis, California.19 But with the Chican@ Movement generation also emerged an imported discourse in the form of aztlanism@, bound up deeply with Mexican nationalist mestizaje ([race] mixing).20 After its 1910-1917 Revolution, the Mexican Republic had embraced a new form of mestizaje which elevated the mestizo (mixed-race) as the racial embodiment of the nation. La raza mexicana was identical to the mestizo.21 Some nationalist intellectuals like José Vasconcelos identified the mestizo as a master race (or a raza cósmica, cosmic race), synthesizing the strongest of the imperial Mexica and the imperial Spanish.22 To him, the two civilizations which could be claimed as the true ancestors of la raza cósmica were the Aztecs (more accurately, the Mexica military leaders of Excan Tlahtoloyan) and the Spanish. He thereby consciously refused the role of Africans, non-Nahua Indigenous peoples, Asians, Jews, and even living Indigenous peoples in the destiny of la raza cósmica. Just as the Mexican state had done since its foundation, Vasoncelos appropriated a mythic icon of the Aztecs as a weapon against actual, living Indigenous peoples. Mestizo Mexico was the descendant of the Aztecs, brought to a higher plane, and so the fate of Indigenous peoples was either to assimilate into that higher civilization or to be made to disappear.

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New Unity Vasconcelos played a disconcertingly major part in the development of the new nationalism, as the Secretary of Education for the Mexican post-Revolutionary state.23 That a Nazi collaborator played such a major part in the development of modern Mexican nationalism is damning.24 But it is important to caution against generalizing this fascist philosophy to the entire new mestizo moment. Not everyone shared his sense of la raza cósmica, particularly not the Communist-dominated groups of muralists who he promoted as Secretary.25 The signifier of lo mestizo was the subject of the new national project, but it was still an open signifier. The Communist Party, which made a significant presence for itself in the new national education system, also put itself at the forefront of recognizing the rebellion and resistance of Black enslaved people in the history of freedom.26 The Communist sense of lo mestizo, though still limited in its modernism, should not be foreclosed under the sins of Vasconcelos. The same extends to thinking about the extension of this mestizaje discourse into the United States, pervading the Chican@ movement. While the Mexican Republic claimed the Aztec state as its forefathers, the Chican@s adapted this claim for their own place as a people concentrated in the U. S. Southwest. They claimed that the region was Aztlán, the mythical homeland of the Mexica.27 They identified themselves as the descendants of the Mexica and a people destined to reclaim their ancient homeland. Like the Mexican state itself, they reinterpreted concepts from a foreign cosmology to fit the terms of the modern, bourgeois system of nation-states.28 For the Mexica, the story of Aztlán held significance for their position as outsiders in Anahuac, coming from beyond the old system to rebuild the mythic ordered society of the Toltec culture.29 For Chican@s, it represented their claim against U. S. colonization, which had dispossessed them and rendered them secondclass citizens—if even that. But this aztlanist@ nationalism, implicitly or explicitly, was a racialization of their claims. It was merely responding to coloniality with coloniality. The aztlanist@s offered a stale, taxidermied myth based on a historically ungrounded claim—most Chican@s’ Indigenous ancestry was not Nahua, much less Mexica in particular. Their nostalgia and desire for a return to some pure original truth could only make sense from a fundamentally colonized perspective.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Aztlanism@ expressed a conservative tendency immanent within Chicanism@. The implicit replication of the raza cósmica discourse introduced a discursive racism against Black and Indigenous peoples, as well as other peoples originating from Latin America.30 The myths of Aztlán and Greater Mexico obscured the ties of diaspora, transborder kinship, and migration which form a genuine means for decolonial proletarian internationalism. If we Chican@s are the descendants of the noble Mexica and the savage Spanish rapists alone, then we cannot be the descendants or kin of Black people or of non-mythologized nations.31 Afro-Chican@s and genuinely Indigenous Chican@s are obscured, and the extension of our relations with Black and Indigenous peoples in general are blocked by a fidelity to this racial myth. Over the course of the Chican@ movement, aztlanism@ revealed itself to be a force of integration into the dominant society just as latinidad and hispanidad had already done. The mythic, colonized consciousness could easily be pandered to by the neo-colonial ‘bread basket’ society. Why not? Everyone gets their representation. A few days out of the year, or perhaps just localized year round in the shittier neighborhoods, why not have the capitalists open up a space for Chican@ workers and students to act out their little roleplay? After all, it's not as if this kind of “playing Indian” is foreign to Euro-Americans. The aztlanist@ falls right alongside all other forms of assimilationist representation, right in its own happy place on the supermarket shelves, the clothing stores, the streaming services… Aztlanism@ is not fundamentally a radical claim against the U. S. Decolonization is, and decolonization means working through real, living networks of kinship. That work demands dropping colonial myths. The mirage of Aztlán stands in the way of a real understanding of our relationships, as Chican@s, with Indigenous peoples. Attempting to claim the Mexica in the mythic way of the Mexican state impedes any decolonial internationalism.32 We are distinct in being without a nation, not even the Mexican nation, and yet an identifiable people. From a communist perspective, this should be an opportunity and not an impediment. I am against aztlanism@, but I believe it is legitimate to consider our movements for self-determination as Chican@s to act in the realm of decolonization, alongside Black and Indigenous peoples.33 I follow Zapatista spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos in saying:

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New Unity “The Chicano is not a Mexican on the other side, he's a Chicano. It's another form of identity. Just as the identity of the indigenous, the punk, of young people, of women is different. They constructed a cultural and political identity with their own demands. So, they claimed to be part of the struggle in Mexico, because they feel part of Mexico, not international.”34

The internationalist tendency of Chicanism@ is threaded with the decolonial tendency. It does not simply refuse this aforementioned focus on Mexico, but transcends it. Yet this transcendence must be understood as an ongoing project. Those of us who are mestizos—in the broad sense—are prime for decolonization. We need to be decolonized, and we have greater potential for this than Euro-Americans. We are not entirely settler-citizens or European in either descent or culture. To characterize us as such obscures the real morphology of Mexican settlercolonialism. Both New Spain and the Mexican Republic directly encouraged Indigenous and Black participation in the settler-colonization of the North and South as a means of “civilizing” them, the land, and local indios bárbaros.35 We Chican@s embody real, living (though typically unconscious) connections with Indigenous peoples through our history, kinship, culture, and struggles.36 But to de-settlerize our relations, to decolonize ourselves, means to take on the responsibility of re-Indigenization. We can only address this responsibility with respect and deference to those who have maintained their Indigeneity. Aztlanism@ and other recycled authenticity delusions impede the labor of this. Our re-Indigenization cannot only mean refusing Anglification, but refusing hispanidad and mestizaje. We mestiz@s have suffered a real loss. The practice of “playing Indian” is a bad habit meant to compensate for that, not unlike abusing opioids. The loss cannot be recovered by trying to return to an original state—the very notion of the original is a notion from the perspective of one who has already been divorced from the thing. The Maya K’iche’ activist Rigoberta Menchú gives us an insightful analysis of our situation as mestiz@s:

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez “We discovered that indigenous peoples have always contributed valuable things to society through their labour and culture, their art and medicine, their wisdom and patience. They have contributed their own blood and pain to build the so-called democracies, a contribution that has never been recognised. On the contrary, a good number of our mestizo children have been denied participation in our ancient culture, and have been made to feel ashamed of the earth which bore them and of their roots.”37

It is exactly our alienation from nature in the Americas, our being without any particular home which expresses itself in our hostility to Indigeneity—in other words, our only being citizens of mestizo nation-states or second-class citizens of Euro-American nation-states. To become re-indigenized, we cannot merely appropriate. We must restore our relations with the earth, with other peoples, and rebuild our homeliness—which we can only do through labor, the labor of learning our real histories, our buried and living kinships alike. One of the greatest historical models of an ‘Indigenous mestizo’ was Emiliano Zapata, who gave his life defending the lands of Indigenous toilers. To re-Indigenize is to become like the Métis, a people with a kinship relation to other Indigenous nations. It does not mean the establishment of a nation-state, because the nationalstate form of sovereignty is directly hostile to Indigenous forms of autonomy.38 Indigenous autonomy is not an edifice of bourgeois representation, law, and citizenship, but something which transcends it by means of kinship. Aztlanism@ leaves this process dead on the vine. Indigenous spatial autonomy is not a static security, territory, and population. Rather, Indigenous autonomy today already has traces of revolutionary internationalism in the very centrality of kinship itself.39 Only by working through the real and potential networks of kinship in this colonial world can we build a fundamentally new, decolonized world. The Black Panther James Yaki Sayles began to work in this direction, though he was not able elaborate himself fully by the time of his death in 2008. His notes, however, point towards a sense of Union beyond a mere federation of “peoples,” beyond a nation-state:

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New Unity “[...]tho the nation is a new unity…and because of the racialized character of much of contemporary national liberation/social revolutionary struggles, it must be said that the new unity is not racial. It's not about uniting only with those who look like you, but it's a matter of uniting with those who think like you and who want what you want…who're willing to put their lives on the line while fighting to realize the new world[...] “i can't limit my responsibility to, say, five of the states within present U. S. borders. The Nation is all of us; it's wherever We are. And, our new concept of the nation (and nationalism) must be linked to the reshaping of our ideas about the world. The world is and must be understood as our ‘village’…We need a ‘world-nation’… a new unity on an inter-nation(al) scale…”40

The New Unity, the new association, is something we build from out of our very ties of dependency and domination themselves. We must refuse bourgeois nationalism, but work through the colonial formation of social categories like Black, Indian, and Chican@. We can find a powerful inspiration for how to conduct this radical democratic struggle in the form of the Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST). The MST engages with the law of the Brazilian state, specifically the promise of the Brazilian constitution that land must be used for the needs of society, but its exercise of autonomy exceeds the state and representation. It unites Black and Indigenous peoples, employed and unemployed, men, women, and others to fight for a new form of association, articulated through but not within the laws of the state. In the U. S., we similarly engage with 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to formulate liberation, but we must go far beyond Civil Rights into decolonial autonomy. This would mean building autonomous centers of resistance now. Self-supporting communities, mutual aid networks, labor unions, tenant unions neighborhood associations, housing cooperatives, cooperative firms. But to become the seeds of a self-governing society, this demands association and distribution beyond firms and other narrow localities. Thus, the need for a commune or communal forms of association across these organizations. This goes hand in hand with building the Communist Party, the united autonomous revolutionary association against the present state of things.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Marx said in 1875:

“Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of one into the other. There is also correspondingly a period of political transition, in which the state can be nothing else but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”41

This state is only a commune-state, a semi-state, a state which is no longer projected above society as its representative. It is a ‘state’ with its basic organs in the sites of everyday life —the workplaces, the farms, the neighborhoods…. It is no longer a ‘state’ based on citizens or subjects. It is a weapon of revolution against the old society, and nothing else. But for a colonial situation, this state must also be a weapon against settlerism, a weapon for decolonization. It must be part and parcel with decolonial forms of autonomy. This state must be a weapon for an association of “peoples” before we can realize a free association of Unique individualities. But this struggle must be to liberate our relations with each other, so that each may be kin with all. De-settlerization aims at this, and not at calling up moral debts. It is a revolutionary struggle, but a struggle to open up a new world. It is the decolonial negation of the colonial negation.

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New Unity Footnotes 1 Vladimir

Ilyich Lenin, “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions for The Second Congress Of The Communist International,” trans. Julius Katzer, June 5, 1920, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/ archive/lenin/works/1920/jun/05.htm. 2 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination (Theses),” February 1916, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jan/x01.htm. 3 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 152 4 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” October 1915, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/oct/16.htm. 5 David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, ... (Boston, 1830), ed. Paul Royster, Zea E-Books in American Studies 15 (Lincoln, Nebraska: Zea E-Books, 1830), p. 18. 6 Walker, Appeal, p. 9. 7 Edward Onaci, Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), pp. 76-78. 8 Onaci, Free the Land, pp. 192-193. 9 Akinyele Omowale Umoja, “Settler-Colonialism and the New Afrikan Liberation Struggle,” in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, ed. Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope (London, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 3-5. 10 Alvin O. Thompson, Flight to Freedom: African Runaways And Maroons in the Americas (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2006), pp. 122-124; Willy Green, “Self-Determination and African National Liberation in the U. S.A.,” Soulbook 10 (1975): pp. 34-39; Beatriz Nascimento, “‘Quilombos’: Social Change or Conservatism?,” in The Dialectic Is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento, by Beatriz Nascimento, ed. Christen Smith, Bethânia Gomes, and Archie Davies, trans. Christen Smith and Archie Davies (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2023), pp. 183-185. 11 Malcolm X, “Message to the Grass Roots,” in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, by Malcolm X, ed. George Breitman (New York, New York: Grove Press, 1994), p. 4. 12 New Afrikan People’s Organization, “Principles & Programme of the New Afrikan People's Organization,” 1984, pp. 1-2, https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/NAPO/ 513.NAPO.NewAfrikanDec.pdf 13 Thompson, Flight to Freedom, pp. 99-103. 14 “Instead of being the coordinated crystallization of the people’s innermost aspirations, instead of being the most tangible, immediate product of popular mobilization, national consciousness is nothing but a crude, empty, fragile shell. The cracks in it explain how easy it is for young independent countries to switch back from nation to ethnic group and from state to tribe—a regression which is so terribly detrimental and prejudicial to the development of the nation and national unity. As we shall see, such shortcomings and dangers derive historically from the incapacity of the national bourgeoisie in underdeveloped countries to rationalize popular praxis, in other words their incapacity to attribute it any reason,” Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 97-98; Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (New York, New York: Verso Books, 1991), pp. 173-176; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 1998). 15 Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States, 2nd ed. (New York, New York; London, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 525-529. 16 Ramón A. Gutiérrez, “What’s in a Name?: The History and Politics of Hispanic and Latino Panethnicities,” in The New Latino Studies Reader: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective, ed. Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Tomás Almaguer (Berkeley, California; Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2016), 19–53. 17 Edward R. Simmen and Richard F. Bauerle, “Chicano: Origin and Meaning,” American Speech 44, no. 3 (August 1969): 225–30, https://doi.org/10.2307/454588.

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See, for example, the Third World Liberation Front at the University of California–Berkeley, which played a major part in the emergence of American Ethnic Studies. Karen Grisby Bates and Shereen Marisol Meraji, “The Student Strike That Changed Higher Ed Forever,” National Public Radio, March 21, 2019, https://www.npr.org/ sections/codeswitch/2019/03/21/704930088/the-student-strike-that-changed-higher-ed-forever. 19 Joshua Frank-Cardenas, “The Rise and Fall of D-Q University: Foundations” 31, no. 2 (November 8, 2019), https://tribalcollegejournal.org/the-rise-and-fall-of-d-q-university-foundations/. 20 María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (Durham, North Carolina; London, United Kingdom: Duke University Press, 2016), pp. 200-203. 21 It is important to note that the slogan and identification “la raza,” used by many in the U. S., does not necessarily trace back to this origin. La raza is an incredibly open signifier, being bound variously to la raza hispana, la raza latina, la raza mexicana, la raza mestiza, la raza cósmica, and others—with manifold interpretations of each. It inherently implies a condition of racialization, but is not necessarily racist in the way some of its detractors assume. In the U. S., la raza historically signified an identification of distinct common interests against Anglo racism. Gutiérrez, “What’s in a Name?,” pp. 9-10; Gabriela Gonzáles, Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp.192-194; Elliott Young, “Deconstructing ‘La Raza’: Identifying the Gente Decente of Laredo, 1904-1911,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 98, no. 2 (October 1994): pp. 234-238. 22 Vasconcelos was even more of a deranged Nazi than some of his critics realize—he claimed that the Mexica and Inka were only the remnants of a greater, “Atlantic” civilization. José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Didier T. Jaén (Baltimore, Maryland; London, United Kingdom: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 7-9. 23 Gilbert M. Joseph and Jürgen Buchenau, Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution: Social Upheaval and the Challenges of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 106-108. 24 Itzhak Bar-Lewaw, “La Revista ‘Timón’ y La Colaboración Nazi de José Vasconcelos,” in Actas del cuarto Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas, ed. Eugenio Bustos Tovar, vol. 1 (Salamanca, Spain: Prensa Universidad de Salamanca, 1982), 151–56; Héctor Orestes Aguilar, “Ese olvidado nazi mexicano de nombre José Vasconcelos,” Istor: Revista de Historia Internacional 8, no. 30 (2007): 148–57; Miriam Jerade Dana, “Antisemitismo en Vasconcelos: antiamericanismo, nacionalismo y misticismo estético,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 31, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 248–86. 25 Joseph and Buchenau, Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution, pp. 109-112. 26 Mary K. Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930-1940 (Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1997), pp. 68-69; Theodore W. Cohen, Finding Afro-Mexico: Race and Nation after the Revolution (Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 56-65. 27 Rodolfo Gonzales, “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” El Grito Del Norte, July 6, 1969, International Center for the Arts of the Americas. 28 Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández, Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U. S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham, North Carolina; London, United Kingdom: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 103-105. 29 Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 26-29. 30 Agustín Palacios, “Multicultural Vasconcelos: The Optimistic, and at Times Willful, Misreading of La Raza Cósmica,” Latino Studies 15 (November 2017): 416–38, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-017-0095-6; Russell Contreras, “AP Explains: Why Term ‘La Raza’ Has Complicated Roots in US,” Seattle Times, July 12, 2017, https:// www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/ap-explains-term-la-raza-has-complicated-roots-in-us/. 31 Lourdes Alberto, “Nations, Nationalisms, and Indígenas: The ‘Indian’ in the Chicano Revolutionary Imaginary,” Critical Ethnic Studies 2, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 107–27, http://dx.doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.2.1.0107; Gloria E. Chacón, “Metamestizaje and the Narration of Political Movements from the South,” Latino Studies 15 (July 2017): 182–200, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-017-0062-2; Enrique Sepúlveda III, “Chicanx Studies, Indigeneity and the Politics of Settler Colonialism,” Latino Studies 21 (April 2023): 262–69, https://doi.org/10.1057/ s41276-023-00411-9; B. V. Olguín, “‘Caballeros’ and Indians: Mexican American Whiteness, Hegemonic Mestizaje, and Ambivalent Indigeneity in Proto-Chicana/o Autobiographical Discourse, 1858-2008,” MELUS 38, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 30–49; Tanya Lovell Banks, “Mestizaje and the Mexican Mestizo Self: No Hay Sangre Negra, so There Is No Blackness,” Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 15, no. 199 (January 2006): 199–234.

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I have to disagree with part of the analysis offered by Gord Hill (Kwakwakaʼwakw), who identifies the Panindianista Mexica Movement as a legitimate form of decoloniality for Chican@s: “Mexico, and by extension the US southwest, is clearly a strategic point to which our enemy devotes considerable resources. The Mexican population, both in Mexico and the US southwest, are seen as hostile and dangerous. Despite this, Mexicanos are a large and necessary part ofUS society, serving as a highly exploitable source of manual labour. Like New Afrikans, the Mexica/Chicano peoples are a strategic factor in decolonization,” Gord Hill, Colonization and Decolonization: A Manual for Indigenous Liberation in the 21st Century (Vancouver, Canada: Warrior Publications, 2006), p. 28. 33I support the intent of MEChA (traditionally, Movimiento Estudiantil Chican@ de Aztlán) to drop “Aztlán” from their name, but not to drop Chican@. Jacqueline Hidalgo, “Beyond Aztlán: Latina/o/x Students Let Go of Their Mythic Homeland,” Contending Modernities (blog), April 11, 2019, https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/globalcurrents/beyond-aztlan/. 34 Subcomandante Marcos, “Jornada de trabajo del 13 de Noviembre por San Luis Potosí” (Enlace Zapatista, November 14, 2006), https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2013/09/30/rincon-zapatista-nuevo-leon-invita-al-ciclo-decine-octubre-rebelde/. 35 María Eugenia Cotera and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, “Indigenous But Not Indian?: Chicana/Os and the Politics of Indigeneity,” in The World of Indigenous North America, ed. Robert Warrior (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 556-559. 36 Cotera and Saldaña-Portillo, “Indigenous But Not Indian?,” pp. 562-563. 37 Rigoberta Menchú, Crossing Borders, ed. and trans. Ann Wright (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 1998), p. 169. 38 Jeffrey A. Gardner and Sarah D. Warren, “Indigenous Borders: Contesting the Nation-State, Belonging and Racialization,” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, October 31, 2023, pp. 1–6, https://doi.org/ 10.1080/17442222.2023.2275515. 39 “Charities choose which of the poor they want to help, but poor people don't have a choice. They are born with a caring heart. It is not only indigenous people who have this sense of solidarity. “That's why I argue that the struggle of indigenous peoples has a purpose - to represent all oppressed people in the world. If we were the only ones, we might act differently, because we have been wise enough to realise what was being done to us. Yet the fact is that poverty does not only affect indigenous peoples. It affects black people, mestizos, and all the world's dispossessed. Suffering knows no frontiers,” Menchú, Crossing Borders, p. 176; Hill, Colonization and Decolonization, pp. 23-25. 40 James Yaki Sayles, Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth: New Afrikan Revolutionary Writings (Chicago, Illinois; Oakland, California; Montreal, Quebec: Kersplebedeb and Spear and Shield Publications, 2010), p. 362. 41Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx: Later Political Writings, by Karl Marx, ed. Terrell Carver, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 222.

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Revolution of the Everyday* Marx and Anarchism

How do we bring about the emergence of a new society from the old? Traditionally, advocates of the revolutionary path to socialism have emphasized the ‘objective’ factors leading to the necessity of socialism over capitalism. Marxists have usually tried to unite these ‘objective’ factors to ‘subjective’ factors—namely, the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat. Capitalism cannot maintain itself. It prioritizes valorization, or what we usually call “profitability,” over the maintenance of society itself. These networks of commodities, of transactions, are themselves the nervous system of our society. They both are born out of our increasing social interconnection, and increase them. The “anarchy of capitalist production,” nevertheless, endangers the viability of those networks. Capitalism is a mode of production that does not work on a social basis, social relations are only instruments to it. Its drive for valorization depends on the maintenance and stability of that very society. Capitalist society eats itself, although it is forced to constantly struggle against this cannibalistic drive in old and new ways. But it is a failing struggle, and it is clear that this insatiable drive to devour has now put the earth into dire ecological straits which pose an existential threat to humanity. For this reason, the question of revolution against capitalism can develop within the consciousness of the broad masses of working people. When we think of revolutionary socialism, we usually think of two ‘options’ within it— Marxism, or ‘statist socialism’ if you like, and anarchism. Both are supposed to disagree with

Revolution of the Everyday reformism, but part ways on the issue of the state. By extension, their analysis of strategies and tactics, of ‘means and ends,’ tend to be directly at odds. The antagonism between Karl Marx and 19th century anarchists has been exaggerated by Marxists and anarchists alike in the past century and a half. This is, in hindsight, a result of the confrontations between the two movements at various points in the 20th century. This may seem strange to us today, but thinking about Marxism and anarchism as closely related was quite common until well into the 20th century. There were many historical figures who dwelled in the space between the two, such as William Morris, Lucy Parsons, Georges Sorel, Victor Serge, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, José Carlos Mariátegui, and even the young Mao Zedong. This is not even touching on the influence of anarchism on global ‘state socialism’ as a whole, which includes the Bolsheviks through Sergey Nechayev, Mao through Peter Kropotkin, and Kim Il-sung through Shin Chae-ho. Though Marx engaged in arguments and even political struggle against anarchists, he did not fundamentally define himself in opposition to anarchists. He criticized other revolutionaries primarily in order to avoid the reappearance of capitalism in their methods.1 This included anarchists, reformists, nationalists, ‘state socialists,’ and ‘Marxists’ alike. These critics tended to reduce capital to something one-sided, rather than the totalizing force that it has proven itself to be. Thus, they found themselves caught in the logic of capitalist power, often without even realizing it—for example, by advocating schemes to realize ‘true’ private property, legal equality, political unity in the state, and so on. By pursuing this thread of caution towards the ‘capital within us,’ we can both understand the real disagreements Marx had with anarchists and understand the specificity of his method. Instead of being a crude and authoritarian ‘statist,’ we can recognize Marx as developing a unique critical dialectic of capitalism which unites theory and practice by expressing the ‘theory’ embedded in our everyday life.

Stirner’s Unique Marx’s engagements with anarchists can serve as moments to trace along the thread of this dialectic. By critiquing anarchists, he developed and clarified his own approach of immanent critique.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Marx’s youthful critique of the egoist Max Stirner was arguably his first engagement with what we now consider anarchism. Particularly because Stirner shattered Marx’s faith in abstract humanism, his philosophy should be considered important for Marx’s intellectual development. As a young man in the 1840s, Marx emerged from the radical democratic and atheistic milieu of Young Hegelianism into communism. He took significant influence from his engagements with the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach and his followers, such as the protoZionist Moses Hess.2 Feuerbach started from radical atheism, arguing that humanity created God as an expression of a “human essence”, rather than God creating humanity.3 In this argument, Feuerbach relied on an anthropological concept of a “human essence” which was supposed to be alienated and expressed in a projected way through the figures of gods and spirits. To him, communism meant recovering this “human essence,” or realizing human nature.4 Max Stirner, also part of the Young Hegelian milieu, is an obscure figure who is known primarily for his views expressed most famously in The Ego and Its Own (1844). Here, he took aim at the anthropological humanism of Feuerbach, along with Christianity, Judaism, liberalism, communism, private property, the state, and many other concepts. Possibly playing on Hegel, he arranged the course of an individual’s life as ascending through psychological-philosophical stages from childhood to old age, repeated on a social scale in the ascendance of races from “Negroidity” to Caucasians who become “really Caucasians” in discovering egoism.5 Stirner opened his book with the now famous line: “All things are nothing to me.”6 He expressed his lack of interest in various causes, from that of God to humanity, pointing out mockingly that every other concept gets to have its “egoism” over the world while the cause of the Unique, is “never to be my concern.”7 Against these abstract concepts which try to subordinate the Unique to their cause, he says that his concern is “only what is mine [das Meinige], and that is not a general one, but is—unique [einzig], as I am unique.”8 The Unique is beyond conceptualization. The Unique is so concrete as to be beyond concepts, which are always too abstract for it. The Unique, in fact, is concrete beyond concreteness, which designates a specific thing: “[…]I am the creative nothing [schöpferische Nichts], the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.”9 This line expresses a proto-existentialist philosophy of freedom. It

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Revolution of the Everyday should be paired with a later paragraph, the last line of which is now infamous but is rarely understood:

“As I find myself behind things, and that as mind, so 1 must later find myself also behind thoughts, namely, as their creator and owner [Schöpfor und Eigner]. In the time of spirits thoughts grew until they overtopped my head, whose offspring they yet were; they hovered about me and convulsed me like fever-phantasies, an awful power. The thoughts had become corporeal on their own account, were ghosts, such as God, emperor, Pope, fatherland, etc. If I destroy their corporeity, then I take them back into mine, and say: ‘I alone am corporeal’. And now I take the world as what it is to me, as mine, as my property [Eigentum]; I refer all to myself.”10

This last line is usually interpreted as Stirner literally claiming the entire world as his private property. Stirner is apparently trying to take private ownership of everything that he possibly can. In light of the context I have given, it is hopefully clear that this is an uncharitable and narrow reading. Stirner is instead speaking in almost proto-existentialist terms. He is a perspectivist—the world is the “property” of the “I’ in the sense of being the creation of its perception. We do not view the world from nowhere, but from the perspective of the “I.” The “I” creates and arranges the world from its standpoint, which cannot be interchanged with any other standpoint. The independent existence of the “Other” (whether “God, emperor, Pope, fatherland,” or something else) is merely the creation of the “I,” the self-alienation of the Unique. Things can only have power over us only if we identify them with our interest. This is a concept very closely related to Nietzsche’s Will to Power, especially in Stirner’s claim that everything is already egoist even where it does not recognize itself as such. Nietzsche believed life could be understood as a field of the struggle between irreconcilably unique perspectives or Wills to Power, while Stirner thought in much the same way through the terms of Egoism. The power of “spirits” (abstract concepts) over the Unique is their egoism—and their egoism is merely a quality borrowed from the Unique, which creates them out of itself. In this way, his discourse is

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez similar to that of his contemporaries Ludwig Feuerbach and Moses Hess. Feuerbach said that God was the self-alienation of Man, Hess said that money was the self-alienation of man, while Stirner said that spirits are the self-alienation of the Unique. The uniqueness of Stirner in this milieu was that the “Unique” was meant as a basically empty concept. It was meant as a concept beyond conceptualization. The affinity of Stirner to Nietzsche has been noticed by other anarchists. Emma Goldman, for instance, tried to canonize both into the annals of anarchy in her Anarchism and Other Essays (1910).11 Both Stirner and Nietzsche expressed critiques of the state, but only one could be understood to do so from something like an anarchist perspective. Nietzsche openly defended an aristocratic arrangement of society as a means of securing the flourishing of an elite few: “Every enhancement so far in the type ‘man’ has been the work of an aristocratic society – and that is how it will be, again and again, since this sort of society believes in a long ladder of rank order and value distinctions between men, and in some sense needs slavery.”12 Nietzsche rejected the abstraction of equality and the abstraction of individualism alike. He knew that individualism, the emergence of the Supermen, could only be founded on a certain system of society. He identified this system with a mass of slave laborers for the Supermen to stand on the backs of. Stirner’s Unique refrains from social doctrines out of its very abstractness. Stirner rejects society-as-such.13 He attacks private property and money, right alongside socialized property. He considers them spirits repressing the flourishing of the Unique through law and the state.14 He does not believe the Unique flourishes either through private property or the lack of it. Private property is not actually the “property” of the Unique’s perspective, as it is guaranteed through the state (a spirit), while socialists do not appreciate the inherent proprietorship of existing as an Unique. Against any abstract social notion of property or ownership, Stirner says that his property is “Nothing but what is in my power! To what property am I entitled? To every property to which I empower myself. I give myself the right of property in taking property to myself, or giving myself the proprietor's power, full power, empowerment.”15 Stirner turns from a critique of the state as alien to the interests of the Unique to calling for a “Union of Egoists.”16 This is meant to be an association where the self-interest of each Ego

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Revolution of the Everyday is meant to be the premise of association. Of course, such self-interest remains abstract and open by the very nature of Stirner’s philosophy, and his amoralism also means he considers it immaterial whether the Unique subordinates another for its interests or not. Nevertheless, the truth of his philosophy comes out as ultimately non-reactionary. The conclusion of Stirner’s book ultimately places his understanding of the flourishing of the Unique in the power of self-creation, which is necessarily a creative negativity:

“I am owner of my might, and I am so when I know myself as unique. In the unique one the owner himself returns into his creative nothing, of which he is born. Every higher essence above me, be it God, be it man, weakens the feeling of my uniqueness, and pales only before the sun of this consciousness. If I concern myself for myself, the unique one, then my concern rests on its transitory, mortal creator, who consumes himself, and I may say: “All things are nothing to me.”17

Stirner is an “active nihilist”—the world has no fundamental meaning, so one should exercise one’s power and create one’s own meanings.18 All the old spirits fall apart upon the Unique’s realization of their basis in the creative power of itself. Everything is ultimately the creation of the Unique, and dispelling the spirits is simply a realization of this fact. It might create a crisis of meaning for someone so deeply dependent on the egoistic interests of the spirits, but this crisis is necessary in order to return to the truth of the “creative nothing”—the true creator of these values, these spirits. We must create our own values based on our egoistic interests, we must have values which emerge purely out of the perspective of the Unique. This all-destroying critique of abstract concepts and affirmation of the Unique’s uniqueness interested and troubled the young Marx and Engels.19 One thing was for sure: Stirner had destroyed the intellectual viability of Feuerbach’s humanism. It seemed ridiculous to say that “Man,” as an incredibly abstract concept, could have any particular “essence” or nature in light of Stirner’s criticisms. Where could one really locate that “essence” in actual, specific

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez individuals? Further, how could one claim capitalist society alienates us from that “essence” if that “essence” cannot even be pinned down beyond historical, social, and individual variability? Thus, before trying to refute Stirner, Marx and Engels incorporated his insights. One November 19, 1844 letter of Engels to Marx is especially demonstrative of their attempts:

“We must not simply cast it aside, but rather use it as the perfect expression of presentday folly and, while inverting it, continue to build on it. This egoism is taken to such a pitch, it is so absurd and at the same time so self-aware, that it cannot maintain itself even for an instant in its one-sidedness, but must immediately change into communism. In the first place it’s a simple matter to prove to Stirner that his egoistic man is bound to become communist out of sheer egoism.”20

This is working well within Stirner’s home field. Engels suggests arguing that communism is the natural form which a “Union of Egoists” would take. The basic abstract Unique, which transcends history and society, remains secure as the basic foundation from which we engage in the world. The rejection of bourgeois society is thus purely on the grounds of this Egoism—it is a rejection beyond history on the basis of a concept beyond history. Marx, making his break with Feuerbach’s humanism, began to approach this dilemma from another angle. The idea of an abstract “Man” could of course not be affirmed, but could the category of “Man” or “society” really be characterized merely as spirits produced by the Unique? Neither the abstract generalization, nor the empty, ahistorical and asocial individual seemed to make sense as starting points. Working over this issue of individual (Unique) and universal (Man), Marx made a breakthrough in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845): “Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.”21 Both abstract “Man” and the arch-individualist Unique are two sides of the same coin. The transcendence of this dualism, between the individual and general, is through realizing the social character of the individual and the individual as the basis of society. “Humanity” is no abstract essence, but is simply the whole of “the ensemble of the social relations.” The same is true of the “Unique”

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Revolution of the Everyday which is beyond history, as the isolated individual. The individual itself is a product of a certain arrangement of social relations. Our perspectives, from out of our “I,” are already laden with ways of thinking and attributing meaning which come from the history of society—most obviously in language. Revolution thus cannot rest on the secure foundation of either “Man” or the “Unique,” but must work from these social individuals to the transformation of society as a whole. There is no ultimate, transcendent foundation which we can rely on for revolution—there is only what is possible out of the immanence of “the ensemble of social relations.” As Marx expresses it: “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”22 This is the revolutionary dialectic, the immanent critique, which became central to Marx’s later analysis of capitalism. When Marx and Engels set out to critique the Young Hegelians as a whole in what we now know as The German Ideology (1846), Marx began to formulate this new perspective directly against Stirner. Stirner had led him beyond both Feuerbach’s “Man,” and Marx now stepped beyond Stirner’s own “Unique.” This text is now known as one of the earliest expressions of historical materialism proper, and his approach is especially strengthened in his critique of Stirner. While Theses on Feuerbach had broken apart both the concepts of abstract “Man” and the “Unique,” Marx had to also address the issue of alienated powers. If there was neither a “Man” nor an “Unique” which could alienate their own “essential” powers into things outside and above them, then how could social domination be explained? Marx began to answer this by critiquing Stirner’s own answer to the phenomenon of domination:

“Further, the man who, as a youth, stuffed his head with all kinds of nonsense about existing powers and relations such as the Emperor, the Fatherland, the state, etc., and knew them only as his own ‘delirious fantasies’, in the form of his conceptions—this man, according to Saint Max, actually destroys all these powers by getting out of his head his false opinion of them.”23

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez This is Stirner’s notion of the Unique returning to itself. These spirits only have power if the Unique alienates itself into them (that is, they only have power over us if we grant it to them with our consent). Therefore, we escape their power by clearing away these spirits, by recognizing our Unique as the center of our world. For Marx, this simply means that Stirner clears away his mystified concepts of these social powers as morally good and justified, and thinks that by choosing his own Unique’s interest that he escapes their actual, material power. Marx responds:

“On the contrary: now that he no longer looks at the world through the spectacles of his fantasy, he has to think of the practical interrelations of the world, to get to know them and to act in accordance with them. By destroying the fantastic corporeality which the world had for him, he finds its real corporeality outside his fantasy. With the disappearance of the spectral corporeality of the Emperor, what disappears for him is not the corporeality, but the spectral character of the Emperor, the actual power of whom he can now at last appreciate in all its scope[…]”24

These powers do not merely emanate from the consent of individuals, but exist objectively regardless of our subjective consciousness of them. Carrying out an act of will, breaking the identification of our Unique with them, does not actually break their power. Their power does not come merely out of our identification with them, our subjective consent to them, but through all the complex “practical interrelations of the world.”Think about our own world of bureaucracy, law, private property, and money. They are certainly bound up with all kinds of subjective delusions and ridiculous beliefs, but they have a concrete power in our lives. Money becomes necessary with a given arrangement of society. It tends to be associated with massive empires, dense social systems, and with the power of the state in exchange. In other words, it is the “universal” in a society that has become complex and ‘split’. At the same time, money is not strictly necessary or the only way to organize a complex society. Some highly dense societies have existed without money, like Tawantinsuyu in the Andes, so it is not the only

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Revolution of the Everyday way to express a universal. It is historically and socially specific, and has elements of both social necessity and contingency. State power similarly is not merely illusory even in its mythic nature. Organized, official, public, civilian police forces are a historically modern phenomenon. Nevertheless, both their physical power and their historically developed moral sanctifications—“To Protect and Serve,” for example—are real limitations. Agency is specific to a specific situation, not the unlimited choice of the Unique. We might act in the world from a specific perspective, but from the beginning of our lives we think and act in an existing network of social relations which we must work through. For Marx, we thus cannot rely on liberation out of the “Unique.” Revolution must work through that network of social relations itself. Breaking the “spectral” appearances of things is a necessary step for changing our situation, but it is only a beginning. We change ourselves and the world, one intertwined with the other. By insisting on the abstract “Unique” as our foundation, we merely naturalize our historically-specific situation of an alienated world. That very alienated world is the condition for us to insist on our “Unique.” Marx does not entirely disagree with Stirner’s critique of abstract categories here, but believes that these abstract categories are still operative on a social level. Yes, the categories are incoherent, but their apparent coherence comes from the practice of everyday life conjuring them up (the base-superstructure analogy was meant to describe this). They emerge out of specific arrangements of our complexes of relationships. A revolutionary dialectic means to work through the incoherence of the categories practically, to dissolve them practically rather than contemplatively. One abolishes them through a practical critique which reveals their historical transience out of their own historical conditions of existence. Marx’s use of an altered egoist communist argument from Engels’ letter reveals the incorporation of this dialectic into his new concept of communism:

“Communism is quite incomprehensible to our saint because the communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its highflown ideological form;

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The communists do not preach morality at all, as Stirner does so extensively. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much as selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals[…]”25

Marx recovers elements of Stirner’s arguments that bourgeois private property represents a repression of the individual’s flourishing. Communists need not appeal to morality, as Feuerbach and Hess do, but can work through the interests of these social individuals to glimpses of a new world. It is this very contradiction between individuals and the conditions of existence which they originally create that leads to the need for revolution. Marx continues:

“Communist theoreticians, the only communists who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely by the fact that they alone have discovered that throughout history the ‘general interest’ is created by individuals who are defined as ‘private persons’. They know that this contradiction is only a seeming one because one side of it, what is called the ‘general interest; is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and in relation to the latter it is by no means an independent force with an independent history—so that this contradiction is in practice constantly destroyed and reproduced. Hence it is not a question of the Hegelian ‘negative unity’ of two sides of a contradiction, but of the materially determined destruction of the preceding materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the disappearance of which this contradiction together with its unity also disappears.”26

Communism emerges out of the concrete developments of society and its history itself by way of these individuals. The revolutionary action of these individuals is not, however, the ahistorical and asocial agency of the Unique. It is instead situated, historically specific freedom which is freedom within an already defined situation. That situation is the ground and premise for that freedom, but that freedom also enables transcendence from beyond that ground. In this

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Revolution of the Everyday sense, Marx incorporates elements of Stirner’s identification of the Unique with the “creative nothing.” What he does to go beyond Stirner is to point out the emptiness of the Unique’s emptiness. The individual is nothing in particular, not even a foundation of emptiness from which freedom emanates. Freedom is always already social and historical, and thus the flourishing of freedom can only be realized by working through the dialectics of history.

Proudhon’s Justice Having clarified his new, critical dialectic out of his engagement with Stirner, Marx continued to follow this thread in theory and practice. While in exile in France in the early 1840s, he had engaged with the radical democratic circles of Paris. He became acquainted with the darling of radical Parisian politics, Pierre Joseph-Proudhon. Proudhon published What is Property? in 1840, which popularized the well-known slogan “Property is theft!”27 Though he criticized private property, he did not wish to necessarily abolish it. Instead, almost like Thomas Paine in Agrarian Justice (1797), he wanted to allow only property which was the product of the individual’s labor—or perhaps he would prefer to say “individual possession.”28 That individual labor would be the basis of a truly “free market,” where each could exchange the products of their labor with the other according to their self-interest. This way, the interests of the individual and society were supposed to be reconciled. Such a system was apparently the solution to the issues of both capitalism and communism. Proudhon was also the first person to refer to himself positively as an anarchist, creating the modern circle-A symbol for anarchism with the slogan “Anarchy is Order.”29 Nevertheless, most anarchists today are not very similar to him ideologically. Most are social anarchists, a subject to be taken up below. Marx, like many in his generation, was initially strongly influenced by What is Property?.30 He was especially interested in Proudhon’s use of categories from political economy to demonstrate the irrationality of bourgeois society. This seemed to promise a popularization of immanent critique as a revolutionary method.

In 1846, Proudhon published his System of Economic Contradictions, or the Philosophy of Poverty. This was supposed to incorporate the science of dialectic into a general philosophical

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez system definitively proving the irrationality of capitalism and the need for a different system in the name of individuality’s flourishing. Marx considered it to instead be a bad joke. In 1847, he published a harsh response titled The Poverty of Philosophy. He immediately opened by mocking Proudhon’s political economy and philosophy alike:

“M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest of French economists. Being both a German and an economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error.”31

Marx’s critique of this try at dialectic is the central theme of the book. His specific criticisms of Proudhon, and what he suggests instead, thus represent another point along the thread of his dialectic of capitalism. Proudhon’s philosophy is significantly more eclectic than Stirner’s, and also significantly less relevant to modern anarchism. Nevertheless, his concept of dialectic and the issues which Marx sees in it relate directly to the criticisms Marx already levied at Stirner. In a high point of Poverty, Marx attacks Proudhon harshly for speaking of dialectic as a contradiction between good and bad, where one must preserve the good and get rid of the bad.32 Marx immediately exposes the ridiculousness this approach using the example of slavery:

“Slavery is an economic category like any other. Thus it also has its two sides. Let us leave alone the bad side and talk about the good side of slavery. Needless to say we are dealing only with direct slavery, with Negro slavery in Suriname, in Brazil, in the Southern States of North America[…] “What would M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He would formulate the problem thus: preserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate the bad.”33

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Revolution of the Everyday Though Proudhon operates under the nominal cover of dialectic, there is no dialectic in his approach. The “negativity” in it is not negation, it is just what is “bad.” There is no “creative nothing,” no transcendence. Every unity, every category, is basically taken as a given in this approach. It is quite literally one-sided. Proudhon cannot see that the “good” and “bad” side of things are an identity. To dialectically transcend something does not mean preserving the “good” in it, but to escape the framing of the contradiction or opposition entirely. Instead of the “good” or “bad” side of slavery, abolish slavery and universalize “free” wage labor. This does not mean the new, emergent category is necessarily the penultimate “good”—the entire point is that it is only a moment. It will fall away through the practical critique of historical actors as well. Marx emphasizes the importance of this creativity in dialectic further along, still critiquing the ridiculous good-bad dialectic:

“Indeed, from the moment the process of the dialectic movement is reduced to the simple process of opposing good to bad, of posing problems tending to eliminate the bad, and of administering one category as an antidote to another, the categories are deprived of all spontaneity; the idea ‘no longer functions’; there is no life left in it. It is no longer posed or decomposed into categories. The sequence of categories has become a sort of scaffolding. Dialectics has ceased to be the movement of absolute reason. There is no longer any dialectics but only, at the most, absolutely pure morality.”34

In some ways, Marx sounds much like Stirner here. To speak in moralizing terms like Proudhon does, trying to realize principles of “eternal justice”, is to put things beyond the power and innovation of individuals. Everything is already decided from the outset. There is no longer the negative-creative power of historical actors. While Stirner would say that this moralizing is morality as a spirit created by the Unique, Marx would say that this is a limitation of a historical dialectic within the terms of capitalism. Because Proudhon lacks the negative-creative character of dialectic, Marx says:

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez “He takes the first category that comes handy and attributes to it arbitrarily the quality of supplying a remedy for the drawbacks of the category to be purified. Thus, if we are to believe M. Proudhon, taxes remedy the drawbacks of monopoly; the balance of trade, the drawbacks of taxes; landed property, the drawbacks of credit.”35

In a sense, Proudhon becomes basically reformist. This character which Marx identifies would later become the ground for Proudhon’s gradualism.36 Marx goes further in his critique of Proudhon, arguing explicitly that Proudhon’s vision of a “just” and “good” society is well within the bounds of capitalist society:

“In any case, it will think it very naive that M. Proudhon should give as ‘revolutionary theory of the future’ what [David] Ricardo expounded scientifically as the theory of present-day society, of bourgeois society[…]”37 “Ricardo shows us the real movement of bourgeois production, which constitutes value. M. Proudhon, leaving this real movement out of account, ‘fumes and frets’ in order to invent new processes and to achieve the reorganization of the world on a would-be new formula, which formula is no more than the theoretical expression of the real movement which exists and which is so well described by Ricardo.”38

Proudhon’s cooperative market system (mutualism), which is supposed to be a truly “free” market, is simply the conscience of capitalism. Value cannot be the basis of a new society, or for revolutionary arguments about equality and social worth. To argue for the equality of human beings based on the equality of their labor’s value is to simply think like a capitalist.39 It is to be complacent with the homogenization wrought by the domination of valorization. It is to be complacent with the domination of living workers by their dead labor in the form of a commodity and in the form of the capital that they feed. The point of communist revolution is to abolish value production, not to give each individual ‘the full value of their labor.’ To try and realize “justice” within bourgeois society is merely to try and realize bourgeois justice. It means to internalize capitalism into our vision of an

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Revolution of the Everyday alternative to it. This is where Marx’s engagement with Stirner continued to influence his dialectic. Proudhon’s moralism simply meant the domination of working individuals by the abstract and impersonal power of capital. Out of this critique, Marx emerged with a clearer understanding of capitalism and the necessary revolution against it. He would continue to return to Proudhon in order to contrast his own dialectic to Proudhon’s complacent “dialectic.” In the midst of writing Capital, he responded to a letter from J. B. Schweitzer asking for his evaluation of Proudhon. In the January 24, 1865 response, he expressed his quite harsh re-appraisal of Proudhon’s older work, What is Property?:

“The very title of the book indicates its shortcomings. The question is so badly formulated that it cannot be answered correctly. Ancient ‘property relations’ were superseded by feudal property relations and these by ‘bourgeois’ property relations. Thus history itself had expressed its criticism upon past property relations. What Proudhon was actually dealing with was modern bourgeois property as it exists today.”40

Marx, as in his critique of Stirner, chastises Proudhon for his lack of historical specificity. When one speaks of “property,” one must mean a specific arrangement of relations. There is no property-as-such. There is always a very specific form of property, which exists in a specific arrangement of social relations. Marx continues:

“The question of what this is could have only been answered by a critical analysis of ‘political economy,’ embracing the totality of these property relations, considering not their legal aspect as relations of volition but their real form, that is, as relations of production. But as Proudhon entangled the whole of these economic relations in the general legal concept of ‘property,’ he could not get beyond the answer which, in a similar work published before 1789, Brissot had already given in the same words: ‘Property is theft.’”41

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Marx considers the legal aspects of property as their codifications in officialdom rather than being their “real form.” Proudhon does not think of property as a social relation, but as a thing. Not only that, he does not think of property as variable—not as “relations of production” embracing “the totality of these property relations.” It should be remembered that in 1844, Marx had already said that alienated labor precedes private property. He had been emphasizing the primacy of social relations to social forms for a long time.42 Proudhon remains stultified by his overly generalizing concept of property, which he sticks to out of his fixation with “eternal” definitions of a morally good order. Marx goes on to mock the very slogan of “property is theft”:

“The upshot is at best that the bourgeois legal conceptions of ‘theft’ apply equally well to the ‘honest’ gains of the bourgeois himself. On the other hand, since ‘theft’ as a forcible violation of property presupposes the existence of property, Proudhon entangled himself in all sorts of fantasies, obscure even to himself, about true bourgeois property.”43

Here, Marx actually sounds almost exactly like Stirner. Stirner himself had said that the idea of property being theft presupposes a validity of some notion of property or ownership anyways.44 Like Stirner, Marx saw such a slogan as purely speaking within the terms of the society one is trying to criticize. However, he again distinguishes himself from Stirner in his critique of Proudhon:

“[Proudhon] shares the illusions of speculative philosophy for he does not regard economic categories as the theoretical expression of historical relations of production, corresponding to a particular stage of development in material production, but arbitrarily transforms them into pre-existing eternal ideas, and that in this roundabout way he arrives once more at the standpoint of bourgeois economy.”45

Marx’s critique of Proudhon centers on his fixation with “eternal justice,” with moralizing critique. He again emphasizes the social-historical specificity of the categories in our

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Revolution of the Everyday lives, hitting a rather anti-foundationalist point. From his earlier critiques of “Man” and “Ego,” he added a critique of “Eternal Justice.”

Bakunin’s Natural-Being To make a step towards modern anarchism, we must step into social anarchism. Social anarchism refers generally to those schools of anarchism which emphasize forms of collectivity, variously defined, as a means of liberation. Typically this means placing weight in collective struggle and alternatives to the state and capital in communal life. This is not to say social anarchism is strictly delineated from all other forms of anarchism. It is simply a general theme which has now come to the forefront in global anarchism since the beginning of the 20th century. Social anarchists similarly warrant an especially interesting and fruitful comparison to Marx in their closeness and distance. Mikhail Bakunin is the most obvious example. The issue of Bakunin and Marx’s conflicts with him in the 1870s are quite well-trodden at this point. The arguments of the two sections of the International Workingmen’s Association, ‘anti-statist’ and ‘state socialist,’ are commonplace. I am not interested here in the debates over whether Marx acted authoritarian in his role, or whether this or that detail was justified or not. Instead, I want to continue the thread through their philosophical disagreements and the substance of Marx’s critique of Bakunin. The main disagreement between Marx and Bakunin typically commented on is the issue of the state and of participation in parliaments. Apparently, Marx was the ‘statist’ and Bakunin the ‘anti-statist.’ Partisans of both positions agree with the characterization. This does not get to the root of the matter, however. Marx was no mere ‘statist,’ as his endorsement of the 1871 Paris Commune as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and his criticisms of Ferdinand Lassalle make clear.46 The disagreements between the two go deeper, into their concepts of humanity and revolution themselves. Bakunin’s major difference from Marx lay ultimately in his concept of a human nature. He argued that there was, in every person, an animalistic-humanistic instinct towards “natural justice,” and that “natural impulses” are already in accordance with “natural law.”47 To him,

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez revolution meant the freedom of these “natural impulses” to roam, both without limitation by other individuals and through cooperation with other individuals.48 In quite Enlightenmentderived terms, Bakunin identified justice with the laws of nature, and argued that:

“Respect for man is the supreme law of Humanity, and that the great, the real object of history, its only legitimate object, is the humanization and emancipation, the real liberty, the prosperity and happiness of each individual living in society.”49

For Bakunin, humans were both “the highest manifestation of animality,” or of the natural order, and humanized in “the deliberate and gradual negation of the animal element in man.”50 Though emphasizing this conscious element of human beings, he did not believe that human society was arbitrarily created out of random decisions of individuals. Instead, contrasting natural laws to laws made by human societies and standing above individuals, he said that the laws of human nature “are inherent in us; they constitute our being, our whole being, physically, intellectually, and morally: we live, we breathe, we act, we think, we wish only through these laws. Without them we are nothing, we are not.”51 These natural laws are identical to our very being. In this way, Bakunin has some relation to Feuerbach’s humanism. Human beings are free to create themselves, but do so within the framing of their very species-being. Thus, liberty means to act in accordance with human nature, with natural laws, themselves.52 These natural laws further extend to our being “intellectually” and “morally”—meaning that our opinions and moral conscience are expressions of our very being. We must be free to think, believe, feel what we desire, because that is an expression of our very natural-being.53 A free society, an anarchist society, would mean an association premised on the liberation of our natural-being impulses and drives. Bakunin’s naturalistic thinking ultimately colored his conflict with Marx. His criticisms of Marx continuously come back to this theme, whether in ways that are still familiar or seem very outdated. Beginning in the essays that became Marxism, Freedom, and the State (1867– 1872), Bakunin publicized his analysis of the International’s split. He famously engages with Marx as a “statist,” but the other elements of his criticisms are not as well known. Earlier, Marx

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Revolution of the Everyday and Engels had attacked him for his racialist Pan-Slavism.54 Bakunin tried to turn this accusation of nationalism against them, claiming that Marx emerged as the true chauvinist: “The policy of [Otto von] Bismarck is that of the present; the policy of Marx, who considers himself at least as his successor, and his continuator, is that of the future.”55 Bakunin believed that Marx saw history as simply stages along the way to the universalization of Western European-style capitalism across the world, then to a “People’s State,” and then to a communist promise which the “People’s State” could never deliver.56 Ultimately, he attributed this intractable difference between himself and Marx to a difference in national-racial being:

“Let us consider the real, national policy of Marx himself. Like Bismarck, he is a German patriot. He desires the greatness and power of Germany as a State. No one anyway will count it a crime in him to love his country and his people; and since he is so profoundly convinced that the State is the condition sine qua non of the prosperity of the one and the emancipation of the other, it will be found natural that he should desire to see Germany organized into a very large and very powerful State, since weak and small States always run the risk of seeing themselves swallowed up. Consequently Marx as a clear-sighted and ardent patriot, must wish for the greatness and strength of Germany as a State.”57

Bakunin does not consider Marx’s nationalism to be objectionable in itself—he says that such a thing is a natural impulse. His Pan-Germanism is a naturally German desire, a desire inherent to identification with Germany. Marx’s natural nationalist tendency, unobjectionable in itself, has overextended into a misguided statism. This statism, in order to maintain itself, in turn expands both Germany and bourgeois civilization across Europe.58 Power corrupts, power justifies power. Bakunin appeals to the German proletariat against Marx’s ostensible Pan-German aspirations, characterizing his statism as in fact anti-national.59 It is quite humorous to note that this is almost exactly how Joseph Stalin criticized the Nazi imperial Pan-German project— neither “National” nor “Socialist.”60 Regardless of this anti-national character of Pan-

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Germanism, Bakunin addresses himself primarily to “the Latin and Slav toilers” as allies against Marx.61 With the Latin “race” being “tired of bourgeois civilization” and the Slav “race” being “almost ignorant of it and despising it by instinct,” the two appeared to Bakunin as a much more natural source of revolutionary initiative.62 To him, their natural-being was purer, less obscured by the artifice of bourgeois civilization compared to the Germans. Thus, his naturalist-humanist perspective extended also into a certain racialism, an appeal to the natural-being of national characters. In his Statism and Anarchy (1873), Bakunin continued this style of critique against Marx. He appealed once again to the natural anarcho-communalistic tendencies of the “Slavic race” against the statist tendencies of Germans.63 He went further than before, taking his characterization of Marx’s “statism” as anti-national to new levels. He blamed Marx’s characteristics on his Jewishness here instead of his Germanness:

“By origin Marx is a Jew. One might say that he combines all of the positive qualities and all of the shortcomings of that capable race. A nervous man, some say to the point of cowardice, he is extremely ambitious and vain, quarrelsome, intolerant, and absolute, like Jehovah, the Lord God of his ancestors, and, like him, vengeful to the point of madness.”64

Marx’s very natural-being was simply defined by his Jewishness. As a Jew, he was thus naturally cunning and deceitful.65 This was not merely a choice, but an expression of his very Jewish-being. Earlier, in an 1871 private letter, Bakunin had gone much further than this in his antisemitism. Sounding much like Joseph Goebbels, he claimed:

“This entire Jewish world, which forms a single profiteering sect, a people of bloodsuckers, a single gluttonous parasite, closely and intimately united not only across national borders but across all differences of political opinion—this Jewish world today stands for the most part at the disposal of Marx and at the same time at the disposal of

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Revolution of the Everyday Rothschild. I am certain that Rothschild for his part greatly values the merits of Marx, and that Marx for his part feels instinctive attraction and great respect for Rothschild.”66

Thus, the reactionary potentials of Bakunin’s natural-being theory become very clear. Marx conspired to accumulate power out of the Jewishness of his being. Marx saw progressive potential in capitalism because he admired the Jewish financiers who were supposed to control the capitalist system. The obvious conclusion, if this was the natural-being of the “Jewish race,” would be their extermination. This is where Bakunin’s criticism flies off of a cliff into a 19th century predecessor to fascism. Marx’s response to Bakunin’s criticism did not focus on his antisemitic remarks. This is not very surprising, since Marx tended to downplay or avoid directly acknowledging his Jewishness in political contexts. His counter-critique does, however, reach to the philosophy behind Bakunin’s natural-being racism. In a notebook, Marx responded to Bakunin’s criticisms while analyzing Statism and Anarchy. Directly addressing the claim that he was complacent with capitalism as “progressive” and thus identified with Pan-Germanism, Marx replied:

“He understands absolutely nothing about the social revolution, only its political phrases. Its economic conditions do not exist for him. As all hitherto existing economic forms, developed or undeveloped, involve the enslavement of the worker (whether in the form of wage-labourer, peasant etc.), he believes that a radical revolution is possible in all such forms alike[…] The will, and not the economic conditions, is the foundation of his social revolution.”67

Marx is not satisfied with Bakunin’s argument from out of human nature. This naturalbeing philosophy lies behind Bakunin’s belief that “a radical revolution is possible in all such forms alike[…]” Revolution emerges out of our very being, which perhaps takes on the tone of a racial being. That is, revolution emerges from willpower, rather than emerging immanently from specific social relations. Here, Marx’s criticisms of Stirner resurface in a different form.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Bakunin also does not see the presence of proletarian revolution as already a possibility in capitalist development. To Marx, the rise of the “collective worker” out of capitalist universal dependency, tying the new class of proletarians to all of society through the market, represents also a universalizing revolutionary subject.68 Marx again considers ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ factors to be inseparable, identical in the form of the proletariat. In some ways, Marx emerges out of his counter-critique as more individualist than Bakunin. For instance, he quotes Bakunin calling for a system wherein: “The whole people will govern, and there will be no governed.” Against this, Marx says: “If a man rules himself, he does not do so on this principle, for he is after all himself and no other.”69 To Marx, “the whole people” is an abstraction. In a sense, “the whole people” has the same issue Bakunin identified with the “People’s State” that he attributed to Marx. If individual self-determination is to be realized, can it be done so with the abstract generality of “the people” as its ground? Once again, he sounds much like Stirner—“for he is after all himself and no other.” Marx believes an emancipated arrangement instead must be premised on individuality on a structural level. It must be a free association of free individuals, in other words. On this concrete unity of individualities, Marx says: “With collective ownership the socalled people’s will vanishes, to make way for the real will of the cooperative.” The people’s will is basically identified with the abstraction of nation-states, of citizens. Collective ownership and cooperative production instead represent “directly social” ways of relating with others. Collectivity is not premised on an indeterminate mob, but on cooperation of each with all. Their individuality and sociality alike are the premise of the social system. Marx again affirms this principle responding to Bakunin’s questioning of whether his “Worker’s State” could include every worker in governance: “Certainly! Since the whole thing begins with the self-government of the commune.” Marx clearly took great inspiration from the 1871 Paris Commune as a model for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Though he considered this class rule as distinct from the mature communist society to be established, they were to be of the same lineage. The free associative character of communism is already present in the foundational role of the commune to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

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Revolution of the Everyday On this rule of the proletariat, which is the first step to negating capitalism, Marx responded to Bakunin that:

“As the proletariat still acts, during the period of struggle for the overthrow of the old society, on the basis of that old society, and hence also still moves within political forms which more or less belong to it, it has not yet, during this period of struggle, attained its final constitution, and employs means for its liberation which after this liberation fall aside.”

Establishing working class government means to move “within political forms which more or less belong” to bourgeois society. That is, the working class is still a class within capitalism and generally a class within class society. Its very distinctness as a class is premised on its identity with capitalists in capitalist society. To abolish the capitalists is to work to abolish its own condition of existence as a class, and thus the very character of class rule (governmental power). Thus, the revolution begins from out of the everyday lives of workers (whether reformist or insurrectionist), reaches a peak in their ascendance to the ruling class of society, and culminates in their abolition of their own class identity as workers. Here, it is clear that Marx strongly valued the immanence of revolution to the proletariat itself. While Bakunin appealed to ideals embedded in a natural-being, always present behind our specific social situations, Marx appealed to the immanence of revolution in our everyday lives. Marx focused on analyzing capitalism not in order to establish London as the model for the entire world, but to show that capitalism contains the seeds for its own transcendence. This insight is what he saw lacking in Bakunin. He believed that this led Bakunin to close the gap of Is and Ought with a pure appeal to will, in order for the Ought to break out of the Is. The philosophical difference between the two also becomes clear in their approaches to strategy. Bakunin engaged in conspiracy to forge tightly disciplined cells of secret societies, working with the Russian nihilist Sergey Nechayev.70 He and Nechayev believed that these secret societies were necessary to maintain the natural ideas of liberty, and to disperse them among the spontaneous revolts of workers without trying to lead them. To lead would be to

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez suppress their natural, vital force of instinct. Nevertheless, the ideals needed to be preserved in intellectual form. Marx, on the other hand, wanted to engage in open struggle and to derive these “ideals” from out of the revolutionary struggles of workers themselves.71 Already in The Communist Manifesto (1848), he had announced that “communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.”72 Further, expressing his understanding of the role of Communists, he said that they “do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties.”73 Rather than forming a dictatorship above workers, telling them what ideals to adhere to, or making a hard distinction of spontaneous practice and theory, Marx saw the role of Communists as expressing what is already present in the actions of workers. They “point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat,” and “always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.”74 Neither apart from nor above them, they were to work through the dialectic of revolution.

Cafiero’s Workers Marx’s engagement with anarchism as it overlapped with his critique of capitalism is clearest and most direct in his correspondence with Carlo Cafiero. Cafiero was an Italian militant in the First International who had begun his political career in the 1870s as a follower of Marx and Engels, but who soon turned to Mikhail Bakunin’s anarchism.75 Rather than rejecting Marxism as incompatible with anarchism, he saw the two as siblings. Cafiero, while falling on Bakunin’s side of the split in the International and arguing intensely with Engels, kept up correspondence with him and Marx.76 The split in the International, solidified at the Hague Congress in 1872, naturally had wide-reaching political consequences. However, it was not nearly as all-or-nothing as we might assume today, although it led to the dissolution of the First International by the close of the 1870s. Nonetheless, it did not foreclose exchange between the two ‘positions’. That exchange offers us insight into differences, with Cafiero being a perfect figure through whom to closely examine them. Cafiero began to draft a summary of Marx’s Capital (1867) after being imprisoned for revolutionary activity in Benevento in 1877.77 He aimed to develop a means of teaching a

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Revolution of the Everyday working-class audience the critique of capitalism developed by Marx. Marx approved of this project and shared his concerns about the text’s legibility for a popular audience.78 He had already revised Capital significantly from 1872–1875 for its first publication in French.79 Rather than a mere translation, he aimed to develop a new model for future editions which would be clearer for a working class public. Cafiero published his summary in 1879 and Marx greeted it with approval, telling Cafiero that other attempts at summary had clung “too pedantically to the scientific form of discussion,” while Cafiero’s summary succeeded in “moving the public for whom the summaries are intended.”80 Marx’s approval is often cited by some anarchists as proof of the quality of Cafiero’s summary, such as translator Paul M. Perrone.81 However, Marx also expressed reservations towards Cafiero’s summary, and the content of which illustrates his concept of working-class self-activity against capital, and how it differed from that of anarchists. Of the limitations of Cafiero’s summary, Marx said:

“As far as the conception of things, I believe I’m not deceiving myself in attributing a gap to the considerations espoused in your preface, and that is the proof that the material conditions necessary to the emancipation of the proletariat are generated spontaneously by the development of capitalist exploitation. After all, I agree with you (if I interpreted your preface well) that it isn’t necessary to overload those who you wish to educate. Nothing will prevent you from returning, at the opportune time, to the charge of bringing out this materialist basis of Capital.”82

This immediately draws our attention to Cafiero’s preface where he is supposed to lay out these “considerations.” How does he conceive of “the emancipation of the proletariat” relative to the conditions “generated spontaneously by the development of capitalist exploitation?” If, according to Marx, there is a gap between these two, then where can we find it in the text? The tail end of Cafiero’s preface seems to be the issue in question: “May the workers read [Capital] and think about it carefully because in it is contained not only the story of The Development of Capitalist Production, but also The Martyrdom of the Worker.”83 In this summarization of what

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Capital is the story of, Cafiero identifies the classic theme of poverty at one pole creating wealth at the other. “The Martyrdom of the Worker” is the very condition of the “Development of Capitalist Production.” In other words, the exploitation of the working class is the condition for the accumulation of capital. Where is the gap that Marx spoke of? It is that here, the proletariat figure as victims (or martyrs) of exploitation, but their self-emancipation is not located in this very condition of exploitation itself. Cafiero agreed with self-emancipation, but he located it elsewhere than in the immanent condition of being an exploited wage-laborer itself. How, then, does Marx’s approach differ here from the summary which Cafiero offered? Raya Dunayevskaya famously commented in 1958’s Marxism and Freedom on the chapter about the fight to shorten the workday in Capital, arguing that it is one of the central expressions of Marx’s philosophy of working class self-emancipation.84 Before examining Marx’s analysis of this process, we should see whether the gap in Cafiero’s summary extends into his version of the chapter on the workday:

“This is how capital whips labor, which, after much suffering, searches until the end to resist it. The workers unite and demand, to the powers that be, the establishment of a normal workday. One may easily comprehend how much of this they are able to obtain, considering that the law must be made and upheld by the capitalists themselves, against whom the workers would like to contend.”85

Cafiero’s summary of the chapter on the working day certainly includes class struggle, this cannot be denied. He further incorporates an anarchist objection to legalistic reformism, which fails to comprehend that “the law must be made and upheld by the capitalist themselves.” It is true that the state in capitalist society takes on a capitalist character, and plays a constitutive role to capitalism, but this concept of law is rather one-sided. That Cafiero sees in law only the machinations of capitalists, and not the ability of workers to stretch the ‘social contract’ by exercising their collective strength, shows another element of the gap stemming from the distinguishing characteristics of Marxism and anarchism alike. Here, the state-legal form figures

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Revolution of the Everyday as an artifice alone, a standard anarchist criticism, rather than a historically necessary artifice, the point of Marx. What Cafiero gets from the workday chapter is that the transcendent elements of class struggle, the revolutionary elements, must be located outside of and beyond law. If we want to abolish the present state of things, changing the law is hopeless and a waste of time. Marx, on the other hand, sees this total abolition, this new world, as already immanent in the ‘gradual’ activities of the workers to improve their conditions within bourgeois society. The struggle to shorten the working day in Capital does not merely prove the emptiness of reformism, but sharpens the consciousness of the proletariat as a class and as the social embodiment of capitalism’s self-destruction:

“It must be acknowledged that our worker emerges from the process of production looking different from when he entered it. In the market, as owner of the commodity ‘labour-power’, he stood face to face with other owners of commodities, one owner against another owner. The contract by which he sold his labour-power to the capitalist proved in black and white, so to speak, that he was free to dispose of himself. But when the transaction was concluded, it was discovered that he was no ‘free agent’, that the period of time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the period of time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not let go 'while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited'.”86

Here, Marx is relatively in the vein of Cafiero. Labor power, the worker’s only commodity which they can sell, is sold under an illusion. The worker is supposedly a “free agent” by law. They are “free” to sell their “own” commodity. In actuality, the worker’s very “freedom” from ownership of anything else drives them, by threat of starvation, to sell to the capitalist. The capitalist squeezes them for more work time as one strategy to extract greater and greater surplus-value. This is “The Martyrdom of the Worker” which enables “The Development of Capitalist Production.” Yet, out of the workers’ struggle against this very “vampire,” a glimpse of a new world emerges. The worker does not merely fall further into the

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez disappointment of victimhood in trying to change the law, but comes to a greater level of consciousness:

“For 'protection' against the serpent of their agonies, the workers have to put their heads together and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier by which they can be prevented from selling themselves and their families into slavery and death by voluntary contract with capital. In the place of the pompous catalogue of the 'inalienable rights of man' there steps the modest Magna Carta of the legally limited working day, which at last makes clear 'when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins'. Quantum mutatus ab illo! [What a great change from that time!]”87

We are now far beyond what Cafiero saw in Capital. The workers’ struggle itself, regardless of whether it results in total legal victory, clarifies for them their distinct philosophy of life. Instead of remaining within the abstract rights of the citizen or of ‘natural rights,’ the workers move through their very concrete and “modest” demands to distinguishing themselves from their form as commodities—as salespeople of labor-power. Rather than aiming for more work, they seek to limit work in the name of being something other than what they are when they’re clocked into a job. To distinguish the time “which the worker sells” and “when his own begins” is to begin to seek a way of living beyond the capital-relation, beyond just producing more surplus-value like a good little proletarian. The agency of their workers, their self-emancipation, thus comes out of their everyday life and everyday struggles even within the contracts of capitalist society. This is what Marx was getting at, and the lack thereof in Cafiero’s summary was the gap that he was speaking of. The ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ factors in capitalism’s demise are united in the people tied up in the capitalist relation. Of course, this distinction of “work” and “life” is still only a beginning. Feminist critics of Marx, like Tithi Bhattacharya, have pointed out that the distinction between the time “which the worker sells” and “his own” can become entangled back into capitalism.88 With the remaking

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Revolution of the Everyday of the world in the image of capital, which is another way of saying with the global ascendancy of the capitalist mode of production, capital wields the power to re-organize everyday life around its needs. Even if the individual capitalist doesn’t have legal control of us when we’re clocked out, the general class of capitalists can still have control over our lives off the clock. In particular, the promotion of the nuclear family and the unpaid domestic labor of women as a means of reproducing the worker’s ability to “work” by replenishing him in the realm of “life” is one way that this happens.89 Revolution practically emerges out of the everyday resistance to capital, there must be no gap in our theory. When Cafiero speaks directly of revolution, he does not sound entirely alien to the revolutionary project of Marx. Yet there are important differences which reveal the continuity of this gap:

“The disease is sweeping. It’s been a long time that the workers of the civilized world have known it; certainly not all, but a great number, and these are already preparing the means of action to destroy it. “They have considered these: “I. That the first source of every human oppression and exploitation is private property; “II. That the emancipation of workers (human emancipation) will not be founded upon a new class rule, but upon the end of all class privileges and monopolies and upon the equality of rights and duties; “III. That the cause of labor, the cause of humanity, does not have borders; “IV. That the emancipation of workers must be done at the hands of the workers themselves.”90

Marx certainly agreed with the central role of bourgeois private property to the capitalist system, but would not agree that it was the “first source of every human oppression and exploitation.” Already in 1844, he had said that rather: “Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labor, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.”91

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Further, Marx of course believed that the working class had to become the ruling class of society in order to ensure “the end of all class privileges and monopolies.” The working class could not abolish class relations, including its own identity as a class, before abolishing the world it is born of. This is Marx’s concept of the revolutionary process, rather than relying on an automatic realization of a “human emancipation.” In a sense, a collective humanity must be built by struggle within and against the old world. Finally, Marx certainly agreed with Cafiero that “the emancipation of the workers must be done at the hands of the workers themselves.” This was the substance of his and Engels’ critiques of utopian socialists. But, unlike Cafiero, this meant that Marx sought to express the glimpses of a new world already present in the struggle of the workers themselves. In a word, Cafiero’s call for emancipation does not concretely answer the question: How? Or, out of what basis? Cafiero foresaw this criticism of abstractness, and responded thusly:

“This is not the place for a revolutionary program, already elaborated and published long ago elsewhere in other books; I confine myself to conclude, replying with the words taken from the lips of a worker and placed in epigraph to this volume: ‘The worker has made everything; and the worker can destroy everything, because he can rebuild everything.’”92

This quoted statement expresses a strong revolutionary sentiment, but fails to reveal that the very fact that “[t]he worker has made everything” is what already holds the seeds of the worker’s self-emancipation. The aim of Marx’s dialectic of capital and revolution is that the ability of the worker to “destroy everything” and “rebuild everything” can be seen within the fact that “the worker has made everything.” Capital is created out of the expropriation and exploitation of workers, their being “free” in a dual sense—to sell their own labor-power as their commodity, and freedom from any other ability to survive. It is this position of the proletariat, as the desolation of capitalist society, in which Marx saw the promise of a class which could only abolish itself by abolishing class society as a whole.

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Revolution of the Everyday Kropotkin’s Communism Peter Kropotkin, also a Russian anarchist, is arguably the historical figure who is most representative of modern global anarchist thinking. He is also the closest comparison to Marx in terms of major anarchist philosophies. Both called for a revolution of everyday life from out of everyday life, but their divergences give a final clear view at the gap between Marx and anarchism. Beginning life as an aristocrat renowned for his natural scientific work, Kropotkin rejected his title and turned to revolutionary activity in the 1870s.93 Like many of his generation, he was inspired by the glimpse of a new world opened up by the 1871 Paris Commune. From his natural scientific background, he developed a theory of anarchism which especially emphasized connecting natural laws to anarchist principles.94 His Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) expressed this idea by critiquing excessive emphasis on “natural selection” or competition in evolution and emphasizing solidarity as an important factor to the survival of species.95 From this innovative perspective, Kropotkin expressed his skepticism of both utopianism and of a “progressive” character in capitalism.96 He tried to point towards a communism already present in everyday life, especially as something inherent to the nature of humans as a species.97 To him, it was clear that a natural order of anarcho-communism needed to rupture through the artificial and irrational system of statist and capitalist society.98 In the early 1890s, he set out to lay out his vision of this anarcho-communist society in The Conquest of Bread (1892). Around the same time, he was writing the essays which would make up a book with much the same themes titled Fields, Factories, and Workshops (1899). Kropotkin appealed against the irrationality of capitalism for the natural rationality of communism, pointing out the communism he already saw in our everyday practices:

“The consequences which spring from the original act of monopoly spread through the whole of social life. Under pain of death, human societies are forced to return to first principles: the means of production being the collective work of humanity, the product should be the collective property of the race. Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to all. All things are for all men, since all men have need of

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez them, since all men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate everyone’s part in the production of the world’s wealth.”99

A new, stateless, classless, moneyless society, organized on the basis of mutual aid and collective labor, was possible. Cooperation had created society, and stood as the very basis of human nature. To realize communism meant to realize the natural premises of society itself, which had been obscured by the delusions of class society. Kropotkin considered “Collectivism,” a label under which he included Marx, to fall within these delusions. It should be noted that he wrote this long after Marx had died in 1883, but addressed the immediate legacy of Marx in European socialist movements. By putting forward the slogan “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their contributions,” Kropotkin believed that the “Collectivists” operated well within the logic of the capitalist wage system. He particularly took issue with their distinction between skilled (“complex”) and unskilled (“simple”) labor in remuneration:

“Well, to establish this distinction would be to maintain all the inequalities of present society. It would mean fixing a dividing line, from the beginning, between the workers and those who pretend to govern them. It would mean dividing society into two very distinct classes—the aristocracy of knowledge placed above the horny-handed lower orders—the one doomed to serve the other; the one working with its hands to feed and clothe those who, profiting by their leisure, study how to govern their fosterers.”100

He does, however, throw a bone to Marx, as opposed to his social-democratic followers:

“We know the answer we shall get. They will speak of ‘scientific socialism’; they will quote bourgeois economists, and Marx too, to prove that a scale of wages has its raison d’etre, as ‘the labour force’ of the engineer will have cost more to society than the ‘labour force’ of the navvy. In fact—have not economists tried to prove to us that if an engineer is

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Revolution of the Everyday paid twenty times more than a navy it is because the ‘necessary’ outlay to make an engineer is greater than that necessary to make a navy? And has not Marx asserted that the same distinction is equally logical between two branches of manual labour? He could not conclude otherwise, having taken up on his own account Ricardo’s theory of value, and upheld that goods are exchanged in proportion to the quantity of work socially necessary for their production.”101

He quite clearly thinks of Marx as an uncritical follower of David Ricardo, the bourgeois political economist. Like the other Ricardian socialists, Marx is supposed to believe that there is an exactly measurable quantity of “socially necessary (minimum average) labor-time” in each individual commodity. On this basis, Kropotkin ends up believing that Marx thought the solution was for the ‘full value’ of an individual’s labor to go their wages:

“The evil of the present system is therefore not that the ‘surplus value’ of production goes to the capitalist, as Rodbertus and Marx said, thus narrowing the socialist conception and the general view of the capitalist system; the surplus value itself is but a consequence of deeper causes. The evil lies in the possibility of a surplus value existing, instead of a simple surplus not consumed by each generation; for, that a surplus value should exist, means that men, women and children are compelled by hunger to sell their labour for a small part of what this labour produces, and still more so, of what their labour is capable of producing. But this evil will last as long as the instruments of production belong to the few.”102

Kropotkin argues that surplus-value comes ultimately from the monopoly of capitalists on the means of production, a monopoly akin to all other class societies through which one part of society controls the surplus that the other produces. Naturally, this means the means of production should be controlled by the people who work, and the surplus should be distributed to them according to need. Kropotkin considers this in line with natural rationality, while capitalism is irrational.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez There can be no exact measure of the value of each product, and the law of equivalence operating in exchange is alien to the basic premises of human sociality.103 To try and distribute “according to contribution” misses the point, and represses the basic human instincts of unselfish solidarity and mutual aid.104 The rule of equivalents means dividing society and social labor up in a way that is untrue, when humanity has survived and defined itself as a species purely out of its natural inclination to give without expectation of equivalent exchange.105 Each human being contributes to the labor of the other. Society, sociality, mutuality, solidarity— these are the premises of any of our individual actions. We cannot act without acting on the ground laid by the labor of previous generations, we cannot flourish unless people freely exchange their knowledge with us and ensure our ability to flourish (for instance, by producing our needs through their labor). It is therefore a myth, and a harmful one at that, to speak of individual contribution. The irony in this criticism of Marx is that Marx agreed almost entirely with Kropotkin’s criticisms!106 He also considered the attempt to exactly measure individual contribution to be ultimately arbitrary from the perspective of cooperative labor. This arbitrariness, however, misses the way that “the money form” is what “conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly.”107 He had already criticized Proudhon in 1847 for advocating such a system with ‘full value’ going to the producer. Just like Kropotkin, he said that was more Ricardian than communist, and that Ricardo described value as the logic of bourgeois society. He would also agree with Kropotkin that state power ensures, or rather coerces, the conditions for the sale of labor-power. Primitive accumulation, typically carried out through governmental means, forces the separation of laborers from the means of production.108 The capitalist class, through this power of monopoly, owns the means of production. The workers can only purchase their needs in the society of commodities by selling their only commodity (laborpower) in exchange for money. They sell it to the capitalists who monopolize the means of production. The capitalist buys their labor-power in this coerced situation, thus also owning the products of their concrete labor—including their surplus-value.

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Revolution of the Everyday Kropotkin is not wrong about the role of this monopoly relationship in capitalism. At the same time, capital is also an impersonal power, a power beyond the personhood of specific capitalists.109 Marx quotes two French sayings to illustrate the distinction of this capitalist power —there can be “No land without its lord,” but “Money has no master.”110 Even capitalists find themselves compelled to “Accumulate, accumulate![…] save, save, i.e. reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value or surplus product into capital!”111 Production ultimately does not even have them as an end. Production seems to be for its own sake, accumulation of capital as an end in itself. A capitalist’s relation with their capital is not an absolute relation and they have significantly more autonomy choice than their workers. The point is that this draws our attention to a broader concept of the capital relation than what Kropotkin offers us. The capital relation is unique compared to previous forms of monopoly and domination. It isn’t just that we are directly dominated by a boss, a person. We are all dominated by this society itself, the whole social machine has run out from us and now stands above as a power over us. The point of focusing on the mechanics of value is to show that the capitalist class does not simply establish this by sheer force alone. Though any class society is defined by relations of distinction and domination, capitalism must be understood as an overall social system, and an impersonal system. Even capitalists are subject to the law of value. Value is “gravity” for all classes in a capitalist society. Like gravity, this doesn’t mean you’re immediately sucked into it and flattened (under normal circumstances). You feel it as a pulling force, a basic direction, which you act in relation to. You feel it more or less intensely according to your characteristics, your situation, your environmental context, etc,but you feel it. Other things appear as contingent and/or illusory compared to value, which appears as the truth of the world. Value is not anything premised on ‘eternal justice,’ nor is it premised on ‘monopoly’ alone. Value is the way that total social labor-time is distributed on a total social scale in capitalism.112 Value is the planless plan of capital. Individual capitalists or groups of capitalists can certainly use force to influence distribution, for example through dictatorial policies over society, but they cannot just create value arbitrarily. Value ultimately operates beyond them—it is literally the expression of our total social relations under capitalism. If one tries to abolish it

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez immediately by force, it exerts itself indirectly. Value is not just supply and demand. Value is the system as a whole, the operation of the entire system of production and exchange in the name of feeding capital. Marx did not disagree that the monopoly power of capitalists affected prices. This is a major subject of discussion in the third volume of Capital. In the first volume, he does not yet distinguish between values and prices because he is starting off with general capital, or capitalin-general. This means two things: 1. He sees the divergence of prices and value as expressed in competition between many capitals. and 2. He sees total social value as equivalent to total prices of production.113 Marx’s criticism of Proudhon, pointing out the divergence of abstract commodified labor and the concrete, living labor involved in production, pointed in the direction of value as “gravity.” The ‘full value of labor’ cannot be the basis of transcending capitalism, because abstract or average labor-time is ultimately the way that capitalism unites individual and social labor into a social system. Thus, in Capital, Marx offered a brief vision of a different first step towards transcendence:

“Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labourpower in full self-awareness as one single social labour force. All the characteristics of Robinson [Crusoe]’s labour are repeated here, but with the difference that they are social instead of individual. All Robinson’s products were exclusively the result of his own personal labour and they were therefore directly objects of utility for him personally. The total product of our imagined association is a social product.”114

By comparing this association to Crusoe, Marx makes the point of its freedom and individuality. It is not ‘split,’ it is not strictly unaware of what it is doing. It is not dominated by what it makes, as capital dominates the human beings that create it. It is “an association of free men” who act “in full self-awareness as one single labour force.” Rather than the total social

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Revolution of the Everyday product being value distributed across different sectors of a ‘split’ society, it is directly a social product for “our imagined association.”

“One part of this product serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another part is consumed by the members of the association as means of subsistence. This part must therefore be divided amongst them. The way this division is made will vary with the particular kind of social organization of production and the corresponding level of social development attained by the producers.”115

Distribution of the product is direct, conscious, and planned by the “association of free men,” unlike the unconscious and only indirectly social distribution of capitalism. In 1875, Marx would add that this distribution would include both deductions to serve as “fresh means of production” and increased “social” parts of the product to go to “whatever is dedicated to the collective satisfaction of needs, like schools, health services etc.” while “[the general administrative costs] will be very significantly restricted from the outset, and it will diminish proportionately as the new society develops.”116 This distribution, and the definition of subsistence, would vary socially and historically.

“We shall assume, but only for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour-time. Labour-time would in that case play a double part. Its apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the correct proportion between the different functions of labour and the various needs of the associations. On the other hand, labour-time also serves as a measure of the part taken by each individual in the common labour, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social relations of the individual producers, both towards their labour and the products of their labour, are here transparent in their simplicity, in production as well as in distribution.”117

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Marx does not speak in the terms of the “Collectivists,” though he speaks of distribution by labor-time. He does not foreclose that distribution within a value-logic. Instead, labor-time is merely a measure to be apportioned “in accordance with a definite social plan.” Marx would expand on the relationship of this to communism in the 1870s. The “Collectivists” which Kropotkin attacked were largely German social-democrats, who in turn took more theoretical influence from Ferdinand Lassalle than Marx. Lassalle and Marx had met during the 1848 wave of revolutions, though Marx very quickly grew to dislike him.118 Lassalle was genuinely a ‘state socialist,’ becoming a political ally of Marx and Engels primarily because of their common disagreement with the ‘antistatists’ of the International. Most of Bakunin’s criticisms lobbied against Marx—that he was a Pan-German nationalist, that he was a statist, that he was a reformist—were ultimately true of Lassalle instead.119 In the late 1860s, some of the early German ‘Marxists’ formed the Social Democratic Workers’ Party.120 By 1875, they aimed to merge with the Lassallean General German Workers’ Association in order to create the modern Social Democratic Party of Germany.121 This merger was to be on the basis of a party platform called the Gotha Programme. This Programme became the target of Marx’s ire, and an opportunity for him to strongly distinguish his critique of capitalism and vision of revolutionary transformation from the Lassalleans. Marx’s critique of the Programme sounds thoroughly Kropotkinist. Against the lukewarm suggestions of the Programme, he suggested an approach which considers such “workerist” perspectives as transient. Marx touches again on the issues which Kropotkin pointed out in a “Collectivist” situation where, for the producer, “The same quantity of labour he puts into society in one form comes back to him in another.”122 He agrees with the criticism that “the principle here is the same as the one that applies in the exchange of commodities, so far as the exchange is one of equal values[…] a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount in another form.”123 This affinity to the logic of commodity exchange is true even in a situation where “no one can contribute anything except his own labour, and nothing can become a person’s property except the individual means of consumption.”124 Marx, however, once again distinguishes this initial, emergent arrangement from the outright capitalist society because “principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads, and

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Revolution of the Everyday anyway in commodity exchange the exchange of equivalents exists only on average, not in each individual case.”125 What he is referring to here is the dual character of labor under capitalism— abstract average or general labor, which is what operates in the world of commodities, and concrete individual labor, which is the living labour that actually produces new surplus-values. Marx goes further, arguing that this equal right ultimately has not yet transcended “bourgeois limitations.”126 With the common standard of labor establishing an equality of measure, inequality still manifests (exactly as Kropotkin argued). It is ultimately an “unequal right for unequal labor,” since it “acknowledges no distinctions of class, because everyone is a worker just like everyone else, but it tacitly recognises unequal individual talent and hence productivity in labour as natural privileges. Therefore in content it is a right to inequality, like all rights.”127 He strikes a note very reminiscent of anarchist criticism. Right, premised on the existence of law and typically some form of state ‘above’ society, only conceals the inequality or individuality of the rights-holders. Right abstracts a single characteristic from their manifold characteristics in order to establish a common standard across unique individuals—again, he sounds like Stirner. Because of this inequality of the equal right, “one worker will in fact receive more than another, be richer than another.”128 The solution? “To avoid all these faults, rights would have to be unequal, instead of equal.”129 That is, the individuality of each would have to be the premise of society. There could be no more state, no more law, no more equivalence. Nothing could stand apart from the individuals who make up society. However, where Marx disagrees with the anarchist solution is when he says that: “these faults are unavoidable in the first phase of communist society when it has just emerged from capitalist society after a long and painful birth.”130 This is a product of the first negation, of transcending capitalism still on its own basis. Thus, because we are still on bourgeois grounds, we must remember that: “Rights can never be higher than the economic form of society and the cultural development which is conditioned by it.”131 This is essentially the same as Marx’s contention against Bakunin. One cannot immediately leap into a totally qualitatively new society by a sheer act of will. Valueproduction drags us along, it permeates every aspect of our lives. Revolution is not a question of

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez will alone, of divine force blasting value out of existence. The force and arc of revolution must account for the pull of value if we are to leave it behind in the dustbin of history. Otherwise, we fall back into the orbit of capital, perhaps no longer seeing price tags and police and so assuming we are in a totally new world. But the power of capital remains, and it continues to influence the distribution of abundance and scarcity alike until, through long and direct struggle against it, we have established labor as a prime want for life, as the very embodiment of our freedom and openness to be what we will. Revolution both emerges out of everyday life and seeks to transcend it, yet the process of revolution will necessarily retain elements of the existing state of affairs. The literal organization of our working days, of our concept of selves in relation to society, of our labor, is still recognizably “stamped with the birthmarks of the old society.”132 Marx’s vision of a communism developed on its own ground, the negation of the initial negation, is much closer to Kropotkin. Here, in communism-as-communism instead of communism-relative-to-capitalism, communism as an independent thing, we see the unique characteristics of the new society. Now, “the subjection of individuals to the division of labour, and thereby the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has disappeared[…]”.133 There must be no “aristocracy of knowledge placed above the horny-handed lower orders,” as Kropotkin said. Labor must become a free expression of individuality, “not merely a means to live but the foremost need in life[…]”.134 This will be established “after the multifarious development of individuals has grown along with their productive powers, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly.”135 This can only be possible if cooperative labor, social labor, has been developed to a certain point. In a word, labor must be socialized, and society must have a certain density of interconnections. In his criticism of Stirner and Bakunin, Marx had identified this socializing process with modern capitalism. This socializing, which connected millions and now billions of people through a network of market dependencies, does not directly acknowledge itself as such. Society is mediated by sales, purchases, contracts—relationships between things, not people. It is only communism which realizes the truth of society to itself—again, Marx agrees with Kropotkin.

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Revolution of the Everyday Out of this ground of capitalist development, where labor has been socialized in the “hidden abode” of production, labor can be socialized directly through social revolution. Only through this revolutionary process, emerging out of the socialized everyday, “can the limited horizon of bourgeois right be wholly transcended, and society can inscribe on its banner: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”136 This communist society is very similar to that described in The Conquest of Bread. The key difference is that Marx focused primarily on the process, the how, of its development. He did not want to describe a plan for an alternative social system extensively. He wanted to critique within the realm of everyday life, to show how the path to this new world leads out from where we are. Kropotkin also sought to point out a communism immanent in everyday life, but believed this new world could already stand on relatively solid ground by the inherent communality of human nature. Communism meant simply recognizing the truth of human nature. To Marx, there could be no guarantees of nature: “Man,” “Ego,” “Justice,” and “Nature” could not serve as foundations. To reach our communist Ought, we had to work through the muck of our capitalist everyday Is. Kropotkin’s criticisms of the “Collectivist” wage system are important and useful to counter the myth of meritocracy, and to point towards the need for communism. He is especially insightful in his arguments showing that communism means putting society on a social basis, recognizing the truth of society to itself. However, after exposing that meritocracy, that the strictly measurable individuality of labor-contribution is a myth, we are left with a question: Why does labor appear as individual anyways? If that’s untrue, then why do things appear that way, and what does that mean for realizing directly social labor on a social scale (communism)? This is what Marx wants us to think through, and what he tries to work through to pick up a path towards communism. Marx’s critique of capitalism has exactly this intent, including his insistence on analyzing the value-form, prices, abstract labor, socially necessary (minimum average) labor-time, surplus-value, etc. Kropotkin thus misses the point of Marx’s critique of capital. Marx’s concept of the dual character of labor, and his “value theory of labor,” is meant to describe our specific historical situation of indirectly social labor and alienated sociality. It is the most universalized, densest

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez social system yet to exist—and yet it does not directly operate on the premise of sociality. We cannot return to non-capitalist sociality, which is now rendered pre-capitalist. Instead, we must realize the truth of sociality by working through capitalism itself. Our “creative nothing,” our freedom, can only realize itself through this very concrete social situation. Marx insisted that we focus on this historical specificity of our situation in order to guarantee transcendence from out of it, to avoid creating a mirror image of our existing society.137 By understanding the system, we can understand how to escape it. We cannot immediately leap into something totally qualitatively new. We have to work through the riddle, we have to answer it before we can take steps into a new world standing on its own foundation. This is not to say that Kropotkin does not understand the need for a revolutionary process, or does not try to trace the immanence of revolution in everyday lives. Rather, his approach does not identify the specificity of capitalism as a social system that we have to work through. Though Marx’s approach seems to get us caught in the muck of metaphysics, it does so in order to capture the way capitalism works and to express points of departure within the system itself. Modern Marxist critiques that touch exactly on the issue of value-production hold much more water than Kropotkin’s. In particular, social reproduction theorists are right that he neglected the mystified relations behind the reproduction of labor-power at a certain level, especially the labor of housewives. He neglected how these relations, hidden behind the abstract “equal right” of commodity exchange, could enable the (male) worker to make peace with their situation, for both state and the masculine trade union-bureaucrats alike to ensure that the system incorporates them.138 The role of unpaid domestic laborers in reproducing labor-power, which in turn produces new value, is something revealed by engaging with the issue of value itself. While Marx in Capital and elsewhere assumed that capitalism would yield a universalization of the wage-labor relation, what we have seen within his approach itself is that the power of capital distributes total social labor-time (value) according to the demands of accumulation across the social system. This extends to waged and unwaged labor, exchange and non-exchange relations, production and consumption. The trouble with capital is that it permeates life even where we try to be something

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Revolution of the Everyday other than workers and bosses, even in the romanticized abode (really, the site of exploitation) of housewives. The gravity of value pulls us even where there isn’t a price tag in front of us, and it does so even where we think we’re in an oasis of authentic, non-money relationships.

The Revolution of the Everyday Marx’s lifelong engagements with anarchists reveal a consistent potential gap of Is and Ought in anarchism. This is not to say that all anarchists are ignorant of this approach—Fredy Perlman, for instance, was a pioneer in recovering Marx’s critique of capitalism. The problem is, rather, where political conclusions do not emerge directly out of this immanent critique of our existing order. There is a problem of failing to connect the two, either trying to absolutely condemn the Is and absolutely vindicate the Ought (Cafiero) or to become too complacent in the Is (Proudhon). Marx identified the common appeal to will by anarchists, meant to be an alternative to historical determinism, as an expression of this issue. Will is a factor in society, yes, but will is always historical and social. One can only express a will through an existing, concrete situation. That will already has a concrete content which is inseparable from the situation, including its limitations. Rather than neglecting the issue of means and ends, Marx took this issue very seriously. He did not believe that we could or should try to already perfectly embody, in miniature, a new society. We have no foundation to stand on in human nature to assert such a thing, nor in anything else. We have to work through the tangled thread of society as we come into it in order to reach something absolutely new. That means the new society is built through the actions of individuals who are completely of the old society. Us and our world are co-creative—we create the world, the world creates us. The two cannot be separated. The only transcendent element of historical actors is their determinate freedom within determinate situations. Our “creative nothing” is a determinate negation.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez This is the substance of Marx’s approach to capitalism. Marx thus rejected both those who projected too much of the capitalist Is into the future Ought and those who tried to separate the Is and Ought entirely, whether reactionary defenders of capitalism or revolutionary critics. Marx’s analysis of the dialectic of capitalism may cause some discomfort. He seemed to emphasize the “progressive” role of capitalism too much. Bakunin already objected to his analysis of capitalism as historically necessary. Some might insist instead on a pure Ought against an impure is Is, a pure No. Capitalism is intolerable, it is evil. We cannot say there is anything “progressive” in it. There is “good” and there is “evil,” and the two are absolutely separate. This moralizing, however, is only an abstract negation. It is not actually a negation of the situation, because it doesn’t find the negativity as a thread in the system itself. It is not situated, it tries to get beyond the situation by saying No to all of it and therefore simply becomes complacent with the Yes of the system existing. Like Marx said of Stirner, it only breaks with one’s subjective consent to the system. It does not break the system itself. This has been understood by most anarchists, including Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Stirner in some moments. The difference is that Marx took up an extensive analysis of our current social totality, our system, to ask how we can say No through the Is. This is especially clear in his advice to workers about trade unions and their sectional struggles in the lectures we know as Value, Price and Profit (1865). There, he lauded and defended the ability of trade unions to influence the rate of wages. Rather than there being some “Iron Law of Wages” (a Lassallean concept anyways), workers had the power to influence the norm through struggle. Trade union struggles were therefore very important in the struggle for working class self-emancipation. They could not be enough in themselves, however. They remained within the identity of the working class within capitalism, as a “capitalist” class. Why? He answered:

“Trades Unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of

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Revolution of the Everyday simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organised forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system.”139

Marx did not reject trade union struggle. Rather, he criticized Proudhon for this.140 He considered them as a start in everyday struggle, but only a start. They remained within a sectional struggle against many capitals, against “the effects of the existing system.” Revolution must mean moving from everyday life, our subordination to specific capitalists or bosses, to capital-in-general. From our everyday lives to the society that they make up, and that makes us. Trade unions fight in the realm of many capitals, against specific firms. One can imagine One Big Union to confront all the capitals at once, as the Industrial Workers of the World did, but it is close to impossible in practice. Further, it risks excluding unwaged or ‘private’ labors, and other sites where the value relation sustains beyond when we are just clocked in. General capital, capital as a whole, is the capitalist mode of production itself. It is a conceptual abstraction from specific capitals, but it takes on a greater social reality as capital remakes the world around itself, exerting a gravitational pull which defines the One of capital-assuch. The historical creation of general capital, capital-as-such, is the triumph of the specifically capitalist mode of production globally. Global finance, global capitalist cartels, are the means through which this general capital operates. Thus, social revolution must erupt throughout the networks of society. It must target the general capital, starting from a confrontation against many capitals. These confrontations throughout society’s nervous system are not only on shop floors. They extend throughout, to everywhere that people attack the domination of value-production. Marx’s dialectic of revolution can offer a guide to us in asking what strategies will bring us along the thread to a totally new world, and whether prevailing strategies bring us in this direction or leave us trapped within the system. We can ask: Do they jump too far, trying to leap towards absolute change “like a shot from a pistol[?]”141 Here we can criticize absolutist approaches to revolution. Wanting immediate and total revolution without working through the threads of the

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez situation ultimately means no revolution at all. You might burn a few things or smash a few windows, but you do not fundamentally change the order of things as a whole. On the other hand, we can ask if strategies become too positivist. Do they lead us to becoming complacent with the order of things? Does “working within the system” just make us a harmless part of the system? This is the common issue in reformism. Eventually, reforms can become an end in themselves when the ‘reformers’ become part of the system. This is especially true of elites whose entire career, whose entire livelihood, depends on the ‘reform’ industry. Insofar as they become calcified bureaucrats, their interests come into direct contradiction to the masses of the working class. As part of a revolutionary approach, we have to ask: Is fighting for this or that reform actually on the path to the working class taking control of society? Or is it just a means for the capitalist state to manage the social totality, to make sure that it’s viable as a cohesive whole? This is the issue Cafiero saw in engaging with the law. We do not need to follow his absolute political indifferentism. Instead, we can try to straddle between the two (indifferentism or reformism) the way that Marx did on the issue of the workday. The question is the concrete situation itself, not just a list of policies on a balance sheet. We should not just focus on the content of the reform, but how we are getting there. Is it by voting, or by seizing it from the state? This is an issue of paternalism versus class strength. Marx focused on the everyday lives and the everyday philosophies of workers as a source of transcendence, but not as sufficient in themselves. They are first negations of the existing order which must go further. Workers are the negativity of capitalist society, but they are still within capital. Freedom is always defined within a defined situation, but it is also the power for us to remake that situation by unraveling it. The self-emancipation of the proletariat is identical to its self-abolition. Marx’s dialectic of capital thus aimed to be within and against capital, as well as outside and beyond it. This latter concern is where he overlaps with anarchist and decolonial critiques. His specificity, however, holds bountiful lessons for us to learn from. There is no deeper, no transcendent foundation which we can rely on in revolting against capital. Revolution must come

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Revolution of the Everyday out of the immanence of our situation itself. Revolution must be revolution of the everyday to transform the everyday.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez *Special thanks to the Negation Magazine editorial team for help in editing this article

Footnotes 1

Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Boston, Massachusetts: Brill, 2012), pp. 4-8. Zhang Yibing, Back to Marx: Changes of Philosophical Discourse in the Context of Economics (Göttingen University Press, 2014), pp. 67-68. 3 Zhang, Back to Marx, pp. 68-69. 4 “What do I take as my principle? Ego and alter ego; ‘egoism” and “communism’; for both are as inseparable as head and heart. Without egoism, you have no head; without communism, you have no heart,” Zawar Hanfi, trans., “Fragments Concerning the Characteristics of My Philosophical Development,” in The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings, by Ludwig Feuerbach (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2012), 265–96. This quote should be taken in the context of Feuerbach’s earlier identification of love (heart) and reason (head) as key components of the natural being of “man,” “What, then, is the nature of man, of which he is conscious, or what constitutes the specific distinction, the proper humanity of man? Reason, Will, Affection. To a complete man belong the power of thought, the power of will, the power of affection. The power of thought is the light of the intellect, the power of will is energy of character, the power of affection is love. Reason, love, force of will, are perfections—the perfections of the human being—nay, more, they are absolute perfections of being. To will, to love, to think, are the highest powers, are the absolute nature of man as man, and the basis of his existence. Man exists to think, to love, to will,” Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. Marian Evans, 2nd ed. (London, United Kingdom: Trübner & Co, 1881), p. 3. 5 Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, ed. David Leopold (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 62-64. 6 Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 5. 7 Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 5. 8 Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 7. 9 Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 7. 10 Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 17. 11 Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York, New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1911), pp. 50-51. 12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 151. 13 Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 271. 14 Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 115. 15 Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 227. 16 Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 161. 17 Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 324. 18 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York, New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 17. 19 Zhang, Back to Marx, pp. 233-234. 20 Friedrich Engels, Marx & Engels Collected Works: Letters 1844-1851, vol. 38 (Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), pp. 11-12. 21 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, including Theses on Feuerbach (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), p. 570. 22 Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, p. 570. 23 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 137. 24 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 137. 25 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 264. 26 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, pp. 264-265. 2

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Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?, ed. and trans. Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 13. 28 Proudhon, What Is Property?, pp. 214-216. 29 Proudhon, What Is Property?, p. 205. 30 Zhang, Back to Marx, pp. 62-63. 31 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Paris, France: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), p. 22. 32 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, pp. 102-103. 33 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 103. 34 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 105. 35 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 104. 36 L. Gambone, “Proudhon’s Libertarian Thought and the Anarchist Movement,” Spunk Library, 1996, http:// www.spunk.org/texts/writers/proudhon/sp001863.html. 37 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 39. 38 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 43. 39 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 48. 40 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 202. 41 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 202. 42 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto (New York, New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 81. 43 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 202. 44 Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 223. 45 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 203. 46 Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, p. 204. 47 Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (New York, New York: Dover Publications, 1970), p. 30; Ann Robertson, “The Philosophical Roots of the Marx-Bakunin Conflict,” Marxists Internet Archive, December 2003, https:// www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/bio/robertson-ann.htm. 48 Robertson, “Philosophical Roots.” 49 Bakunin, God and the State, p. 57. 50 Bakunin, God and the State, p. 10. 51 Bakunin, God and the State, p. 29. 52 Bakunin, God and the State, p. 30. 53 Robertson, “Philosophical Roots.” 54 Henryk Katz, The Emancipation of Labor: A History of the First International (New York, New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), pp. 99-100. 55 Mikhail Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State (Anarchy is Order, 1999), p. 36. 56 Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State, pp. 66-68. 57 Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State, p. 51. 58 Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State, pp. 64-67. 59 Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State, pp. 64-65. 60 Joseph Stalin, “Speech at Celebration Meeting of the Moscow Soviet of Working People’s Deputies and Moscow Party and Public Organizations (1941)” (Marxists Internet Archive, November 6, 1941), https://www.marxists.org/ reference/archive/stalin/works/1941/11/06.htm. 61 Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State, p. 68. In this specific line of critique, Bakunin preceded and apparently influenced later decolonial critiques of Marxism. See, for example, Willy Green, “Self-Determination and African National Liberation,” Soulbook 10 (1975): 28–48. 62 Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State, pp. 67-68.

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Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, ed. Marshall Shatz (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 37-40. 64 Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, p. 140. 65 Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, pp. 140-141. 66 Mikhail Bakunin, “On Marx and Rothschild,” libcom.org, 1871, https://libcom.org/library/bakunin-marxrothschild. 67 Karl Marx, “Conspectus of Bakunin’s ‘Statism and Anarchy,’” Marxists Internet Archive, 1874, https:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/04/bakunin-notes.htm. 68 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1., trans. Ben Fowkes (London, United Kingdom: Penguin In Association With New Left Review, 1976), pp. 468-469. 69 Marx, “Conspectus.” 70 Katz, The Emancipation of Labor, pp. 57-58. 71 Katz, The Emancipation of Labor, pp. 14-20. 72 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 243. 73 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 222. 74 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 222. 75 Mathieu Léonard, “Carlo Cafiero and the International in Italy: From Marx to Bakunin,” in “Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth”: The First International in a Global Perspective, ed. Fabrice Bensimon, Quentin Deluermoz, and Jeanne Moisand (Boston, Massachusetts: Brill, 2018), p. 368. 76 Léonard, “Carlo Cafiero,” p. 372. 77 Léonard, “Carlo Cafiero,” pp. 374-376. 78 Léonard, “Carlo Cafiero,” p. 376. 79 Marcello Musto, “When Marx Translated Capital,” Jacobin, September 17, 2022, https://jacobin.com/2022/09/ karl-marx-capital-das-capital-french-translation-150-years. 80 Karl Marx, Karl Marx’s Capital: Briefly Summarized by Carlo Cafiero, trans. Paul M. Perrone (Marxists Internet Archive, 2018), https://anarch.cc/uploads/carlo-cafiero-karl-marxs-capital.pdf. 81 “First published in 1879, this work was highly praised, even by Marx, whose opinion of the work can be read in the Appendix at the end of this translation,” Paul M. Perrone, Karl Marx’s Capital, p. 3. 82 Marx, Karl Marx’s Capital, p. 65. 83 Carlo Cafiero, Karl Marx’s Capital, p. 5. 84 Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 until Today (New York, New York: Bookman Associates, 1958), pp. 87-91. 85 Cafiero, Karl Marx’s Capital, p. 16. 86 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., pp. 415-416. 87 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., p. 416. 88 Tithi Bhattacharya, “Introduction: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory,” in Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya (London, United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 2017), pp. 12-14. 89 Bhattacharya, “Introduction,” pp. 10-12. 90 Cafiero, Karl Marx’s Capital, p. 63. 91 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 81. 92 Cafiero, Karl Marx’s Capital, p. 64. 93 Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings, ed. Marshall Shatz (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. viii-x. 94 Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, pp. xvi-xix. 95 Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, p. xviii. 96 Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, pp. 68–69, 103.

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Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, pp. 32-36. Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, p. 19. 99 Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, p. 19. 100 Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, p. 149. 101 Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, p. 149. 102 Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, p. 89. 103 Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, pp. 152-155. 104 As an aside, it is interesting to note that Kropotkin’s compatriot Errico Malatesta strongly critiqued his determinist sense of human nature “Kropotkin adhered to the materialist philosophy that prevailed among scientists in the second half of the 19th century, the philosophy of Moleschott, Buchner, Vogt and others; and consequently his concept of the Universe was rigorously mechanistic. “According to his system, Will (a creative power whose source and nature we cannot comprehend, just as, likewise, we do not understand the nature and source of ‘matter’ or of any of the other ‘first principles’)—I was saying, Will which contributed much or little in determining the conduct of individuals—and of society, does not exist and is a mere illusion. All that has been, that is and will be, from the path of the stars to the birth and decline of a civilization, from the perfume of a rose to the smile on a mother’s lips, from an earthquake to the thoughts of a Newton, from a tyrant’s cruelty to a saint’s goodness, everything had to, must, and will occur as a result of an inevitable sequence of causes and effects of mechanical origin, which leaves no possibility of variety. The illusion of Will is itself a mechanical fact. “Naturally if Will has no power, if everything is necessary and cannot be otherwise, then ideas of freedom, justice and responsibility have no meaning, and have no bearing on reality. “Thus logically all we can do is to contemplate what is happening in the world, with indifference, pleasure or pain, depending on one’s personal feelings, without hope and without the possibility of changing anything,” Errico Malatesta, “Peter Kropotkin—Recollections and Criticisms of an Old Friend,” in Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta, by Errico Malatesta, ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, California: PM Press, 2015), pp. 246-247. Yet Malatesta’s own emphasis on will was filled with holes as well, such that he found himself being showered with praise by a Fascist for advocating spiritual ideals against narrow material interests, as described in Errico Malatesta, “Interests and Ideals,” in The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader, ed. Davide Turcato, trans. Paul Sharkey (Oakland, California: AK Press, 2014), 431–34. 105 Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, p. 155. 106 Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, pp. 193-196. 107 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., pp. 168-169. 108 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., p. 876. 109 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., pp. 247-248. 110 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., p. 247 n. 1. 111 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., p. 742. 112 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (London, United Kingdom: Penguin Books In Association With New Left Review, 1981), p. 1022. 113 Marx, Capital, Vol. 3., pp. 1008-1016. 114 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., p. 171. 115 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., pp. 171-172. 116 Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx: Later Political Writings, ed. Terrell Carver (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 212. 117 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., p. 172. 118 Katz, The Emancipation of Labor, pp. 27-28. 119 Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, p. 188. 120 Katz, The Emancipation of Labor, pp. 43-44. 121 Katz, The Emancipation of Labor, pp. 43-44. 122 Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” p. 213. 123 Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” p. 213. 98

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Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” p. 213. Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” p. 214. 126 Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” p. 214. 127 Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” p. 214. 128 Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” p. 214. 129 Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” p. 214. 130 Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” p. 214. 131 Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” p. 214. 132 Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” p. 213. 133 Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” p. 214. 134 Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” p. 214. 135 Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” pp. 214-215. 136 Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” p. 215. 137 Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, p. 96. 138 Selma James, “Sex, Race, and Class (1974),” in Sex, Race, and Class: The Perspective of Winning, a Selection of Writings, 1952–2011 (Oakland, California: PM Press, 2012), pp. 92–101. 139 Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital and Value, Price and Profit (New York, New York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 62. 140 Karl Marx, “Political Indifferentism,” Marxists Internet Archive, 1873, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1873/01/indifferentism.htm. 141 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, ed. George di Giovanni (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 53. 125

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Fascist Decoloniality or, the Need for a Decolonial Communism

The decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo has promoted the slogan “neither capitalism nor communism, but decolonization.”1 Zeev Sternhell, a historian of fascism, summed up the birth of fascist politics as an attempt to be “Neither of the right nor of the left.”2 This is not to imply that all forms of decoloniality are fascist, or that all forms of fascism hold a decolonial impulse. Though there are certainly a wealth of mass movements advocating fascist decoloniality—in India, Russia, and Japan, for instance—there are endless examples of decoloniality with other orientations. To draw this connection is simply to say that such a phenomenon should drive us to reflect on the relationship of radical politics to bourgeois civilization. It is true that the framing of politics within left and right is an inheritance of the French Revolution, a Eurocentered bourgeois convention. Left and right are indeed the left and right wings of bourgeois civilization. They are two tendencies for bourgeois citizens to organize their society within the same basic order. Euro-bourgeois civilization is identical to global civilization. The left and right wings spread across the earth alongside the body of bourgeois civilization, even if left and right do not appear identical the world over. There is also a reason that those who wish to escape bourgeois civilization tend towards its ‘extremities’ in left and right. They seek to escape off of the feathers of the beast, but in the historical long run tend to merely give a new momentum and direction for the thing to stay in flight. Frantz Fanon understood this to be the fate for the bureaucratic

Fascist Decoloniality mainstream of 20th century decolonization, which he accurately predicted would lay the groundwork for the neo-colonial global system which we live in today.3 This co-optative tendency has become a central concern in the past 50+ years for decolonial, communist, and fascist movements alike. The desire of fascism to escape the bourgeois enframing of left and right is not alien to communism, though the two mean something different by it. Nevertheless, there is genuine overlap between fascism, communism, and decoloniality which indicates to us the pitfalls of liberation which we must be aware of in our long struggle to leave bourgeois civilization behind. Every liberation movement also contains the seeds of new forms of domination, revealing both its own weaknesses and the possibility for a deeper, more determinate sense of liberation.

Marxism and Decoloniality It is not uncommon for Marxists to dismiss (or admonish) decoloniality as mere bourgeois particularity, if not an outright fascist ideology of Blood and Soil. Such a criticism can take multiple forms—some, like the International Communist Current, characterize the concern of decolonization as illusory compared to that of the proletariat, while others, like Moishe Postone, focus on the narrow Romantic and antisemitic anti-capitalist positions associated with ‘Third Worldism.’4 These amount to universalist, or otherwise anti-particularist, critiques of what is perceived as narrow and reactionary in decolonization. Decoloniality is either in contradiction with history or is only a narrow and relative stage in the history of freedom. What must be focused on instead is an immanent critique of the capitalist social totality alone, which discovers or maintains the space for the realization of human freedom in history. While these criticisms can hold water for some forms of decoloniality, they are not accurate for all. Decoloniality is not one, and forms of decoloniality have many directions and forms. The nouns decoloniality, decolonization are only meant to describe a general theme and perspective of thought and practice, not as tightly-bound a tradition as something like Marxism. In some respects this is an advantage, in others it means that there can just as well be fascist decoloniality as a communist one. The practical experience of decolonization for the mass of the colonized, however, tends towards communist social revolution as the negation of class society.5

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Further, Marxist critique of decolonial particularity in favor of immanent critique can itself become complacent with the immanence of bourgeois civilization. In refusing to recognize a periphery or an exterior, it can become bound to cheering on the self-development of capitalism towards its culmination.6 What this means in political program is internalizing the values of bourgeois civilization, perceiving the tasks of communism as the living truth of bourgeois civilization or ‘Enlightenment.’ Such a perspective implies elite modernization, Eurocentrism, and an overestimation of the urban against the rural. If we insist that there is no value to worldviews exterior to bourgeois civilization, we risk adopting a complacent whiggish view of history in which it is an endless, linear accumulation of Progress towards some final end (in this case, Communism). Just as there are many possible orientations of decoloniality in relation to communism, there are many possible orientations of Marxism in relation to decoloniality. There has been a tradition of decolonial Marxism, or a common substance of Marxism and decoloniality, from the 20th century up until now. The Guyanese militant Walter Rodney described his own sense of the relation between Black Power and Marxism as “that tool, at the level of ideas, which will be utilized in dismantling the capitalist imperialist structure.”7 Bolivian politician and theorist Álvaro García Linera has also, in turn, identified a common heart between indianismo and Marxism despite their history of mutual suspicion.8 As many movements from the 20th century onward discovered, Marxism can itself become a guide for thinking through and practicing decolonization, even in spite of its metropolitan origins in Western Europe.9 As Frantz Fanon observed, “a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue.”10 In this perspective, the wealth of communism is opened up. Just as a Eurocentric system implies a bad abstraction, a false universal which incorporates most of the world as its underside and a raw material to define its own contours of being, Eurocentered Marxism implies a tendency towards one-sided communism. It is impossible for communism to truly enrich itself with determinations, with particular content and intelligence, without accounting for the whole of the earth. The Eurocentered earth is not only Europe. Europe is not actually the true core

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Fascist Decoloniality dynamism. This is the illusion of a Eurocentered perspective itself, the illusion from within the Veil.11 Eurocentrism is defined by the relationship of the West to the Rest, the global minority of the metropole to the global majority of the periphery. A communism wealthy with the histories presently united into global, universal history by bourgeois civilization can only become so by cutting along the grain. It must inhabit a decolonial perspective in order to recognize the social totality in its finitude, instead of from a perspective in which it appears infinite. In the closed immanence of a colonizer’s perspective, Euro-bourgeois civilization appears to be the universal, homogenous substance of human life itself. To understand the coloniality of power—especially that impersonal power of capital fundamental to modern bourgeois civilization—means to develop a stronger sense of liberation, or of what freedom must be. Freedom is always situational. Understanding one’s world situation means deepening one’s capacity for self-emancipation. Decolonization is not only a step along the history of freedom, but a lesson of liberation core to realizing freedom out of the ‘free’ society of bourgeois civilization. What Marxists must understand is that decolonization is not alien to communism—to decolonize must mean to decolonize all of social life, including decolonizing everyday life from the power of capital. Decoloniality does not have to be a threat to communism. It can be a refining and clarifying of communism. Marxism has techniques already amenable to decolonization, but decolonization must sharpen these tools. The need for this is revealed by the history of Marxism and its failure to recognize coloniality in its full extent, due to its originally Eurocentered perspective. In theorizing the development of capitalism and the world-market, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels initially assumed that the Western European mode of development would more or less be replicated abroad.12 By extension, they expected the ‘normal form’ of free labor, wage-labor, to be universalized in the world economy. As they realized, however, capitalism as a world-system articulates itself unevenly. The demands of general capital, world capital, for accumulation do not act homogeneously. Capital is a homogenizing force, but it does not act on the same terrain across the earth.13 It is strategic, it does not repeat the model of wage labor abstractly. Thus global capitalism has incorporated

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez chattel slavery, indentured servitude, corvée, and other forms of labor into the production of commodities and the accumulation of capital. Marx and Engels began to analyze these distinct articulations of capital, including the many forms which the wage relation can take, and opened up their analysis to a multilinear understanding of history.14 Though Marx and Engels put the analysis of colonization on the agenda, their followers did not necessarily follow in their sketch of the morphology of capitalism as a totality. The Polish Marxist Rosa Luxemburg, for instance, understood capital’s colonial expansion as stemming from its failure to close its circuits of accumulation.15 In her theory, capital needs a non-capitalist in order to realize capital through the consumption of capitalist commodities by non-capitalist modes of production. Once these non-capitalist exteriors have been exhausted by the expanding scale of capitalist production, the system breaks down.16 This theory posits the exploited exteriority of capital as strictly outside of bourgeois civilization. Though incorporated as a dependency, its essence is strictly exterior in a spatialcivilizational sense. The non-capitalist exterior is authentically itself, its selfhood as exteriority is not thoroughly mediated by Eurocentered capitalism except on its own edges. The metropole is the metropole, and the periphery is the periphery. The sense of capitalist totality here is rather one-dimensional—one has the spiral of capitalist production on the one hand, and the outside on the other. Coloniality is a frontier, an exterior—there is a certain step of distance between it and the everyday life of capitalist production. Though capital needs the exterior to realize its production on a total scale, totality is still separate from exteriority. For this weakness, the Polish Marxist economist Henryk Grossman critiqued Luxemburg’s model of capitalist reproduction. In his eyes, her strict separation of totality and exteriority appeared weak and plainly inaccurate.17 Her model displaces the core logic of capital to ‘frontiers,’ leaving a bourgeois political-economic understanding of the center as almost a closed system if not for the frontiers. Grossman, on the other hand, emphasizes the exploited as an underside to the system, not a strict exterior. Surplus-value is extracted within the totality of capital itself, even if it is produced outside of the contractual exchange of commodity laborpower for wages. Even where capital might appear as a spatially and civilizationally closed system (as it does in our neo-colonial situation), it lives through a vampirism of living labor.

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Fascist Decoloniality This is much closer to Marx, and reveals where Marx’s critique of capital overlaps with decoloniality in its picture of bourgeois civilization’s contours. It is exactly the appearance of universality that facilitates capitalist exploitation, the periphery is exploited by the Self-Same, the Universal exploits the exteriorized non-Universal. This exploitation is not a frontier to the logic of capital within, but permeates the entire system to its very core.18 Exploitation is at the very heart of capital. In spite of this strong insight, however, Marxists from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels to Vladimir Lenin and beyond underestimated or even dismissed the importance of settlercolonialism in understanding societies like the U. S. Marx explicitly repeated the genocidal myth of virgin soil in his letter to Lincoln, and Engels in 1848 supported the U. S. invasion of Mexico in spite of the overwhelming abolitionist opposition to it as an imperial war.19 To Marx and Engels, settlerism was a means for bourgeois civilization to spread and ensure the ‘normal,’ ‘civilized’ conflict of proletariat and bourgeoisie which has communism as its horizon. Even with their later re-evaluations of Indigenous societies such as the Haudenosaunee, they did not quite develop an understanding of what settlerism represented for the U. S.They believed that the completion of the U. S.’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ would ensure the development of a ripe capitallabor antagonism. Both Engels and Marx recognized that settlerism offered a pressure valve for global capitalism, allowing ‘redundant’ populations to be turned into indentured servants, farmers, land speculators, and soldiers instead of becoming part of the ‘dangerous classes’ in Europe.20 However, despite this insight, they did not appreciate the fundamentally counterrevolutionary character of settlerism within the U. S. Instead they identified quite strongly with the Yankees.21 Lenin repeated much of this same analysis, but his differences are significant. His study of American agriculture for materials in his debate on capitalist transition with the Narodniki enabled him to make deeper insights which must be extended. Lenin repeated the virgin soil myth just as Marx did, although he understood the consciously counterrevolutionary intention of settler policies like the Homestead Act. He noticed a similarity between Narodniki plans for land distribution and U. S. settlerism, arguing that “the American Republic has implemented in a capitalist way the ‘Narodnik’ idea of distributing unoccupied land to all applicants.”22 He further

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez identified Black workers as a core revolutionary mass in the U. S., recognizing in their conditions a racialized form of the class exploitation familiar to many ‘emancipated’ Russian serfs.23 However, his model of capitalist development in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) falsely posits discrete stages of free-competitive capitalism and imperialistmonopoly capitalism.24 This limited his ability to understand coloniality, though he was known among the socialists of his day for his intransigent advocacy of the right of self-determination and his attacks on imperial chauvinism. His two-stage analysis underestimates the domination already immanent in capitalism, although it is based on a dialectical model tracing the selfnegation of capitalism. Rather than a free-competitive stage of capitalism, the capitalist worldsystem should be understood as the world of 1492. Rather than having coloniality as its precapitalist predecessor or overripe form, coloniality and the capitalist mode of production go hand in hand.25 Where Lenin and Marx both reveal an extremely useful insight into settlerism is their analysis of the capitalist negation of individual private property. As Marx notes in Capital (1867), property as an individual possession, an extension of the individual, is swept away by capital, which has no ties to any individuals except by contract.26 Capital is not inherently bound to anyone—rather, they are bound to it. In the capitalist mode of production, the working classes are exploited by capital as a whole, and thus the capitalist class as a whole, rather than only a few aristocrats. They might be able to choose the employers they sell their labor-power to, but they are compelled to participate in this exchange of commodities under pain of starvation or legal sanction. Marx explicitly tied this insight into the tension between settler individual private property, a practice encouraged by the state in the name of expropriating Indigenous peoples, and the demands of capital accumulation. Though settlers might grow cash crops, their direct control of colonized land undermines the disciplinary demands of capital.27 They are not left only with the ownership of their labor-power—they own land seized from Indigenous peoples. For this reason, there is an inborn tendency of settlers to Romantic anti-capitalism.

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Fascist Decoloniality This settler-colonial project contains an immanent tendency to self-negation. Settlers demanded the sponsorship of the U. S. government, whether in the distribution of land (through the Homestead Act), the sponsorship of individual land ownership against the spread of slave plantation agriculture (Free Labor), or military defense from Indigenous peoples. The Federal government was itself interested in regulating and controlling the process of settler-colonization in order to maintain the cohesion of the Republic, and the viability of the national economy as a whole.28 Thus, through the very needs of this individualist settlerism itself, tendencies towards centralization emerged. During and after the Civil War, these tendencies made broad strides. The mass-mobilization of the Civil War—perhaps the first war to give the world an image of 20th century warfare—transformed into mass-mobilization in the name of colonization and the repression of the proletariat. Union soldiers were deployed against rebellious workers in St. Louis in 1877 and elsewhere at the exact same time that they were deployed against the Dakota, Lakota, Comanche, Apache, and other peoples in order to defend settlers. By the end of the 19th century, the Federal government’s close involvement in the management of settler expansion became a tool for limiting and expropriating small-time settlers, particularly those buried in debt.29 The Federal government’s systematic use of protective tariffs, tax incentives, and hard money policy to facilitate industrialization disempowered small settlers in favor of industrial capital, who mustered the Grange and People’s Party in response but fell apart in the face of capital’s power and their own racist, particularist limitations.30 Capital eventually must drive to expropriate settlers and transform them into wagelaborers. At the same time it must import new workers, who live without any possibility of taking land as individual private property. Lenin agreed with this analysis, demonstrating this tendency in U. S. agriculture while critiquing the proposal by Narodniki to adopt an American model to serve an antidote to the development of capitalism in Russian agriculture. This mass expropriation happened in the U. S. in the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, a periodization which Lenin took careful note of.31 The tendency culminated finally in the mass expropriations of land during the Great Depression.32 By the 1940s, the old style of individual ownership of

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez land was a remnant of the past.33 Agriculture was dominated by capitalist combines, not by individual ownership. This does not mean that settlerism disappeared—this is where we must go further than Marx and Lenin. Rather than settlerism being abolished right alongside the negation of individual property ownership, settlerism was socialized. In the U. S.’s settler-colonial context, the general capital and the nation became something like one big settler. Proletarians were not pushed outside of the settler relation but deployed in the name of it, transforming expropriated land into the image of capitalist industries. Though they did not own the land, and only reaped wealth in the form of wages, they lived by the colonization of the land. Settlerism set the morphology for the U. S. as a whole, extending far beyond the individual ownership of land by settlers. As has been noted by the historian Stefan Aune and the communist militant J. Sakai alike, settlerism was extended by the U. S. in its overseas imperialism.34 Rather than U. S. imperialism being a simple negation of the old settlerism, it realized it even more profoundly. The U. S. colonization of the Philippines, the conduct of genocidal warfare against Filipino and Haitian guerrillas, and the adoption of gunboat diplomacy all showed the marks of the strategies originally developed in the expropriation of Indigenous peoples. Psychologically, the U. S. sees ‘Indians’ the world over. From the Filipino rebels to the Viet Minh to the Taliban and now the Palestinian resistance, the U. S. keeps seeing ‘Indians’ in its enemies. It continues to extend its imperial strategy of settlerism abroad, having learned in its very beginnings how to conduct warfare as an occupying colonizer against peoples defending their homes. It is no coincidence that this theory was developed originally synthesized by the insights of Red Power, which connected the oppression of Indigenous peoples to that of the Vietnamese by U. S. imperialism.35 It is important to note, however, that Sakai in particular is still limited in his understanding of the exteriority of Indigenous peoples and Black people to U. S. settler capitalism. In his perspective, Indigenous peoples are more or less homogeneous in interest as a “race.” This misses the importance of tensions, conflict, and competition within and among nations in the negotiation of settler-colonization. In his framework, for instance, one cannot

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Fascist Decoloniality understand the Camp Grant massacre of Pinal and Aravaipa Apaches, committed by EuroAmericans, Mexicans, and Tohono O’odham warriors.36 It also underestimates the complex relationship of Black people to Anglo settlercolonialism. Though excluded from the status of whiteness, after the Civil War Black people were accommodated into the otherwise Anglo-Yankee definition of citizenship by the 14th Amendment.37 Notably, the Amendment excluded Indigenous peoples, who were considered to fall under the jurisdictions of foreign affairs, and was later invoked against Asians and Mexicans.38 The Federal government tried to further incorporate Black people into Yankee settlerism through such institutions as the Buffalo Soldiers, who were deployed against both Indigenous peoples and rebellious Mexicans defending common lands in the U. S. Southwest.39 The trouble with settlerism is that, particularly when socialized into the general capital, it is a social relation in which all are complicit. This is why it appears as a civilizational struggle, a conflict of one way of life against another. Capital operates as a totality. We must think of the exterior as also a periphery or underside rather than reproducing Luxemburg’s understanding of capitalism. The stakes of this understanding are also clear when we consider the need for decolonial or communist universalism. On the one hand, a perspective limited to the interests (in a narrow sense) of specific Indigenous nations can lead to complicity with the ‘objectively’ universalizing tendencies of capitalist coloniality.40 For instance Clinton Rickard (Skarù:ręˀ), the Tuscarora leader and founder of the Indian Defense League, saw no incongruence between his fight for sovereignty and his participation in the U. S. invasion of the Philippines. In his eyes, this was simply part of the traditional alliance of his people with the U. S., just like any other alliance of two nations.41 This is a sibling perspective to that of the herrenvolk (chosen people) socialists who throw their support behind imperialism in the name of their national working classes.42 Without revolutionary universalism to meet the bloodthirsty universalism of capital, we end up drawn into the bloodbath ourselves. Rickard himself taught this lesson after reflecting on his experiences both participating in and fighting colonialism, declaring:

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez “We have seen the downfall of the British Empire and the decline of England in our day. This will happen whenever a nation oppresses people. It will happen to the United States if it continues to wrong my Indian people. A nation cannot build its future on a foundation of oppression.”43

This is where the self-composition of Pan-Indigenism and communist internationalism is necessary to constitute the wretched of the earth as a common political subjectivity, a force which acts in world politics. This forces a choice on the peoples of the world, a choice which establishes who’s who and who stands where. This establishes the terrain of decision between coloniality and decoloniality. Today there is a continuity of militant decolonial Pan-Indigenism right alongside the integrated form of 20th century Pan-Indigenism, which was innovated with President Richard Nixon’s Self-Determination reforms. Similarly there is a wealth of herrenvolk workerism, with populist leaders like Bernie Sanders trying to push the small, sprouting seeds of a new labor movement against the Palestinians and other ‘enemies’ in favor of U. S. Empire. This is already a struggle of universalisms, the one repeating U. S. Imperial foreign policy and the other identifying itself with oppressed Palestinians and other indigenous peoples of the world in their struggle with coloniality. But such struggle for universalism is not so simple. There is something else that J. Sakai notes which is missing in orthodox Marxist analyses of settlerism—that “white settlercolonialism and fascism occupy the same ecological niche.”44 While Sakai sees this as preventing the development of fascism in settler-colonies except where settler status decays, I see this tendency as haunting settlerism from the outset (as the status of settlers is never entirely secure or permanently defined). In this, I tend more towards the Black Panther George Jackson’s analysis.45 Not every settler-colony is fascist by definition, but there is a certain historical association of settlerism and the development of fascism. For the French, the pied-noirs of Algeria were disproportionately hardline Vichy supporters. For the Spanish, much of the Nationalist leadership during the Civil War drew from Canary Island settlers hardened by

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Fascist Decoloniality colonial warfare. Part of this can be understood through the lesson of Aimé Césaire: that fascism brings the violence of the periphery into the metropole, that what one does to Others begins to define what one is to the Self-Same.46 But there is also something further in this association. There is a certain ‘plebeian,’ commoner character of settlerism which to many settlers set the colonies apart from the ranks and titles of the metropoles. Though rank and title were rarely alien to colonies, the settler-colonial situation has historically facilitated a certain leveling tendency among settlers (at least in some modalities of colonization). The settlers are defined in their settlerhood, their relationship to the natives and the land as foreign conquerors remaking the land in line with their own needs (often, even ‘spiritual’ needs). There are a wealth of examples wherein settlers develop a certain sense of solidarity among themselves in relation to the metropole and to the indigenous. The pied-noirs, the Boers, the Anglo-Americans, the criollos, the Zionists in Palestine and others came to consider themselves as holding distinct interests as a defined mass group which had to defend itself in mass politics. Similarly, fascism is defined by a ‘plebeian’ character. Unlike the Counter-Revolutionism of the 18th and early 19th centuries, fascism is perfectly at home in mass politics. Though rank and title involve themselves in fascist movements, this is not what’s particular to fascism compared to standard reactionism. Fascism identifies the national community as the transcending spirit of society, that collectivity supposedly uniting classes into a single interest. What is valuable to fascists is not aristocracy in title as much as the aristocracy of the ‘spirit,’ the aristocracy of dynamism instead of passive, inherited aristocracy. The fascists thus hold a ‘plebeian’ perspective, one which overlaps with settlerism in its contours of domination. Both fascism and settlerism tend toward forms of rebellion invested in positivity, or givenness. They are not ‘revolutions’ with nothing to lose but their chains, they are ‘revolutions’ which change everything so that everything can stay the same. J. Sakai has argued that “It is the absolute characteristic of settler society to be parasitic.”47 However, to frame settlerism as identical to parasitism is both inaccurate, misunderstanding the core of this relation as it appears in the modern world, and risks the reactionary Romanticism of fascists. Critiquing settlers primarily for their failures of productivity, and by extension glorifying productivity, reproduces the old bourgeois moralist

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez pastime of praising productive against unproductive labor. But what is productive is always productive relative to a specific arrangement of society—one can only speak of what is productive for a specific arrangement of society and for a particular society’s particular needs. Bourgeois civilization produces a wealth of needs for colonialism, this is in fact fundamental to its global practice. There is certainly parasitism at the hands of settlers, but that is not their primary, defining characteristic as a social group. What defines settlerism is that they are an entire group of people embodying imperial forms of labor that seek to force the entire world into their own image. This world cannot tolerate whatever is non-identical to it, whether the natural world or the indigenous ‘natural-peoples.’48 In fact, settler ‘anti-colonial’ nationalism ironically reveals limits of decolonial thought which can only be resolved by communism—the abolition of imperializing forms of labor and social relations. Settler claims to indigeneity are based on the concept of property as an extension of the self by means of imperial labor, as a recreation of the world in one’s image. Capital socializes this proprietary relation to nature. Communism, on the other hand, must socialize relationality with all of life. Imperial bourgeois civilization, including settlerism and ‘Third World’ bourgeois nationalism alike, worships labor and the domination of nature by the Self(-Same). The call to transform the land in the image of the laborer is core to settler-colonialism. This is the theme of virgin soil and the taming of the land, which appears in the national mythologies of the U. S., Israel, Australia, and other settler-colonies. This perspective asserts that (imperial) labor is the source of all wealth, of all use-values. Yet it also asserts, childlike in narcissism, that nature herself spreads her arms wide open for the herrenvolk race of settlers to enjoy the infinite wealth of her bosom. These two perspectives are not inherently contradictory—the latter tends to be paired with a dismissal of natives as squandering the wealth of their own Mother Nature. This discourse condemns them for providing poor companionship compared to the rational and laborious resoluteness of the settlers. In either perspective, the main theme is the identity of nature to laboring settler humanity, whether through the rape-taming ‘wilderness’ or the coverture of marriage.

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Fascist Decoloniality Marx himself warned against this worship of labor, viewing it with suspicion from 1845 in The German Ideology to his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme.49 While labor is the source of all value—value being a specific social relation, specific to the production of commodities—labor is not the source of all wealth. Marx uses wealth in the sense of use-values, the qualities of things which a living being discovers as useful to its needs in engaging with the world through its activity. The identification of wealth and value implied by the idea that labor is the source of all wealth means an identification of the world with capital, complicity with bourgeois civilization in its drive to close the earth into a Self-Same totality. The more human beings dominate nature like a foreign conqueror, the more human beings dominate each other. The difference between such imperial forms of labor and other possible relationships to the world is revealed quite vividly in two passages by two North American authors. The one, the Euro-American John Steinbeck, author of the social realist epic The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The other, Luther Standing Bear (Sičhą́ǧu Oyáte and Oglála Lakhóta Oyáte), an Indigenous philosopher. In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck wrote thusly of the history of his home state of California:

“Once California belonged to Mexico and its land to Mexicans; and a horde of tattered feverish Americans poured in. And such was their hunger for land that they took the land, stole Sutter’s land, Guerrero’ s land, took the grants and broke them up and growled and quarreled over them, those frantic hungry men; and they guarded with guns the land they had stolen. They put up houses and barns, they turned the earth and planted crops. And these things were possession, and possession was ownership. “The Mexicans were weak and fed. They could not resist, because they wanted nothing in the world as frantically as the Americans wanted land. “Then, with time, the squatters were no longer squatters, but owners; and their children grew up and had children on the land. And the hunger was gone from them, the feral hunger, the gnawing, tearing hunger for land, for water and earth and the good sky over it, for the green thrusting grass, for the swelling roots. They had these

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez things so completely that they did not know about them any more. They had no more the stomach-tearing lust for a rich acre and a shining blade to plow it, for seed and a windmill beating its wings in the air. They arose in the dark no more to hear the sleepy birds’ first chittering, and the morning wind around the house while they waited for the first light to go out to the dear acres. These things were lost, and crops were reckoned in dollars, and land was valued by principal plus interest, and crops were bought and sold before they were planted. Then crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but simple losses of money. And all their love was thinned with money, and all their fierceness dribbled away in interest until they were no longer farmers at all, but little shopkeepers of crops, little manufacturers who must sell before they can make. Then those farmers who were not good shopkeepers lost their land to good shopkeepers. No matter how clever, how loving a man might be with earth and growing things, he could not survive if he were not a good shopkeeper. And as time went on, the business men had the farms, and the farms grew larger, but there were fewer of them.”50

To Steinbeck, it is labor and the transformation of the land in the laboring subject’s own image which makes the land a home. The key is the identity of the world with the subject. The human subject is the center. Through this anthropocentrism and implicitly imperial sense of labor, the conquest of settlers in America is guaranteed by the conquest of labor over the earth. While Steinbeck recognizes the homelessness imposed by capital, therefore the negation of private property in its long-standing historical sense by the impersonal power of capital, he remains complacent with settlerism. Contrast that perspective to this passage, wherein Standing Bear analyzes settler consciousness:

“The white man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative processes. The roots of his tree of life have not yet grasped the rock and soil. The white man is still

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Fascist Decoloniality troubled with primitive fears; he still has in his consciousness the perils of this frontier continent, some of its vastness not yet having yielded to his questing footsteps and inquiring eyes. He shudders still with the memory of the loss of his forefathers upon its scorching deserts and forbidding mountain-tops. The man from Europe is still a foreigner and an alien. And he still hates the man who questioned his path across the continent. “But in the Indian the spirit of the land is still vested; it will be until other men are able to divine and meet its rhythm. Men must be born and reborn to belong. Their bodies must be formed of the dust of their forefathers’ bones.”51

Here, ‘Man’ is decentered. The settler does not become indigenous through imperial labor —in fact, one of the needs behind this is their very fear of the land the settlers knows they are usurpers of. This is not a genuine indigenization but an attempted “settler move to innocence,” which Eve Tuck (Unangax̂ ) and K. Wayne Yang describe as “an attempt to deflect a settler identity, while continuing to enjoy settler privilege and occupying stolen land.”52 To try to conquer the land into one’s property, into an extension of oneself is not a true decolonization because of its very implied identity of the land with the subjectivity of the laborer. The narcissism of settler labor only means the revenge of nature, the return of the repressed, the mutilation of one’s own corporeal, natural being by the mutilation of nature. The North American settlers destroyed the soil and ecology of the continent in their own attempts to force it into the image of their needs—namely, intensive production of cash crops for the world market. On the other hand, the Three Sisters (corn, beans, and squash) represent an alternative relationship of labor and nature. The Indigenous agricultural practice of growing these together is knowledge developed from a recognition of these plants in their own determinacy, an ecological understanding from relating to nature in its own distinctness and otherness from our own needs. Their artificial selection into plants useful for human needs could only be accomplished by humans understanding these vegetables’ characteristics and needs. Only by understanding the particular needs of other natural beings can we organize our own needs rationally and sustainably. This other possibility for labor means respecting the no-thing, the uncategorizable,

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez the Other, the non-identical in nature. It means working with rather than against, unity and harmony through plurality instead of through homogeneity.

Decoloniality and Fascist Authenticity The form that fascist decoloniality takes is, almost without exception, a rhetoric of authenticity. One must be true to the Self-Same, one must expel the artificial infection of the colonizer. The core object of critique in the West here is decadence, immorality, rootlessness, hostility to the traditions of the world. The virtue of the Native is rootedness, being-at-home, having an authenticity to return to. Fascist decoloniality is an ideology of return, of looping the Self-Same back into itself. And yet, the ideology of authenticity only makers sense from the perspective of a colonial split in history (pre-colonial and colonial). To assert one’s authenticity in this general, racialized claim does not make sense without a situation with a terrain that has already been racialized.53 This racial-civilizational Manichaeism is caught in identity with the colonial world, it is not decolonization which leaves the home terrain of coloniality. It is Euro-colonialism which racializes that terrain, marking a distinction between the West and the Rest wherein the Rest are devalued as the not-West. The fascist ideology of authenticity speaks within an already Eurocentered world perspective, where the authentic ones turn to face towards the West (in body, heart, and mind) in order to prove themselves as the Native. But the Native, in this generalized sense, is a category birthed by the Eurocentered world itself, the twin of the Colonizer. Thus fascist authenticity is a failed recognition, it’s a desperate desire to prove how little the Native needs the Colonizer by operating on the latter’s own metrics. It is no surprise, by extension, that this ideology makes use of worldviews and techniques exported from Europe. To be the truest, most authentic Colonizer’s Native, they must use the methods of defining the Native innovated by the intelligentsia and bureaucratic apparatuses of the Colonizer. Orientalism, anthropology, missionary studies, language standardization, linear historiography… all are adopted from the Colonizer as trusty tools of Nativeology. Thus the

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Fascist Decoloniality Native inherits the neuroses of the Colonizer, already saturated with the practical psychological dilemmas that come with bourgeois civilization. The mournful twin of Euro-modernization, Romanticism, has been exported throughout the world by colonization itself. The rhetoric and framing of European Romantics in their confrontation with emergent bourgeois civilization thus shapes the rhetoric and framing of Romantic nationalists confronting the West. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the grandfather of National Socialism, still makes his presence felt in nationalism worldwide, Johann Gottfried Herder influences the ideals of rootedness invoked against the West, Mikhail Bakunin’s contrasting of collective racial natural-being and the artificial statist decadence of the West has had appeal in East and South alike, John Ruskin’s Romantic medievalist critique of capitalism influenced Ananda Coomaraswamy and Mahatma Gandhi’s attempts to advocate an Indian spiritual ethic against Western colonization, Thomas Carlyle’s Romantic guild socialism has had much the same appeal, Oswald Spengler’s prediction of the decline of the West and the rise of the ‘darker nations’ has been taken as an accurate and inspiring prophecy, Martin Heidegger’s critique of technology and inauthenticity a wellspring for understanding Westoxification…54 Bourgeois civilization turns its own contradictions and internal tensions into a world milieu, so that the entire globe picks up the same tools of political discourse (even if in distinct manners). Bourgeois civilization exports its own internal opposition and integrates non-European lifeways into itself. Thus we see figures like the Egyptian Salafi theorist Sayyid Qutb incorporating the civilizational thought of Oswald Spengler while blasting apart traditions of Islamic jurisprudence in his flat dichotomy of the Self-Same and jahiliyyah (Age of Ignorance), which he identified with practically all societies and history up to and including Muslim societies and history after Prophet Muhammad.55 To Qutb, all human societies which practice their interrelations in themselves and for themselves lead to degeneration and exploitation—only pure, unmediated submission to God can be the solution. Tawhid, or the unity of God with himself as the truth, and sharia, law, are flatly identical in Qutb’s thought.56 He thinks in a manner incredibly reminiscent of Western fascist thought, as he thinks with the very same Eurocentered tools and dichotomies which they take up.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Imperial Japanese nationalism reveals this tendency as well. Intellectuals like Kita Ikki identified the power of the masses with the sovereignty of Japan as an Imperial State (an idea inherited more from European nationalist socialists than Japanese political traditions), while philosophers like Watsuji Tetsuro explicitly sought to incorporate the Romantic critiques of European Enlightenment offered by figures like Heidegger into Japanese traditions of thought.57 The Imperial Japanese state itself should be brought up more often as an example of fascist decoloniality, not in spite of but because of the irony in its own imperialism. This state framed itself as a representative of the darker races of the earth—an authentic, rooted Native response against decadent Western modernity.58 It was the Japanese Imperialists who sought to supplant U. S. Anglification of the Philippines and to implement Tagalog-centered Nativization—at the exact same time that they enslaved Filipinos to accumulate capital for the war machine.59 The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere is a natural conclusion of that decoloniality which deals in Blood and Soil and in the pursuit of the Self-Same. The other side of this Romanticism of the ‘Third World’ is the incorporation of ‘Third Worldism’ by the fascists of the metropole itself. If the West is the embodiment of decadent modernity, then the natural conclusion is that the Rest is the reliable store of an authentic, rooted alternative. This is fascist internationalism, another element where fascism reveals itself as the sublimation of revolutionary drives from their immanent reactionary tendencies themselves. These fascist ‘Third Worldists’ deal in noble savageism, and often argue that European countries are themselves victims of imperialism at the hands of rootless financial aristocrats (typically identified with Jewry). This rhetoric has a history stretching from Mikhail Bakunin to the original National Bolsheviks (Ernst Niekisch, Karl Otto Paetel) to elements of the modern European New Right (Alain de Benoist).60 Colonialism posits the Natives of the world as ‘natural-peoples’, and this Romantic reaction takes that idea at its word. Zionism reveals the immanent tendency of this metropolitan ‘right-decoloniality’ to turn decoloniality into its opposite. This seems like a strange place to turn from the subject of antisemitic fascism, but Zionism is itself the internalization of antisemitism (the so-called “Jewish Question”) into a political form. Zionism reveals a conservative form of how a people rendered a foundational Other of Euro-bourgeois civilization, of the world-system of 1492,

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Fascist Decoloniality confront their own position as a periphery. This peripheral perspective, this confrontation of the 1492-world from the perspective of an inside-outsider, is thus directly relevant to decoloniality. The internalization of antisemitism represented by Zionism is made evident by its agreement with the image of the rootless, parasitic Jew of the diaspora. Moses Hess said, in his Rome and Jerusalem (1862) that “the Christian nations will certainly not object to the restoration of the Jewish State, for they will thereby rid their respective countries of a foreign population which is a thorn in their side.”61 Theodor Herzl, the leader of the World Zionist Organization, stated the case even more bluntly in a letter to the imperialist Cecil Rhodes—in order for Jews to become a ‘normal,’ rooted nation, they must be hardened through colonization and imperial labor.62 Zionism responds to the “Jewish Question,” the problem of assimilation, by offering a project to assimilate Jews into the 1492-world through colonization outside of Europe. It agrees that Jews are intractably foreign to Europe, that they cannot but be ‘rootless parasites’ in diaspora.63 In order to become indigenized, Jews must colonize the land of Palestine. Through the redeeming force of labor, considered to be alien to the ‘parasitic’ Jews of diaspora, Jews could become rooted in Blood and Soil.64 The virgin soil myth of a “land without a people for a people without a land” emerged. After a century, this myth has undeniably confirmed itself as an ideology of genocide of the indigenous Palestinians. Such an affinity of colonial and indigenist rhetoric side by side is not without precedent. The historian Philip J. Deloria (Íŋyaŋ Woslál Háŋ) has demonstrated that early Anglo-American settler patriotism indulged deeply in indigenist Romanticism.65 The Anglo settlers were supposed to have become natives of wild America just the same as the Indigenous peoples of the continent. Of course, the course of the U. S.’s development buried this form of indigenism in favor of the more respectably bourgeois icon of Columbia—an unmistakeable identification of Americanism with Westernism.66 Some maintained the discursive thread as an ostensibly radical interpretation, whether in the form of Marx and Engels praising the American Revolution as the ‘natives’ standing up to an Empire and setting off a wave of emancipatory movements in Europe or even Frantz Fanon characterizing the arc of the U. S. as stretching from an anti-colonial liberation movement to a

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez neo-colonial power.67 Yet the Romanticism of free, wild kinship imagined by some settlers— whether the utopian socialists of the U. S. or the kibbutzim of Israel—falls apart in the face of the brute cannibalistic tendencies inherent to settlerism. The quasi-decolonial rhetoric of indigenization turns into its opposite through imperial labor, the need for the Self-Same, itself.68 The pervasiveness of this self-negation in settler consciousness should not lead us to a one-dimensional analysis of indigenous peoples. The fascistic discourse of authenticity isn’t alien to the Indigenous peoples of North America. Historically, organizations like the American Indian Federation (AIF) promoted an antisemitic doctrine of Indigenous rootedness versus Jewish cosmoplitan-communist deracination.69 This Romantic antisemitism is not nearly as pervasive due to the foreignness of antisemitism to indigenous cultures, however. Antisemitism for Indigenous radicalism is not nearly as common as in, say, mestizo ideologies of indigenista authenticity. Such antisemitism comes from the perspective of a deeper colonial split, a Westernization. José Vasconcelos, one of the key theorists of Mexican indigenismo and the progenitor of the concept of la raza cósmica, collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and espoused antisemitism in his writings.70 We should not conflate all mestizo indigenismo with fascism, as they have ranged from communists associated with the journal Amauta in Perú to liberals resonant of John Collier, the American architect of the Indian New Deal. But this tendency must be recognized rather than dismissed. ‘Third World’ nationalism tends to be ripe ground for this fascist authenticity, in no small part because these nation-states are part and parcel of world (neo)coloniality. These nation-states adopt the Fourth World—“a forgotten world, the world of aboriginal peoples locked into independent states but without an adequate voice or say in the decisions which affect our lives,” [George Manuel (Secwépemc)]—as pacified mascots, at the very same time that they perceive them as a problem and inconvenience to be addressed.71 Whether this is post-Revolutionary Mexico adopting Indigenous peoples as symbols of national ancestry, or the Egyptian state using Palestinian refugees as political pawns, this distinction between Third and Fourth World has direct practical consequences.72 It is this very modernist concern with authenticity itself that facilitates the embourgeoisment of social relations among indigenous peoples, incorporating them into the world-capitalist unit of the nation-state.

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Fascist Decoloniality The association of fascist authenticity and neo-colonialism is quite evident when one looks at the examples of François Duvalier’s U. S.-collaborationist regime in Haiti, the promotion of Authenticité as a state ideology in Zaire under Mobutu Sese Seko at the same time that his regime worked closely with the U. S., France, and Belgium, Indonesia’s Islamic decolonial rhetoric tossed out freely while Indonesians are super-exploited by Eurocentered capital… As Walter Rodney taught, the ‘Third World’ as a project is not unitary. Rather, he and his fellow ‘Third World’ Marxists had to show that “Marxism continues to grow as a Third World ideology in spite of the attempts to present it as something alien to the Third World. And it continues to grow as an independent ideology seeking clear alternatives to capitalism, in spite of the attempts to divert this process by focusing on a compromise between capitalism and socialism.”73 The Fourth World is not an original, natural authenticity—such a perspective simply implies something to be mined by bourgeois states, not unlike extraction from corporeal nature. Instead the Fourth World is more like Odradek in Franz Kafka’s “Cares of a Family Man” (1919) —an upsetting, uncategorizable, incomprehensible thing which troubles the consciousness of every imperial paterfamilias the world over. The Fourth World, in its inconvenience, is a site of political innovation even amidst its very deprivation. Though exclusion from the mainstream of society limits the possibilities available to it, it also opens up the need for for experiments in autonomy. This is why indigenous peoples are often innovators of political and military strategies of autonomy, whether the Zapatistas in Chiapas or the Palestinians in Gaza. As the Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin taught, historical change tends to move from dynamic margins to coagulated centers.74 Of course, the indigenous peoples of the world do have to relate to the metropole in some way. Such is the reciprocal nature of identity. For every Native, there is a Colonizer. Relating to bourgeois civilization, with all of its tendencies, there are the options of relating the center, the status quo, or, for change to left and right, communism and fascism. This is a choice to make, but a choice made from an independent standpoint. Decolonial theorists like José Carlos Mariátegui, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Rodney all emphasized a natural affinity of communism and decoloniality, both expressing

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez themselves as the self-emancipation of the wretched of the earth. Despite the framing of some, there is a long-standing historical affinity of decololoniality and communism—from the millenarian movement of Manuel Quíntin Lame (Páez) establishing a political legacy in the Communist Party of Colombia to the influence of Maoism on Red Power in Canada.75 These militants, who might be considered ‘left-decolonial,’ rejected the illusory radicalism of fascism in favor of communist universal emancipation. Many, like the Métis militant Howard Adams, attacked the rhetoric of authenticity as indicative of narrow, bourgeois nationalism—part and parcel of the colonial system, becoming complacent in it amidst the spectacle of refusal itself.76 All of his hammers home the importance of thinking through the Westernization of global thought. Doing so enables us to be aware of and exercise suspicion towards tendencies towards fascist Romanticism and antisemitism. It is not that decolonial thought is impossible and that everything is intractably Western, but that decoloniality must start from the premise that Eurobourgeois society has remade the world in its image as a totality with the West at the center.77 Capital is a totalizing power, incorporating even crisis and resistance (this drive to authenticity, for instance) into a more cohesive, closing totality. The ‘invisible hand’ of the market, the cunning of instrumental reason, always seems to find a way to bring subjective wills back into the fold. The Romantic rhetoric of rootedness opens itself up to the reactionary limitation of humanity to a narrow, national-racial horizon. In spite of its rhetoric of good-concrete against bad-abstract, it in fact abstracts human beings apart from their openness. It does not recognize the truth that human nature is to be nothing in particular. It is an attempt at historical regression from bourgeois society into some Romanticized ‘primitive’ past of a Volksgemeinschaft, people’s community. In this it reveals in exaggerated form the immanent limitations of communalism, transforming the association of a community with a home into Self-Sameness.78 The limits of communality revealed themselves in the treatment of outsiders, and particularly the fundamental outsiders—those without a community. Within communalist societies, these have primarily taken the form of the socially dead, the enslaved, those in whom society recognizes no relations.79 Fascist decoloniality reproduces this hatred in its drive towards the enslavement and extermination of the Other. This is the dividing line for this fascist

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Fascist Decoloniality decoloniality. It does not seek a world where many worlds are possible, but a closed system composed of closed systems. At the same time, the cosmopolitanism of bourgeois civilization is itself a drive to transform all individuals into contracting commodity-owners, into citizens. This limits human relationality into the exchange of equivalents, subordinating the wealth of characteristics in all human beings and nature as a whole to the image of capital. Against both of these, communism must call for something that might be described as a cosmopolitan rootedness. While ‘communalist’ societies confined their humanism to the members of the community, and considered other communities to be outside of their own cosmos except where adopted or enslaved through capture, communism must be based on the communal relationality (gemeinwesen) of all living beings. This is a realization of a universal communalism. Global universality has been opened up by the horrific drives of colonialism, and global community must be realized by the wretched of this imperial earth. Such a communist cosmopolitanism must not only define itself as a form of decoloniality against fascist decoloniality. It must also make a strong stand against the narrowness of whiteness, which almost always serves as the substance of settler fascism. It is not the racial ‘particularism’ of the oppressed that has limited communism in the settler-colonies, but the particularity and class-collaborationism of the white race as a political bloc.80 In order to build a communist community, we must break the centrality of white domination as a restriction of free relationality, as a mutilation and distortion of the non-white and white alike. The ‘particularism’ of the oppressed is not navel-gazing or a so-called reverse-racism, but a recognition of the terrain established by colonial racialization. The totality is the coloniality of power, the coloniality intertwined with our relations with the world, but this totality is not homogenous but differentiated. It is exactly in its differentiation—into Colonizers and Natives, White and nonWhite, Human and non-Human, Metropole and Periphery, Bourgeoisie and Proletariat—that it is articulated as a social totality. However, some communist critics of the white race have expressed a discontent with an analysis which emphasizes settler-colonialism as a central dilemma for countries like the U. S.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez The Marxist militant Noel Ignatiev, for example, questioned the thesis of J. Sakai’s book Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat (1983):

“But people from Africa were imported to the western hemisphere along with people from Europe. Why aren’t they counted as ‘settlers’ too? That must be where class analysis comes in. Here is another outline of history: The ruling classes imported from Europe and Africa laborers, soldiers, prostitutes, and all the others necessary to clear out the indigenous inhabitants, transform the environment, and start the profitmachine turning[…] “It is true that ‘the entire settler economy was raised up on a foundation of slave labor, slave products, and the slave trade.’ Of course the fisherman, the clerk, the overseer, the farmer were ‘dependent’ on the system of slave labor; so was the child who tended a loom thirteen hours a day in a cotton-mill. Not only that, the slave was ‘dependent’ on the mill worker and fisherman. Ever since the division of labor, human beings have depended on others for the things they need to live. The cotton does not care whether it was picked, nor the cloth whether it was spun, by a laborer who was whipped to work or driven by want, nor does the owner of capital care whether the laborer’s subsistence takes the form of a peck of corn or a money wage, so long as it is exceeded in value by the laborer’s output. Since in modern society most producers are exploited laborers it follows that each group of laborers ‘depends’ on the exploitation of others. To attempt to give this truism a profounder significance is to embrace the world view of the bourgeoisie, which holds that its mode of regulating the social division of labor is natural.”81

Ignatiev is not incorrect to point out that all are complacent in the totality of exploitation through the system of universal dependency. This the contradiction of domination, that it is still a form of relationality. The trouble is that Ignatiev does not properly appreciate the influence of settler-colonization to the relations of classes and the terrain of politics. The issues of colonizing more land, the rights to that land, the conduct of war against Indigenous peoples, and the uses of

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Fascist Decoloniality colonized land and labor have all emerged as determining factors in the history of the U. S. and other settler-colonies. In these countries, there is a certain equation of settlerhood and whiteness—though not every settler is white, every white is whitened by settlerism. The settlers are the herrenvolk who must realize their mission in the world. This populist worldview has in the U. S. been expressed in settler resistance to proletarianization, in opposition to wars, in resistance to the state… This settler perspective is exactly one of the culprits for the weakness of communism as a mass movement in the U. S. compared to general populist radicalism.82 Settlerism cannot be anything but central to understanding the settler-colonies. Settlerism is both a relation of people mediated by land, and a relation to nature itself—a mode of labor.

The Question of Nature Nature is a core distinguishing theme between communism, fascism, and decoloniality in their critiques of bourgeois society. How a perspective constructs its relationship to nature, or constructs nature itself, reveals its own nature. One’s relationship to nature, one’s ethic of life amidst the world, is defining of any civilization. And the relationship of subjectivity to corporeal life is mediated through the metabolism of labor. The domination of nature is the origin of exploitation, it is what enables the accumulation of surpluses and the control of those surpluses by those best fit for domination. Of course, origin is never a sufficient explanation—there must be further determinations and specifications—but it is an important consideration in order to understand the trajectory of something. In the history of domination, we can recognize a certain theme of imperial forms of labor. These are forms of labor which posit a split between laboring subject and the object of labor, between actor and acted upon, between the doer and the done to, thinking and being, being and having, etc. This means a domination of the world by a subjectivity, the transformation of the world into a totality in its own image and the subordination of the exterior Other to itself. The imperial forms of labor pursue the identity of the world to itself, the realization of the Self-Same. The response of radicalism to this theme of domination in the relationship of human beings and nature reveals its own contours. This can reveal the degree of complicity in bourgeois

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez civilization (whether by communists, fascists, or decolonizers), but it can also reveal tendencies towards other forms of domination. By extension, it is key to determining the differences between ‘left’ and ‘right’ decolonization. The mainstream relation to nature in decolonization has not been much different from that of the West. Nature becomes a territory for the new nation-state, a pool of resources to be extracted from for development along Western lines.83 This drive to recreate nature in the image of the national-bourgeois subject fails, on the one hand because this national-bourgeoisie is hopelessly dependent to the dominant powers of this Eurocentered neo-colonial world-system, and on the other because every drive to recreate nature in the image of the subject always fails. The destruction of nature destroys the cohesiveness of the nation itself, revealing who the state really prioritizes. There are some who are expendable, left to drown in the runoff of capitalist ecological destruction, and others who have the money to avoid these consequences in the short run. The traditional ecological practices of agricultural laborers and peasants are perceived as an inefficiency to be swept aside in modernization (or, more accurately, capitalization) of agriculture. This developmentalist model provokes discontent from within the project of nationalism itself. One response to this exploitation of the earth from within the frame of nationalism itself takes the form of Romanticism. Bourgeois developmentalism is a betrayal of the homeland, a foreign and parasitic imposition. The elites hate the land as they hate the nation. It is up to the authentic nationalists to restore a rooted relationship with the soil of the fatherland.84 This is a perspective of Blood and Soil, which considers nature as a cradle of humanity (or, rather, as distinct cradles for distinct humans).85 Each people is rooted in Blood and Soil in a homeland, they are racially-spiritually bound to these places. The connection is pure, it is immediate, it is embedded. Where labor is not tainted by Jewish abstractness, as in bourgeois civilization, it can be truly said that work makes you free (arbeit macht frei).86 This perspective immanently leads into antisemitism and other forms of hostility to Otherness.87 Decoloniality understood as the restoration of the Self-Same to itself reveals all of the worst tendencies within communality. Communality is not sufficient in itself—there must be communist universalism, which recognizes and respects Otherness.

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Fascist Decoloniality Communist universalism emerges from the diasporic figures of the world—in particular, the proletariat as the ultimate diasporic class in history. It is full well compatible with decolonial perspective. It is ‘rootless’ diaspora itself which has contributed significantly to the development of decolonial liberation movements, whether Black radicalism in the Atlantic or the broad development of national liberation movements in the metropoles of Paris, London, and Berlin in the 20th century.88 Rootedness, the flat contrasting of the good-concrete and bad-abstract, is a stubbornly childish response to the dilemma of bourgeois civilization.89 Abstraction, rootlessness, is not bad in itself—abstraction is immanent to concreteness, it is what ensures the richness of it (after all, how can one understand the wealth of characteristics without abstracting them?). Dead abstraction and flat concreteness go hand in hand, as they reproduce the split of subject and object. It is no coincidence that this perspective tends to fall into a trite image of a pure nature, of unsullied and broad landscapes spread wide open for the national-man. The vegetarianism of Adolf Hitler and Hindutva alike can be understood as reproducing this ideal of nature, which is clean of the indeterminacy, contingency, and flux revealed by the practice of labor.90 Fascism incorporates the false dichotomy of workerism, fetishizing imperial forms of labor, and Romanticism, fetishizing the supposed purity of nature as the subordinated Other of the Self-Same subject. While the fascists fetishize the Self-Same, communism which is genuinely liberatory pursues the intersubjectivity of laboring subjectivity with Otherness. Communism which seeks the Self-Same rooted community turns into its opposite—it becomes a fascist worship of productive labor and the myth of Blood and Soil. Similarly, decoloniality which conceives of coloniality as primarily defined by “rootlessness” and “parasitism” reproduces an imperial mode of relation with the world. There is a reason that Marx did not praise work as the highest virtue. Instead he considered the aim of communism to abolish work as we have known it thus far. Communism is established through the self-abolition of the proletariat, not the creation of a proletarian civilization. Labor cannot be the instrumental metabolism characteristic of its imperial forms. Labor must be the prime want of life, an expression of free association and understanding of the Otherness of natural beings.91

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Thus the true alternative, the communist alternative, is to realize decolonization by recognizing nature as a subject (or, rather, a wealth of subjectivities) and calling for universal kinship with the world. Labor must become a self-conscious free association rather than a subordination of Otherness into Self-Sameness.92 Through the universality opened up by bourgeois civilization, we must carve out the contours of a civilization founded on love. Neither labor, nor Blood and Soil, but universal kinship represents the realization of decolonization.

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Fascist Decoloniality References 1 Walter

D. Mignolo and Christopher Mattison, “Neither Capitalism nor Communism, but Decolonization: Interview with Walter Mignolo (Part I),” Critical Legal Thinking (blog), March 21, 2012, https://criticallegalthinking.com/ 2012/03/21/neither-capitalism-nor-communism-but-decolonization-an-interview-with-walter-mignolo/. 2 Zeev Sternhell, Neither Left Nor Right: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, New Jersey; Oxford, United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 109. 3 “So what does [Fanon] tell us about the final result? We learn that the newly independent states become sucked into the world market and fall prey to neocolonial domination. No sooner do they achieve political independence than what becomes manifest is their economic dependence. The old colonial powers as well as the superpowers step in to direct the affairs of the newly born nation. Independence turns out to be ‘an empty, fragile shell.’ Unable to provide the masses with the benefits that they expected from the struggle, the newly anointed leaders turn upon them and impose hierarchical social control often at the point of a gun. ‘Neocolonialism, this portrait suggests, is not simply a surreptitious recapture of national resources by external agents in the aftermath of flag independence. Neocolonialism is an internal state of affairs, the unmasked recolonization of human existence by the blackest of skins.’ “Here we have the limitations of the national bourgeoisie on full display. The African national bourgeoisie, like any bourgeoisie, wants to control the economy. However, unlike in the West, where the bourgeoisie came to political power through its control of productive resources, in Africa the colonial authorities denied the native bourgeoisie any such control. The native bourgeoisie therefore focuses on the kind of power that is more readily in reach— political power. It has no experience running an economy. Upon independence it still lacks economic power,” Peter Hudis, Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades, Revolutionary Lives (London, United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 2015), pp. 114-115. 4 International Communist Current, “Nation or Class?” (International Communist Current, January 27, 2006), https://en.internationalism.org/pamphlets/nationorclass; Moishe Postone, “History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism,” Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): pp. 98-99, https:// doi.org/10.1215/08992363-18-1-93. 5 The historical tragedies of 20th century decolonization hold this lesson out. Every tragic failure in liberation is also a lesson, or an opportunity for the deepening of our sense of freedom. The self-destruction of the Bolshevik Revolution revealed the flaws that Marxism had accumulated — in particular, the trouble of maintaining a communist program, meeting the needs of all in a cohesive society, and developing the powers of self-emancipation. The bureaucratic-militarist outcome of the Algerian Revolution, for example, revealed the pitfalls of a ‘statist’ interpretation of socialism as a tool for decolonization, while the workers’ councils offered a deeper, more concrete vision of decoloniality. From the accumulation of failures, we refine and polish our sense of freedom into something concrete, practical, and real. 6 Robert Biel, Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement (Montreal, Quebec: Kersplebedeb, 2015), pp. 16-18. 7 Walter Rodney, “Marxism and African Liberation,” in Decolonial Marxism: Essays from the Pan-African Revolution, by Walter Rodney, ed. Asha Rodney et al. (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2022), p. 45. 8 Álvaro García Linera, “Indianismo and Marxism: The Missed Encounter of Two Revolutionary Principles,” trans. Richard Fidler, Monthly Review Online, January 31, 2008, https://mronline.org/2008/01/31/indianismo-andmarxism-the-missed-encounter-of-two-revolutionary-principles/. 9 “As the two varieties of anti-systemic movements have spread (the labour-socialist movements from a few strong states to all others, the nationalist movements from a few peripheral zones to everywhere else), the distinction between the two kinds of movement has become increasingly blurred. Labour-socialist movements have found that nationalist themes were central to their mobilization efforts and their exercise of state power. But nationalist movements have discovered the inverse. In order to mobilize effectively and govern, they had to canalize the concerns of the work-force for egalitarian restructuring. As the themes began to overlap heavily and the distinctive organizational form ats tended to disappear or coalesce into a single structure, the strength of anti-systemic movements, especially as a worldwide collective whole, was dramatically increased,” Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 1996), p. 71. 10 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 5.

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“The greatness of Europe has lain in the width of the stage on which she has played her part, the strength of the foundations on which she has builded, and a natural, human ability no whit greater (if as great) than that of other days and races. In other words, the deeper reasons for the triumph of European civilization lie quite outside and beyond Europe,—back in the universal struggles of all mankind. “Why, then, is Europe great? Because of the foundations which the mighty past have furnished her to build upon: the iron trade of ancient, black Africa, the religion and empire-building of yellow Asia, the art and science of the ‘dago’ Mediterranean shore, east, south, and west, as well as north. And where she has builded securely upon this great past and learned from it she has gone forward to greater and more splendid human triumph; but where she has ignored this past and forgotten and sneered at it, she has shown the cloven hoof of poor, crucified humanity,—she has played, like other empires gone, the world fool!” W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1999), p. 23. 12 Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2016), pp. 9-10. 13 “In real life the International is composed of workers divided into oppressor and oppressed nations. If its action is to be monistic, its propaganda must not be the same for both. That is how we should regard the matter in the light of real (not Dühringian) “monism”, Marxist materialism,” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Monism and Dualism,” in A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism (Marxists Internet Archive, 1916), https://www.marxists.org/ archive/lenin/works/1916/carimarx/5.htm#v23pp64h-055. 14 Anderson, Marx at the Margins, pp. 172-173. 15 “The general result of the struggle between capitalism and simple commodity production is this: after substituting commodity economy for natural economy, capital takes the place of simple commodity economy. Non-capitalist organisations provide a fertile soil for capitalism; more strictly: capital feeds on the ruins of such organisations, and although this non-capitalist milieu is indispensable for accumulation, the latter proceeds at the cost of this medium nevertheless, by eating it up. Historically, the accumulation of capital is a kind of metabolism between capitalist economy and those pre-capitalist methods of production without which it cannot go on and which, in this light, it corrodes and assimilates. Thus capital cannot accumulate without the aid of non-capitalist organisations, nor, on the other hand, can it tolerate their continued existence side by side with itself. Only the continuous and progressive disintegration of non-capitalist organisations makes accumulation of capital possible. “The premises which are postulated in Marx’s diagram of accumulation accordingly represent no more than the historical tendency of the movement of accumulation and its logical conclusion. The accumulative process endeavours everywhere to substitute simple commodity economy for natural economy. Its ultimate aim, that is to say, is to establish the exclusive and universal domination of capitalist production in all countries and for all branches of industry,” Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzchild (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Routledge Classics, 2003), p. 397. 16 “Yet this argument does not lead anywhere. As soon as this final result is achieved—in theory, of course, because it can never actually happen —accumulation must come to a stop. The realisation and capitalisation of surplus value become impossible to accomplish. Just as soon as reality begins to correspond to Marx’s diagram of enlarged reproduction, the end of accumulation is in sight, it has reached its limits, and capitalist production is in extremis. For capital, the standstill of accumulation means that the development of the productive forces is arrested, and the collapse of capitalism follows inevitably, as an objective historical necessity. This is the reason for the contradictory behaviour of capitalism in the final stage of its historical career: imperialism,” Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, pp. 397-398.

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“It was a great historical contribution of Rosa Luxemburg that she, in a conscious opposition to the distortions of these ‘neo-harmonists’ adhered to the basic lesson of Capital and sought to reinforce it with the proof that the continued development of capitalism encounters absolute economic limits. “Frankly Luxemburg’s effort failed. According to her exposition, capitalism simply cannot exist without noncapitalist markets. If this line of reasoning were true, the breakdown tendency would have been a constant symptom of capitalism from its very inception, and it would be impossible to explain either periodic crises or the characteristic features of the latest stage of capitalism called ‘imperialism’. Yet Luxemburg herself had the feeling that the breakdown tendency and imperialism only appear at an advanced stage of accumulation and find their sole basis in this stage. ‘There is no doubt that the explanation for the economic roots of imperialism must be deduced from the laws of capital accumulation’ (Luxemburg, 1972, p. 61). “However Luxemburg herself provided no such deduction and even made no attempt in this direction Her own deduction of the necessary downfall of capitalism is not rooted in the immanent laws of the accumulation process, but in the transcendental fact of an absence of non-capitalist markets. Luxemburg shifts the crucial problem of capitalism from the sphere of production to that of circulation. Hence the form in which she conducts her proof of the absolute economic limits to capitalism comes close to the idea that the end of capitalism is a distant prospect because the capitalisation of the non-capitalist countries is the task of centuries. Moreover, the collapse of the capitalist system is conceived in a mechanical fashion. Once capital rules the entire globe, the impossibility of capitalism will become evident. The result is to anticipate in theory a situation in which capitalism will be automatically destroyed, although we know that there are no absolutely hopeless situations. Luxemburg thus renders the theory of breakdown vulnerable to the charge of a quietist fatalism in which there is no room for the class struggle,” Henryk Grossman, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System: Being Also a Theory of Crises, trans. Jairus Banaji (London, United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 1992), pp. 41-42. 18 “What this reveals, on the other side, is the foolishness of those socialists (namely the French, who want to depict socialism as the realization of the ideals of bourgeois society articulated by the French revolution) who demonstrate that exchange and exchange value etc. are originally (in time) or essentially (in their adequate form) a system of universal freedom and equality, but that they have been perverted by money, capital, etc. Or, also, that history has so far failed in every attempt to implement them in their true manner, but that they have now, like Proudhon, discovered e.g. the real Jacob, and intend now to supply the genuine history of these relations in place of the fake. The proper reply to them is: that exchange value or, more precisely, the money system is in fact the system of equality and freedom, and that the disturbances which they encounter in the further development of the system are disturbances inherent in it, are merely the realization of equality and freedom, which prove to be inequality and unfreedom. It is just as pious as it is stupid to wish that exchange value would not develop into capital, nor labour which produces exchange value into wage labour. What divides these gentlemen from the bourgeois apologists is, on one side, their sensitivity to the contradictions included in the system; on the other, the utopian inability to grasp the necessary difference between the real and the ideal form of bourgeois society, which is the cause of their desire to undertake the superfluous business of realizing the ideal expression again, which is in fact only the inverted projection [Lichtbild] of this reality,” Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1973), pp. 248-249.

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“From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the starspangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?” Karl Marx, “Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America” (Marxists Internet Archive, January 28, 1865), www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm; “In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it It is also an advance when a country which has hitherto been exclusively wrapped up in its own affairs, perpetually rent with civil wars, and completely hindered in its development, a country whose best prospect had been to become industrially subject to Britain—when such a country is forcibly drawn into the historical process. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will in future be placed under the tutelage of the United States. The evolution of the whole of America will profit by the fact that the United States, by the possession of California, obtains command of the Pacific. But again we ask: ‘Who is going to profit immediately by the war?’ The bourgeoisie alone. The North Americans acquire new regions in California and New Mexico for the creation of fresh capital, that is, for calling new bourgeois into being, and enriching those already in existence; for all capital created today flows into the hands of the bourgeoisie. And what about the proposed cut through the Tehuantepec isthmus? Who is likely to gain by that? Who else but the American shipping owners? Rule over the Pacific, who will gain by that but these same shipping owners? The new customers for the products of industry, customers who will come into being in the newly acquired territories—who will supply their needs? None other than the American manufacturers,” Friedrich Engels, “The Movement of 1847” (History is a Weapon, January 23, 1848), http://hiaw.org/defcon6/works/1848/01/23.html. 20 “As a result of the American Civil War and the accompanying cotton famine, the majority of the cotton workers of Lancashire were, as is well known, thrown out of work. Both from the working class itself, and from other social strata, there arose a cry for state aid, or voluntary national subscriptions, in order to make possible the emigration of those who were 'redundant' to the English colonies or to the United States,” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1, 3 vols., Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1976), p. 720; “What a limited field the proletarian movement occupied at that time (December 1847) is most clearly shown by the last section: the position of the Communists in relation to the various opposition parties in various countries. Precisely Russia and the United States are missing here. It was the time when Russia constituted the last great reserve of all European reaction, when the United States absorbed the surplus proletarian forces of Europe through immigration. Both countries provided Europe with raw materials and were at the same time markets for the sale of its industrial products. Both were, therefore, in one way of another, pillars of the existing European system,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Preface to the 1882 Edition of The Communist Manifesto” (Marxists Internet Archive, 1882), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/ communist-manifesto/preface.htm#preface-1882. 21 At the same time, Marx had a far more realistic assessment of settlers than some of his followers. While the final chapter of Capital (1867) only claimed to show that capital is the self-negation of private property through the example of capitalist struggle to expropriate settlers, some followers like Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have portrayed petty settlers as a positive image of a revolutionary subject. To them, these settlers are an instance of the ‘multitude,’ a revolutionary subjectivity defined primarily by a democratic political ethos enabled by autonomy from the site of capital-production. Needless to say, this is quite a reactionary assessment of settlers, significantly more complacent in settler mythology than Marx ever was. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 167–172; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2004), pp. 247–249. 22 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “General Characteristic of the Three Main Sections. The Homestead West,” in New Data on the Laws Governing the Development of Capitalism in Agriculture: PART ONE—Capitalism and Agriculture in the United States of America (Marxists Internet Archive, 1915), https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/ newdev/1.htm#v22zz99h-019. 23 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Russians and Negroes” (Marxists Internet Archive, February 1913), https:// www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/feb/00b.htm.

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“Competition becomes transformed into monopoly. The result is immense progress in the socialization of production. In particular, the process of technical invention and improvement becomes socialized. “This is something quite different from the old free competition between manufacturers, scattered and out of touch with one another, and producing for an unknown market. Concentration has reached the point at which it is possible to make an approximate estimate of all sources of raw materials (for example, the iron ore deposits) of a country and even, as we shall see, of several countries, or of the whole world. Not only are such estimates made, but these sources are captured by gigantic monopolist combines. An approximate estimate of the capacity of markets is also made, and the combines ‘divide’ them up amongst themselves by agreement. Skilled labour is monopolized, the best engineers are engaged; the means of transport are captured: railways in America, shipping companies in Europe and America. Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads right up to the most comprehensive socialization of production; it, so to speak, drags the capitalists, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialization. “Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few. The general framework of formally recognized free competition remains, but the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable,” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Paris, France: Foreign Languages Press, 2020), pp. 22-23. 25 Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from the South 1, no. 3 (2000): pp. 538-541. 26 “Political economy confuses, on principle, two different kinds of private property, one of which rests on the labour of the producer himself, and the other on the exploitation of the labour of others. It forgets that the latter is not only the direct antithesis of the former, but grows on the former’s tomb and nowhere else,” Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 931. 27 “We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists in this, that the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it can therefore turn part of it into his private property and his individual means of production, without preventing later settlers from performing the same operation. This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their cancerous affliction their resistance to the establishment of capital. 'Where land is very cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour very dear, as respects the labourer's share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labour at any price,’” Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 934-935. 28 Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896, The Oxford History of the United States (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 104-105. 29 Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer’s Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860-1897 (New York, New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 291-308. 30 Shannon, The Farmer’s Last Frontier, pp. 309-326. 31 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Displacement of Small by Big Enterprises. Quantity of Improved Land,” in New Data on the Laws Governing the Development of Capitalism in Agriculture: PART ONE—Capitalism and Agriculture in the United States of America, by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Marxists Internet Archive, 1915), https://www.marxists.org/ archive/lenin/works/1915/newdev/8.htm#v22zz99h-048. 32 Lee J. Alston, “Farm Foreclosures in the United States During the Interwar Period,” The Journal of Economic History 43, no. 4 (December 1983): 885–903. 33 Zvi Griliches, “The Sources of Measured Productivity Growth: United States Agriculture, 1940-60,” Journal of Political Economy 71, no. 4 (August 1963): pp. 338-340. 34 Stefan Aune, Indian Wars Everywhere: Colonial Violence and the Shadow Doctrines of Empire (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2023), p. 48; J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern, 4th ed. (Montreal, Quebec: Kersplebedeb, 2014), p. 383. 35 Bradley G. Shreve, Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011), p. 42. 36 See Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: The Apache Massacre and the Violence of History (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2012).

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Stephen Kantrowitz, “White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and the Two Citizenships of the Fourteenth Amendment,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 10, no. 1 (March 2020): pp. 30-31, https://doi.org/10.1353/ cwe.2020.0002. 38 John Hayakawa Torok, “Reconstruction and Racial Nativism: Chinese Immigrants and the Debates on the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and Civil Rights Laws,” Asian Law Journal 3, no. 55 (1996): p. 57; Martha Menchaca, “Chicano Indianism: A Historical Account of Racial Repression in the United States,” American Ethnologist 20, no. 3 (1993): p. 595. 39 James N. Leiker, Racial Borders: Black Soldiers along the Rio Grande (College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University, 2002), pp. 64-65. 40 With the distance of hindsight in exile, Kwame Nkrumah realized exactly this. Critiquing the ‘African Socialism’ which he himself had participated in the promotion of, he noted that “The myth of African socialism is used to deny the class struggle, and to obscure genuine socialist commitment. It is employed by those African leaders who are compelled — in the climate of the African Revolution — to proclaim socialist policies, but who are at the same time deeply committed to international capitalism, and who do not intend to promote genuine socialist economic development,” Kwame Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa, 1st ed. (New York, New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 26. 41 Clinton Rickard, Fighting Tuscarora: The Autobiography of Chief Clinton Rickard, ed. Barbara Graymont (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1973), p. 14. 42 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism” (Marxists Internet Archive, October 1916), https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm. 43 Rickard, Fighting Tuscarora, p. 16. 44 J. Sakai, “The Shock of Recognition: Looking at Hamerquist’s Fascism & Anti-Fascism,” in Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement, by Don Hamerquist et al., 2nd ed. (Montreal, Quebec: Kersplebedeb, 2017), pp. 125-131. 45 George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (Baltimore, Maryland: Black Classics Press, 1996), pp. 138-140, 164-166, 171-172. 46 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001). 47 Sakai, Settlers, p. 9.

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“Myth becomes enlightenment and nature mere objectivity. Human beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted. Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent that he can make them. Their ‘in-itself’ becomes ‘for him.; In their transformation the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination. This identity constitutes the unity of nature. Neither it nor the unity of the subject was presupposed by magical incantation. The rites of the shaman were directed at the wind, the rain, the snake outside or the demon inside the sick person, not at materials or specimens. The spirit which practiced magic was not single or identical; it changed with the cult masks which represented the multiplicity of spirits. Magic is bloody untruth, but in it domination is not yet disclaimed by transforming itself into a pure truth underlying the world which it enslaves. The magician imitates demons; to frighten or placate them he makes intimidating or appeasing gestures. Although his task was impersonation he did not claim to be made in the image of the invisible power, as does civilized man, whose modest hunting ground then shrinks to the unified cosmos, in which nothing exists but prey. Only when made in such an image does man attain the identity of the self which cannot be lost in identification with the other but takes possession of itself once and for all as an impenetrable mask. It is the identity of mind and its correlative, the unity of nature, which subdues the abundance of qualities. Nature, stripped of qualities, becomes the chaotic stuff of mere classification, and the all-powerful self becomes a mere having, an abstract identity. Magic implies specific representation. What is done to the spear, the hair, the name of the enemy, is also to befall his person; the sacrificial animal is slain in place of the god. The substitution which takes place in sacrifice marks a step toward discursive logic. Even though the hind which was offered up for the daughter, the lamb for the firstborn, necessarily still had qualities of its own, it already represented the genus. It manifested the arbitrariness of the specimen. But the sanctity of the hie ct nunc, the uniqueness of the chosen victim which coincides with its representative status, distinguishes it radically, makes it non-exchangeable even in the exchange. Science puts an end to this. In it there is no specific representation: something which is a sacrificial animal cannot be a god. Representation gives way to universal fungibility. An atom is smashed not as a representative but as a specimen of matter, and the rabbit suffering the torment of the laboratory is seen not as a representative but, mistakenly, as a mere exemplar. Because in functional science the differences are so fluid that everything is submerged in one and the same matter, the scientific object is petrified, whereas the rigid ritual of former times appears supple in its substitution of one thing for another. The world of magic still retained differences whose traces have vanished even in linguistic forms. The manifold affinities between existing things are supplanted by the single relationship between the subject who confers meaning and the meaningless object, between rational significance and its accidental bearer. At the magical stage dream and image were not regarded as mere signs of things but were linked to them by resemblance or name. The relationship was not one of intention but of kinship. Magic like science is concerned with ends, but it pursues them through mimesis, not through an increasing distance from the object. It certainly is not founded on the ‘omnipotence of thought,’ which the primitive is supposed to impute to himself like the neurotic; there can be no ‘over-valuation of psychical acts’ in relation to reality where thought and reality are not radically distinguished. The ‘unshakable confidence in the possibility of controlling the world’ which Freud anachronistically attributes to magic applies only to the more realistic form of world domination achieved by the greater astuteness of science. The autonomy of thought in relation to objects, as manifested in the reality-adequacy of the Ego, was a prerequisite for the replacement of the localized practices of the medicine man by all-embracing industrial technology,” Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 6-7.

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“In all previous revolutions the mode of activity always remained unchanged and it was only a question of a different distribution of this activity, a new distribution of labour to other persons, whilst the communist revolution is directed against the hitherto existing mode of activity, does away with labour and abolishes the rule of all classes with the classes themselves, because it is carried through by the class which no longer counts as a class in society, which is not recognised as a class, and is in itself the expression of the dissolution of all classes, nationalities, etc., within present society[...]” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Includes: Theses on Feuerbach and the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (New York, New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), p. 86; “Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use-values (and what else is material wealth?) as labour, which is itself only the expression of a natural power, human labour power. “This line can be found in any children’s primer and is correct in so far as the implication is that labour requires certain means and materials. However a socialist programme cannot allow a bourgeois phrase like this to conceal the very circumstances that give it some sense. Only in so far as man acts as the proprietor of nature, the primary source of all the means and materials of labour, and treats nature as his own from the outset, does his labour become the source of use-values, and hence of wealth. The bourgeoisie have very good reason to credit labour with a supernatural generative power; for it follows directly from the fact that nature is a precondition for labour, that a man who has no property other than his labour power must in all cultural and social circumstances be a slave to those who have become the owners of labour’s material prerequisites. He can only work by permission, and hence live by permission,” Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx: Later Political Writings, by Karl Marx, ed. Terrell Carver, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 208-209. 50 John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York, New York: Random House, 1939), pp. 315-316. 51 Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle (Lincoln, Nebraska; London, United Kingdom: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), p. 248. 52 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): p. 11. 53 “When the black man, who has never felt as much a ‘Negro’ as he has under white domination, decides to prove his culture and act as a cultivated person, he realizes that history imposes on him a terrain already mapped out, that history sets him along a very precise path and that he is expected to demonstrate the existence of a ‘Negro’ culture. “And it is all too true that the major responsibility for this racialization of thought, or at least the way it is applied, lies with the Europeans who have never stopped placing white culture in opposition to the other noncultures. Colonialism did not think it worth its while denying one national culture after the other. Consequently the colonized’s response was immediately continental in scope,” Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 150. 54 Oswald Spengler had moments of strange affinity to decoloniality himself. In his magnum opus, The Decline of the West (1918), he described Bolshevism as a forcible Westernization of a basically Eastern Russian civilization. Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West: An Abridged Edition. Edited by Helmut Werner and Arthur Helps. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. New York, New York: Vintage Books, 2006, 273-274 55 Jonathan Raban, “My Holy War,” The New Yorker, January 27, 2002, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/ 2002/02/04/my-holy-war; Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (Chicago, Illinois: Kazi Publications, 2003), pp. 45-51. 56 Sayed Khatab, “‘Hakimiyyah’ and ‘Jahiliyyah’ in the Thought of Sayyid Qutb,” Middle Eastern Studies 38, no. 3 (July 2002): pp. 162-165.

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“The revolution means that the national will evolves along with social influence in accordance with times. So, why the will of today’s upper class in today’s state is regarded as the national will is because upper class is on the top of today’s social influence. If we deny today’s state because of this, we shall have to deny socialism that shall be the national will on the top of modern social influence by the same logic because it shall not express the national will. –Not only in Japan, most of today’s socialists are pure individualists and think that a mission of socialism is to practice the French Revolution once more,” Kita Ikki, “The Enlightening Movement of Socialism,” in A Discourse on the Theory of Japanese Constitution and Real Socialism, by Kita Ikki, trans. Higuchi Shinya (Tokyo, Japan: Kokutairon, 2014), p. 2 http://kokutairon.web.fc2.com/english-version.html; “It was in the early summer of 1927 when I was reading Heidegger's Zein und Seit in Berlin that I first came to reflect on the problem of climate. I found myself intrigued by the attempt to treat the structure of man's existence in terms of time but I found it hard to see why, when time had thus been made to play a part in the structure of subjective existence, at the same juncture space also was not postulated as part of the basic structure of existence. Indeed it would be a mistake to allege that space is never taken into account in Heidegger's thinking, for Lebendige Natur was given fresh life by the German Romantics, yet even so it tended to be almost obscured in the face of the strong glare to which time was exposed. I perceived that herein lay the limitations of Heidegger's work, for time not linked with space is not time in the true sense and Heidegger stopped short at this point because his Dasein was the Dasein of the individual only. He treated human existence as being the existence of a man. From the standpoint of the dual structure–both individual and social–of human existence, he did not advance beyond an abstraction of a single aspect. But it is only when human existence is treated in terms of its concrete duality that time and space are linked and that history also (which never appears fully in Heidegger) is first revealed in its true guise. And at the same time the connection between history and climate becomes evident.” Watsuji Tetsuro, A Climate: A Philosophical Study, trans. Geoffrey Bownas (Tokyo, Japan: Printing Bureau, Japanese Government, 1961), pp. v-vi. 58 Mohammed Elnaiem, “Black Radicalism’s Complex Relationship with Japanese Empire,” JSTOR Daily (blog), July 18, 2018, https://daily.jstor.org/black-radicalisms-complex-relationship-with-japanese-empire/. 59 Jie Zeng and Xiaolong Li, “Ideologies Underlying Language Policy and Planning in the Philippines,” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 10, no. 405 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01911-8. 60 See Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, ed. and trans. Marshall Shatz, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, n.d.); Ernst Niekisch, “Where We Stand,” trans. Bogumil (ARPLAN, 1926), https://arplan.org/2020/08/03/ernst-niekisch-where-we-stand/; Karl Otto Paetel, “The National Bolshevist Manifesto,” trans. Bogumil (ARPLAN, 1933), https://archive.org/details/ PaetelNationalBolshevistManifesto/page/n7/mode/2up; Alain de Benoist, On Being a Pagan, ed. Greg Johnson, trans. Jon Grahamm (Atlanta, Georgia: Ultra, 2004). 61 Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism, trans. Meyer Waxman (New York, New York: Bloch publishing Company, 1918), p. 160. 62 “You are being invited to help make history. That cannot frighten you, nor will you laugh at it. It is not in your accustomed line; it doesn't involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor, not Englishmen but Jews. But had this been on your path, you would have done it by now. How, then, do I happen to turn to you, since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial,” quoted in Stephen Halbrook, “The Class Origins of Zionist Ideology,” Journal of Palestine Studies 2, no. 1 (Autumn 1972), p. 86 https://doi.org/10.2307/2535975. 63 Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State (Princeton, New Jersey; Oxford, United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 47–51. 64 Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel, pp. 153–177. 65 Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 21-22. 66 Deloria, Playing Indian, pp. 51-52. 67 “Let us decide not to imitate Europe and let us tense our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us endeavor to invent a man in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving. “Two centuries ago, a former European colony took it into its head to catch up with Europe. It has been so successful that the United States ofAmerica has become a monster where the flaws, sickness, and inhumanity of Europe have reached frightening proportions,” Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 236-237. 68 This lesson is particularly clear in looking at the reactionary tendencies of the Israeli mizrahim, West Asian and North African Jews. The mizrahi settlers who back the fascistic ruling party Likud justify their choice through a rejection of paternalistic universalism and a rhetoric of Jewish authenticity. To them, Likud is the best vehicle to enact their Jewish indigeneity to the land exactly because of its uncompromisingly violent, genocidal ethnonationalism. Peggy Cidor, “Why the Right-Wing Mizrahi Vote Is Misunderstood in Israel,” Middle East Eye, February 1, 2023, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-why-right-wing-mizrahi-vote-misunderstood.

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Laurence M. Hauptman, “The American Indian Federation and the Indian New Deal: A Reinterpretation,” Pacific Historical Review 52, no. 4 (November 1983): pp. 395-396, https://doi.org/10.2307/3639073. 70 Héctor Orestes Aguilar, “Ese olvidado nazi mexicano de nombre José Vasconcelos,” Istor: Revista de Historia Internacional 8, no. 30 (2007): 148–57; Itzhak Bar-Lewaw, “La Revista ‘Timón’ y La Colaboración Nazi de José Vasconcelos,” in Actas del cuarto Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas, ed. Eugenio Bustos Tovar, vol. 1 (Salamanca, Spain: Prensa Universidad de Salamanca, 1982), 151–56; Linnete Manrique, “Dreaming of a Cosmic Race: José Vasconcelos and the Politics of Race in Mexico, 1920s–1930s,” ed. Lisa Miles Bunkowski, Cogent Arts & Humanities 3, no. 1 (2016): 1–13, https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2016.1218316. 71 George Manuel and Michael Posluns, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (Minneapolis, Minnesota; London, United Kingdom: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), p. xii. 72 Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization, trans. Philip A. Dennis (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2010), pp. 53–57; Sebastian Usher, “Why Egypt Remains Reluctant to Open Rafah Crossing to Gaza,” British Broadcasting Corporation News, October 17, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/worldmiddle-east-67133675. 73 Walter Rodney, “Marxism as a Third World Ideology,” in Decolonial Marxism: Essays from the Pan-African Revolution, by Walter Rodney, ed. Asha Rodney et al. (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2022), p. 63. 74 “[...]at the center of a system, that is, where the relations of production are more firmly entrenched, the development of the productive forces governed by these relations strengthens the cohesion of the whole system, while in the periphery, the inadequate development of the productive forces provides more flexibility, which explains the earlier revolutionary outcome,” Samir Amin, Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion, and Democracy, A Critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism, trans. Russell Moore and James Membrez, 2nd ed. (New York, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), p. 248. 75 Joanne Rappaport, The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes (Durham, North Carolina; London, United Kingdom: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 144-148; Glen Sean Coulthard, “Once Were Maoists: Third World Currents in Fourth World Anti-Colonialism, Vancouver, 1967–1975,” in Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, ed. Brendan Hokowhitu et al., 1st ed. (New York, New York; London, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2020), 378–91. 76 “Since red nationalism is essential to Indian/Métis liberation,it must be a spearhead force for the native movement, and must provide the machinery for educating the masses politically. Since the cultural awakening is only one stage of liberation, steps must be taken to ensure that the national consciousness will develop its political aspects as well.There is danger in nationalism if this transition is not made at the right time, because colonized people can quickly become involved in cultural nationalism, which is a move backward to further oppression. They must be on guard against bourgeois nationalism as well as cultural nationalism. Bourgeois nationalism, however, is easily recognized: it is simply a code of patriotism imposed by a ruling class through authoritarian officials and channels, such as the schools - it is a purely ritualistic and empty exercise, performed only because one is obligated to participate in displays of patriotism. “Cultural nationalism is a reactionary nationalism that forms part of the ideology of imperialism. It is adopted by or imposed on Third World people in their colonized state and it involves the revival of indigenous native traditions and tribalism. Today, in our awakening, many Indians of Canada are returning to native religion and tribal rituals. The danger in this is that it might begin to sever any links with a progressive liberation ideology. The idea that a return to traditional Indian customs and worship will free us from the shackles of colonial domination is deceptive–a return to this kind of traditional worship is a reactionary move and leads to greater oppression, rather than to liberation. Cultural nationalism is more than behaving and believing as traditional Indians; it is a return to extreme separatism in the hope that colonial oppression will automatically go away. The emphasis is upon worship and the performance of ritual behavior, not upon politics and liberation. Because cultural nationalism insists on excluding political issues, Indians and Metis accept their colonized political conditions without challenging them. It perpetuates the racist idea of ‘Indians in their place’ and does not allow them to develop a radical consciousness or a reorganized culture that would be in harmony with liberation,” Howard Adams, Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View, 2nd ed. (Saskatoon, Canada: Fifth House Books, 1989), pp. 169-170. 77 For examples of the consequences of crude ‘Third Worldism’ and authenticity ideology, see Loren Goldner, Revolution, Defeat and Theoretical Underdevelopment: Russia, Turkey, Spain, Bolivia (Leiden, South Holland; Boston, Massachusetts: Brill, 2016).

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Fascist Decoloniality 78

“Race is not, as the racial nationalists claim, an immediate, natural peculiarity. Rather, it is a regression to nature as mere violence, to the hidebound particularism which, in the existing order, constitutes precisely the universal. Race today is the self-assertion of the bourgeois individual, integrated into the barbaric collective. The harmonious society to which the liberal Jews declared their allegiance has finally been granted to them in the form of the national community. They believed that only antisemitism disfigured this order, which in reality cannot exist without disfiguring human beings. The persecution of the Jews, like any persecution, cannot be separated from that order. Its essence, however it may hide itself at times, is the violence which today is openly revealed,” Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 138–139. 79 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 4–7. 80 Noel Ignatiev, “Whiteness and Class Struggle,” in Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity, by Noel Ignatiev, ed. Geert Dhondt, Zhandarka Kurti, and Jarrod Shanahan (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2022), 268–75. 81 Noel Ignatiev, “Notes on ‘Settlers’” (June 1996), pp. 1-3 https://thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/ Noel-Ignatiev-Notes-on-Settlers.pdf. 82 Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Eric Foner (New York, New York: Noonday Press, 1989), pp. 211-220. 83 Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, New Jersey; Oxford, United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 199-206. 84 Aram Ziai, “The Ambivalence of Post-development: Between Reactionary Populism and Radical Democracy” 25, no. 6 (2004): 1045–60, https://doi.org/10.1080/0143659042000256887. 85 Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology (New Haven, Connecticut; London, United Kingdom: Yale University Press, 2022), pp. 246-248. 86 Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins, pp. 180-182. 87 Maxwell Woods, “Decoloniality, Communality, and Antisemitism,” Cultural Dynamics 32, no. 4 (2020): 241–60, https://doi.org/10.1177/0921374019856631. 88 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (New York, New York; London, United Kingdom: Verso Books, 1993); Jonathan Derrick, “The Dissenters: Anti-Colonialism in France, c. 1900–40,” in Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France, ed. Tony Chafer (New York, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 53–68; Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (New York, New York; London, United Kingdom: Verso Books, 2020); Fredrik Petersson, “Hub of the AntiImperialist Movement: The League against Imperialism and Berlin, 1927–1933,” Hub of the Anti-Imperialist Movement, Interventions 16, no. 1 (2014): 49–71, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2013.776222. 89 “This form of ‘anti-capitalism,’ then, is based on a one-sided attack on the abstract. The abstract and concrete are not seen as constituting an antinomy where the real overcoming of the abstract - of the value dimension - involves the historical overcoming of the antinomy itself as well as each of its terms. Instead there is the one-sided attack on abstract Reason, abstract law or, on another level, money and finance capital. In this sense it is antionomically complementary to liberal thought, where the domination of the abstract remains unquestioned and the distinction between positive and critical reason is not made. The ‘anti-capitalist’ attack, however, does not remain limited to the attack against abstraction. Even the abstract dimension also appears materially. On the level of the capital fetish, it is not only the concrete side of the antimony which is naturalized and biologized. The manifest abstract dimension is also biologized - as the Jews. The opposition of the concrete material and the abstract becomes the racial opposition of the Arians and the Jews. Modern antisemitism involves a biologization of capitalism - which itself is only understood in terms of its manifest abstract dimension - as International Jewry,” Moishe Postone, “Antisemitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust,’” New German Critique, no. 19 (Winter 1980): p. 112, https://doi.org/10.2307/487974.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez 90

“Objectified labour ceases to exist in a dead state as an external, indifferent form on the substance, because it is itself again posited as a moment of living labour; as a relation of living labour to itself in an objective material, as the objectivity of living labour (as means and end [Objekt]) (the objective conditions of living labour). The transformation of the material by living labour, by the realization of living labour in the material — a transformation which, as purpose, determines labour and is its purposeful activation (a transformation which does not only posit the form as external to the inanimate object, as a mere vanishing image of its material consistency) — thus preserves the material in a definite form, and subjugates the transformation of the material to the purpose of labour. Labour is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time,” Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 360–361. 91 “In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity's own nature? The absolute working out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming?” Marx, Grundrisse, p. 488. 92 Luce Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History, trans. Alison Martin (New York, New York; London, United Kingdom: Routledge, 1996), pp. 23-26.

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Part III: Reinterpretations

Bourgeois Civilization “The fact is that the so-called European civilization—‘Western’ civilization—as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem; that Europe is unable to justify itself either before the bar of ‘reason’ or before the bar of ‘conscience’; and that, increasingly, it takes refuge in a hypocrisy which is all the more odious because it is less and less likely to deceive.” — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1955)1

Modernity, or the modernity of this Euro-centered world, began with the assertion of subjectivity. Its roots stretched back further, like any dialectical potential. But we see something new with the emergence of a specifically bourgeois Christianity (whether Protestant or Catholic humanist), the bourgeois form of scientific materialism, the bourgeois doctrine of free and equal national citizens… These are the things coupled under the self-congratulatory labels of “Renaissance” (looking backward to Classical Antiquity), “Enlightenment” (looking forward to modernity), and the “Age of Reason” (looking inward for meaning). Many have argued against their conflation, a criticism that cannot be denied, but their association nevertheless is clear. Modernity and subjectivity go hand in hand. Yet it is clear that this assertion of subjectivity, of subjective freedom (i.e., freedom of thought, of being oneself as a subject) has now turned over into its opposite. The cheery arrogance of the “Enlightenment” defining itself against the so-called “Dark Ages” is especially hilarious now, when the arch-Enlightened structures of mass society now churn out prefab people-units with shallow subjectivity and incredible dependency on external coercion to.

Bourgeois Civilization function. Today, it is impossible to avoid the fact that no one is in control, as hard as we try to run from it. Perhaps no one was ever in control in history. But it is only in this bourgeois civilization where even the body of the sovereign, no matter what form, is so clearly powerless against the impersonal power of capital. Bourgeois civilization announced itself as the freedom of property. Property was supposed to be the free self-expression of the individual. This could take the form of either property in the sense of attribute, or property in the sense of an external thing that is owned. The self was supposed to own itself and its properties. Individuals were supposed to be free to realize themselves, as long as they didn’t encroach on the self-ownership of others. And yet, capitalism has transformed property into its opposite for most people in the world.2 Most people do not own what they produce, and instead their work is bought by wages in exchange for feeding capital. They are also not sure who they are, what their properties are. They find themselves helpless, confused, in despair. Life seems to be a property of capital in both senses. We live to work instead of working to live. In the name of subjectivity and of individuality, bourgeois civilization has become the most calcified objective system in history and individuals have become less individual and less unique than ever in history. Capital demands global homogenization—everything must serve a single Plan, a single Totality. Sure, it might grant a bit of autonomy… but it’s just giving some slack to the rope we’re bound with. Think of it with an everyday example. Even when you aren’t clocked in, you have to plan your life around work. You can’t do much of anything without money when everything has a price, and work is the main way that most people access money. And even when you’re not on the clock, the same principles that organize work organize the rest of society’s structures—mass production, standardization of parts, rationalization according to a Plan, seemingly infinite choices but all of them already chosen for you. When the capitalist mode of production is well-established, and we are in close proximity to its accumulation, we are made in the image of capital as our God. The light of God-capital does not shine on all equally, but it is unavoidable as the center of the world. This is itself the function of Eurocentrism. Even if the West is no longer the center of global production, it is the

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez center of the general capital. Therefore to be capitalist is to be Western, to be Western is to be civilized, to be civilized is to be modern, to be modern is to be bourgeois, to be bourgeois is to be capitalist…

Abstract Universals We think of places like Florence and Venice as the birthplaces of bourgeois civilization, admiring their human achievements, their cosmopolitanism, and their cultural and intellectual advances. We think of the Renaissance as a Golden Age of bourgeois civilization, the measure for what we should aspire to. But the beautiful, bountiful, bustling streets of Renaissance Venice were tied directly to the agonized cries and thing-ification of the slave trade. This bond acted through capital itself. Freedom in bourgeois civilization is bound to unfreedom, universality to exclusion, Being to non-Being, humanity to inhumanity. The hagiography of freedom and human flourishing which has been crafted for bourgeois civilization is written in pages of human skin. As Vladimir Lenin said, freedom in bourgeois civilization is “freedom for the slave-owners.”3 The specific forms which freedom takes, particularly that of the rights-bearing individual citizen, is inseparable from enslavement, expropriation, and exploitation. The white citizen in North America, unencumbered by a parasitic aristocracy, themselves lived on land seized from Indigenous peoples and with a distance from the ‘bare life' of proletarianization bought by branding Black people with labor as a state of being. The white citizens considered life for labor to be the racial destiny of Black people, while citizenry could be free of these concerns and instead focus on the ‘higher’ and universal life of ethics and politics.4 They could abstract from the concerns of their ‘animal’ life by abstracting Black human beings into chattel, into the embodiment of labor-values which could be measured in their corporeality itself by capitalist enslavers. The universality of bourgeois citizenry had, and has, as its underside, the inhuman laborer. Eurocentrism and abstractness thus coincide in the bourgeois citizen. The abstractuniversal in bourgeois civilization always-everywhere feeds on its outside and its underside. Living labor is what feeds capital, and it always needs its host to survive. But its relationship to

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Bourgeois Civilization its host is not always the same. It takes different forms according to the political constellation of a given region of global capital, articulating itself especially through citizenship. Some workers enjoy the rights—however illusory—of citizenship, while others don’t. And still today, the slave trade thrives. Karl Marx revealed that the apparently free and equally matched exchange of two commodity owners exercising full rights over their property, the one of capital and the other of labor-power, obscures what operates within the process of production itself. Beyond the sphere of circulation, the exploitation of living labor ensures that capital can continue to gorge itself off of the externality which becomes surplus-value.5 This is one of his key, original insights, and where he overlaps directly with decolonial critique of bourgeois civilization. It is exactly the freedom and equality of capitalism that is the premise for the extraction of surplus-value, the exploitation of living labor by capital.6 The proletarian is not only the industrial worker. The proletarian is all of that living labor which is subordinated to capital directly through the sale of abstract commodity labor-power, the domination of labor as a personal power by labor as an article of sale. The proletarian produces surplus-value, which is distributed to all of capitalist society through wages, profits, rents, interests, taxes, etc. The fundamental exploitation, the making-available of surplus-value to the general capital, is what underlies all of bourgeois civilization. Capital needs the externality of the proletariat to drink the blood of living labor, the proletariat can never be entirely a citizen. The living labor which capital feeds on and the rights of the commodity-citizen are in a tense relationship, even if they are coexist within a single whole. The tension can be greater or lesser. In some cases or junctures capital wields a monopoly power which it uses to toss aside the premise of exchange and to simply seize living labor (for example, through unpaid slave labor in prison camps). The difference between abstract commodity labor-power (the citizen-humancommodity) and living labor remains. This difference also means that the proletariat can never be entirely subsumed into capital, and that it must wield its externality as a weapon to seize autonomy and defeat capital.7 By defeating capital, the proletariat abolishes itself as a class and steps forth into self-creation.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Aníbal Quijano identified coloniality and power as inseparable in bourgeois civilization.8 This civilization, as a civilization unto itself, formed through colonization, through the historical break represented by 1492.9 What the bourgeoisie wrought against the peasants in Europe, against Indigenous peoples in the Americas, and against the Africans that it enslaved was a new creation—global capitalism, Euro-bourgeois civilization.10 The forms of power which it wields are stamped with the birthmarks of these formative moments.11 As C. L. R. James and W. E. B. Du Bois have argued, the techniques of exploitation, control, and instrumental rationality which we associate with factories developed first in the hellish sugar mills and cotton plantations of the so-called New World.12 Commodity labor-power, as an abstraction from specific human beings and specific kinds of labor, itself finds key moments of its history in the commodification of Indigenous and Black peoples into mere things, exchangeable property.13 Like the wage-laborer, enslaved people in racialized chattel slavery were subordinated through their exchangeability to the slave society as a whole, not only to one particular master. For all their pathetic paternalistic imitations of European aristocracy, the enslavers were capitalist. Yet the difference between slaves and proletarians is still clear—even while they found themselves in horrendous conditions of neglect and abuse, indentured servants were not bound in chains and packed skin to skin like any other commodity to be shipped across the Atlantic and sold. They were not a pure mass of inhuman labor, a difference which would grow into the illusory promise of whiteness. What they saw in enslaved Black people was a terrifying reminder of what the coloniality of power could do, thus the American Patriot slogan that the British government was “making slaves” of them through taxes. This investment in the sanctity of whiteness continued into denunciations of “white slavery,” and grumblings about “[n-word] wages.”14 Whiteness is thus a basically bourgeois identity, something which white workers cling to in terror of being put at the other end of bourgeois civilization’s vampirism. The bourgeois citizen is non-relational, the citizen becomes society through contracts. Each citizen is supposed to be themselves and no other, even though they are really more or less interchangeable. The citizen is the son that defines himself by rejecting his birth-bond to his mother, instead desiring the absolute self-ownership (and… ownership of others) which the

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Bourgeois Civilization father wields.15 The bourgeois citizen is a masculine, individualist, vampiric form of power. The citizen-society is a society of wannabe fathers. Exploitation does not only take the form of the proletariat and bourgeoisie. There is also the gendered relationship between men and women, and the definition of people in these strictly bipolar terms. One is supposed to complement the other, but really their complement is quite stilted. To be ‘morally pure,’ a woman must be a good appendage of the man. He must cover her, she must treat him as a father. Otherwise she is supposed to betray her own interests, as the proletarian is supposed to betray their interests when they strike and revolt. If she is going to be a public person, an individual unto herself, she must play by the rules of the game. She can’t be hysterical, she can’t be too relational. She has to be a good commodity-owner if she isn’t going to be the owned commodity.16 Man must be ‘masculine’ and maintain the boundaries of the bourgeois self, or else they risk being penetrated and weak like woman is supposed to be. Men must be men and women must be women, and any variation must ultimately fall within these two poles in a single identical totality. This entire civilization is built on global exploitation, a global exploitation which is the first of its kind in history. The Romans and Chinese had certainly established world-systems before, but not unified global systems. It is bourgeois civilization which brings together the equation globality-coloniality-modernity.17 This exploitation does not always take the same forms and strategies, but it is a basic drive nevertheless. Today, in the age of neo-colonialism, global-coloniality looks quite a bit like the exploitation of proletarians. The universal contract relations between nations are themselves the premises for exploitation. Even where global law of ‘fair exchange' is enforced (which is quite rare), exploitation occurs.18 Through the exchange between equal owners, the transfer of surplus-value occurs. Even while the global division of labor has shifted, and the ‘First World’ is no longer the center of production, this Eurocentric arrangement operates. The key is to ask where the centers of capital accumulation are, where the densities of value-chains concentrate.19 It is also important to remember that nations cannot be made strictly equivalent to classes —while labor-power is a unique commodity in being only one side of a dual character (the other

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez being living labor, which produces and realizes new commodity-values), nation-states do not have such a character in exchange. Nation-states instead distribute surplus-values in these unequal exchanges. Value operates on the level of the general capital, of global capital, of bourgeois civilization, while it is prices, rents, interests, taxes, and outright force that determine distribution. It is also important to note that imperialist exploitation does not simply occur by extracting from the outside, the pre-capitalist.20 This is certainly important, but it is not what determines the ultimate fate of the capitalist system as a whole. Imperial exploitation can just as well take the form of universal exchanges within and between bourgeois nation-states.21 By extension, hope for revolution does not depend only on externality. There is an opportunity for revolutionary transformation from within bourgeois civilization itself. But this revolution must break with the world it has grown in, and put the world on a fundamentally new basis. Otherwise it is dead on the vine. Many Marxists and anarchists have a certain investment in bourgeois civilization. They denounce capitalism for being unable to realize these principles anymore and call on the proletariat to take up the mantle. This has included figures from Rudolf Rocker to the older Georg Lukács. They remain stuck in the capitalist form of subjectivity, unable to see that exploitation cannot be wiped away from it. To emphasize individualism, contract, totality, and Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity in an uncritical way is to potentially repeat the coloniality and destructive character of bourgeois civilization. This criticism had already been made by contemporary colleagues, such as Errico Malatesta and Theodor Adorno respectively. It is not that these ideals have been betrayed. They have, of their own logic, transformed into their opposite. The principles of bourgeois civilization lead to their own self-negation. It’s not up to us to simply repeat them, but to work through the process of going beyond them. Marx and Engels identified the seed for this as existing in the European proletariat, which in their day was constituting itself into an independent political force. By the end of their lives, however, they realized that this independence may not have been as solid as they thought. The European

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Bourgeois Civilization workers seemed to think and act much the same as the bourgeoisie in many instances. The two started to look to the ‘underdeveloped’ world for new signs of revolutionary struggle. Historically, revolutionary Marxists have identified the embourgeoisment of Western proletarians, this infection by bourgeois civilization, as emerging from a direct investment in imperialist exploitation. Drawing from preceding arguments made by Friedrich Engels, Lenin argued that “out of such enormous superprofits (since they are obtained over and above the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers of their ‘own’ country) it is possible to bribe the labour leaders and the upper stratum of the labour aristocracy. And the capitalists of the ‘advanced’ countries are bribing them; they bribe them in a thousand different ways, direct and indirect, overt and covert.”22 There are more or less radical ways of thinking about this notion of labor aristocracy. There is a vulgar form, which assumes that complacence must emerge from ‘material interests’—workers would only support imperialism if it was directly and obviously padding their paychecks. Such an analysis seems very radical, as it goes far to condemn the complacency as directly and consciously accepting blood money. But this explanation has faltered quite a bit in the past few decades, with neo-colonialism having hidden extraction and distribution and with living standards relatively declining in many Western countries. This has led some, like David Harvey, to argue that imperialism has ended or even shifted to a redistribution of wealth from West to East.23 This very strange claim is not our only alternative. Instead, we can interpret this concept in a more complex—civilizational—sense.24 It is superexploitation of some nations, the less-than nations, which allows for other nations to live civilizational norms closer to the modern ideals of bourgeois society. This does not mean all or even most of the workers in the wealthy nations live happy lives, own their own houses, or live equally to their own bourgeoisie. There can be very sharp class distinctions in income and standards of living—something that’s quite clear for those living in the United States. Where this exploitation and accumulation of surplus-values in the metropolitan cores of the world really matters is in enabling the presence of specific institutions, expectations of consumption, and—in short—“moral-historical” norms. For example, the free availability of

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez practically any produce year-round in supermarkets is an extreme global and historical aberration specific to the wealthiest imperial centers. It is exactly these institutions and practices which are tied to the recuperation of the proletariat in these countries as well, facilitated through mass media (culture industry), car culture, high purchasing power by global standards, the aspiration to house ownership, access to globally prestigious institutions… The Western workers can have so many things to occupy them, to create and reproduce their basically bourgeois subjectivity, because of this imperialist exploitation. Of course, the distribution of this wealth is not uniform even within specific countries. Often, it is heavily racialized. Imperialist exploitation does not stop at national boundaries—the coloniality of power is much more pervasive than that. Food deserts, exposure to toxic waste, unemployment, wage theft, and superexploitation are all distributed along racial lines. Yet even when they enjoy all of this wealth at once, many find themselves discontented. Bourgeois civilization simply does not have people as its center. There is no given meaning to life, only producing and accumulating capital. There is too much givenness to give meaning to life.25 Some of this wealth is directed to generating meaning through techniques of mass production, today tending to take the form of social media influencers and subcultural brand identities. Capitalists, life coaches, influencers, movies, shows, schools, and books alike encourage people to pursue the fantasy of something beyond a work-life balance, a dream job where you realize your individual authenticity in your work itself. The best work doesn’t feel like work at all! But to get there, to be morally qualified, you have to grind. Those who are unhappy simply haven’t grinded hard enough, or talked to a therapist, or taken medication, or otherwise become a Good Person. The imperial mode of living is the ultimate passive nihilism that passes itself off as active. Capital is dragging us to apocalypse, to ecocide, and we are supposed to grind away regardless. What the imperial mode of living tells people is that nothing matters but your choices as a market actor, as a bourgeois individual, to ignore anything outside of your myopic concerns. If even your myopic concerns bring you to sound the alarm, then you are a failure—you need to practice a growth mindset. Bourgeois civilization comes to a historical fatalism out of its own subjectivism.

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Bourgeois Civilization Even this wealth can be no guarantee. There is no fundamental ground in bourgeois civilization except capital. In the past few decades, many workers and petit-bourgeoisie who once enjoyed bountiful fruits of exploitation now find themselves declassed, thrown into unemployment or menial and insecure forms of wage-labor. The labor aristocracy in the conventional sense has shrunk significantly, though the imperial mode of living has not disappeared. These people respond to proletarianization differently, but do so with reference to what they consider normal. Many, even most, look back to the ‘good old days’ for meaning and gravitate towards fascism. Others look forward, to the need to transform the social system to its core. This has been only a minority however, as the norms which people are used to and the destruction of the proletariat as an independent political force in the West have eroded the viability of communism as an alternative. Communism must constitute itself as an alternative by constituting a new collectivity which fundamentally rejects the premises of bourgeois civilization. The imperial mode of living is transitory and is already collapsing before our eyes. Fascism is a false solution, remaining mired in the passive nihilism baked into our institutions. To really free ourselves, we must abolish Euro-bourgeois civilization and commit to global revolutionary transformation. This means taking on the responsibility of freedom.

Capitalism and Freedom So we come to the question: How to wrench freedom from bourgeois civilization? Do we have to leave subjectivity behind? Some have tried to look for a deeper grounding apart from, or more fundamental than, subjectivity. This has been essential to reactionary critiques of modernity, from Martin Heidegger to Julius Evola, who argue that subjectivism has lead to forms of domination which were previously unimaginable in history and that we must return to rootedness in order to be free in a way true to our being.26 Yet this response means falling into fascism, and despite the objections of some, into fatalism. This is an escape from freedom, not the realization of it. Freedom must work through modern, bourgeois subjectivity itself. Subjectivity has certainly turned into unfreedom in bourgeois society. But subjectivity is key to realizing a society

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez where the freedom of each is the condition of the freedom of all. Subjectivity in bourgeois society is really quite limited. The subjectivity which is the most free is the alienated and impersonal power of capital, and by proximity that of the biggest capitalists. This subjectivity is premised on most people living their lives as things, working to feed capital instead of for themselves. We have not seen what subjectivity could be. The next question: How to free subjectivity in the name of freedom? We have to freely understand the nature of freedom itself. We can’t be told to be free and given a mass of commodity-things which we are supposed to be free with. This is the bourgeois understanding of freedom—making the best of what you have, and if possible, having as much as you can. But this is simply taking what’s already given, which is no independence of subjectivity. Free subjectivity can’t simply make do with what is already given to it. Freedom exercises itself through negativity. This doesn’t simply mean a ‘negative attitude,’ or hopelessness (though rejecting false hope and toxic positivity can be important for freedom). Freedom negates what is given, saying “no” to it. This doesn’t simply mean rejecting abstractly, like we do when we select “no” on a screen at a store. This is “no” that refuses the way things are given to us, implying instead a change. To create also means to destroy. But to create-destroy means to work through something by its own premises. You have to understand, or internalize, a thing’s qualities in order to consciously change it into something else according to your own purpose or desire. Freedom is a determinate negation.27 Freedom therefore requires a subjectivity which comes to an awareness of itself for itself, and which does so by working to understand the world and internalizing the qualities of things into knowledge. Of course, we learn about these qualities from our own corporeal perspectives and drives. We human beings wouldn’t think of a grease trap as a great place to live in and eat because that would probably kill most of us, or at least make us very sick. But a grease trap offers a wealth of use-values for the needs of bacteria. We categorize the world according to our needs and intentions, which can vary with time, place, and social consciousness. There is already a given in our choices and actions, but they are our choices and actions in their specific negativity in specific situations. They can be more or less ours, but this freedom and openness is inseparable from life. The only thing we can call human nature is to be nothing in particular.28

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Bourgeois Civilization By understanding things from our subjective perspectives, we open up further possibilities for actions. Determinate negativity is freedom, and freedom is the understanding of necessities. Possibilities are always contextually specific and relational. We tend to think of possibility, at least when we’re thinking of our own possibilities, as more or less arbitrary. We might think they’re inherent to ourselves from birth, they’re spontaneous actions of an abstractly free will, or they’re dropped down from the sky. But possibility, something positive, is defined by negativity. Possibility could be many things. It is not identical to itself. This is why possibility is the home ground of freedom. Abstractness seems to bring us infinite possibilities. To focus on specific things seems to be dull, uninteresting, and stultifying. Why not act, and act purely of our own will? Life is short. Whatever happens happens, so why waste time? This attitude, so common in bourgeois civilization today, really means an unconscious enslavement to the existing current. Abstractness, purity is an illusion. Already by working through it, a determinate arrangement of things is revealed. Freedom is situated, and it must act through a situation. At the same time, freedom can negate itself when it treats a thing or situation purely as an instrument of subjective will. This is the bourgeois attitude to the world. All things are means, and the only end is capital. Yet this kind of freedom simply leads to an overaccumulation of instrumentalization, and the disappearance of those who can understand and keep the machine running smoothly. Everything becomes an instrument, a machine, in a gigantic factory that accumulates, accumulates, accumulates. Life becomes an appendage of its own creation, and the only things that are truly free are… things. But this is not substantial freedom, the negating freedom of subjectivity. This is only a freedom borrowed from the people who conjured capital up. Capitalism is, in a sense, the accumulation of infinite dead possibilities. Marx described it as the culmination of many class societies across history, incorporating a hodge-podge of all of them under one global form of impersonal power.29 There can be many relations of exploitation, domination, and distribution in capitalism, but they all come back to the gravitational pull of capital-in-general. Capitalism develops only what is necessary for accumulation and allows underdevelopment where it’s convenient. This is especially obvious in an age of planetary waste,

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez where much of what the West exports is literally garbage. We can’t rely on the “productive forces” to prepare the way for freedom. Capital is distorting, it is disharmony. Many people embrace this passively nihilistic way of living, terrified of the consequences implied by trying to be free. Negating this world seems impossible, so if you can’t beat them join them. People want to give up the tension and pain of negativity, of freedom, and let themselves go to be carried away. They throw themselves head first into algorithmic programming of thought and activity, desiring more and more passive forms of consumption. Some directly practice something like “animism” but for the internet. They believe that the internet is a moral-spiritual force which will realize a new, holy world. This takes more subcultural forms, as in digital accelerationism, or more banal forms, as in the obsessive worship of influencer-brands and the measure of moral quality by social media content (Do you post your romantic partner, therefore proving loyalty? Did you post in support of this?). Of course, this is only a specific way of giving up freedom—specific to the heartland of contemporary bourgeois civilization, and varying according to how interpersonal life has been arranged. But it is an especially glaring example of subjectivity turned into a dead objectivity, just as bourgeois individuals imagine “nature” to be. It is a second nature, and people learn to worship it as a “natural order.” Communism offers a form of freedom much truer than this. The free association of free individuals need not destroy subjectivity. It should be an association of many subjectivities, many freedoms, in a common relational constellation of freedom. The free development of each needs to be the free development of all, rather than each individual being the defining limit of the other as in bourgeois society. For subjectivity to really be one’s own, for one to be a master of oneself, all must be masters. Bourgeois civilization has produced a massified form of life, one where individuality has been destroyed in the name of individualism. Free subjectivity would need to be able to create and recreate itself, and it can only do so with a respectful and understanding relation with all subjectivities of the world. Freedom of one cannot be at the expense of another. Negativity which imposes itself on another becomes givenness. The dominating subjectivity forces identity on another, identifying itself with domination in the process in order to maintain it. It might run

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Bourgeois Civilization from this and obscure it, but its freedom is a bastard freedom. The freedom of subjectivity, torn from bourgeois civilization, would mean a freedom to be otherwise, but otherwise in association and kinship with others. Freedom is already situational and relational. Exploitation is relational, even where it is premised on a rejection of a relational identity.30 The free citizen has the slave beneath them, even if they think their freedom is entirely a quality of themselves. Their possibilities are expanded on the backs of others. A relationship of exploitation distorts both the exploiter and exploited because it is premised on unfreedom, degradation, and disharmony, not premised on free kinship. Communism puts freedom on a basis true to itself. Everyone is themselves… and they are specifically nothing in particular. All relations are based on this truth. Our possibilities are mutually extended by working with another. Communism puts the flourishing of each and all as an end in itself, it is life-affirming. It is not idyllic—this is an unfree idea of freedom. It means working through difference and understanding, reaching towards the harmony of an Absolute where all are free. Freedom is both a place and a horizon.31 Marx and Engels saw capitalism as something like a Golgotha of the Spirit—a mutilation which humanity must go through in order to realize a greater freedom.32 This was the rationale behind their congratulatory analysis of coloniality, considering the spread of bourgeois civilization to be clearing the way for a global human community to emerge. Capitalism creates the potential for a universal humanity—the end of the “pre-history of human society”—by uniting everyone under one global class society for the first time in history.33 It is exactly the abstracting and nihilistic character of bourgeois civilization, where “all that is solid melts into air,” which clears the way for something greater. The accumulation of many possibilities by capitalism, in the eyes of Marx and Engels, created a potential freedom to be realized by communist society. But has capitalism become overripe, and now threatens to abolish all possibilities? Ecocide threatens the existence of humanity as we have come to know it. The dream of a smooth passage from passive to active nihilism which Marx and Engels indulged was woefully naive. To realize freedom, communism must be far more of a break in history. To refer to Walter Benjamin: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez attempt by the passengers on this train-namely, the human race-to activate the emergency brake.”34

Cosmopolitan Roots What do we do? We can’t even find the conductor’s cabin to pull the breaks. And besides, where do we stop? For many of us, nowhere in the world is a home. The railroads ran through them a long time ago, and all we’ve known is the train careening forward, forever. It’s hard enough to stop the train, how would we find somewhere to be home and free? We can learn something of this from Indigenous peoples, those who are not strictly trainpeople and retain the memory and heart of home. Their homes have been run through by the railroads, and they have been carried across space by the imperial train. But they can remember other ways of doing things, ways which don’t have to look like blasting mountains, mania for gold, steel monstrosities, life for labor. To preserve their sovereignty, their distinctness as peoples, they have preserved their principles of communal kinship. Though many are citizens of nation-states today, they hold passenger tickets to the train, they are also kin of their people and of their homelands. The anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus described very similar principles for a future society, saying:

“Some day our civilization, which is so fiercely individualist and divides the world into as many little belligerent states as there are private properties and family households, will finally collapse, and it will be necessary to practice mutual aid to assure our common survival. Some day the quest for friendship will replace the quest for material well-being that sooner or later will have been adequately provided for. Some day dedicated naturalists will have disclosed to us all that is charming, appealing, human, and often more than human in the nature of animals. We will then reflect upon all the species left behind in the march of progress and seek to make of them neither our servants nor our machines, but rather our true companions.”35

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Bourgeois Civilization This is cosmopolitan rootedness, rootedness that isn’t rootedness in Blood and Soil but in beloved kin, kinship with all life, kinship with the other. We should stand against the so-called global village, really the global train, as a disaster. Even the imagined universal community of the internet, which was praised at the beginning of this century as heralding utopia, is really just the realization of these train-principles of disembodiment and destruction.36 Rather than think globally and act locally, we should think locally (situated in a place, relationally) and act globally (universal revolution for universal kinship). The Republican Party presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy claimed that “the nuclear family is the best form of governance known to mankind.”37 On some level he is right. This cell of bourgeois civilization is not strictly uniform across the globe, but certainly appears as a normative ideal. It churns out good little citizens who know the difference between governor and governed, owner and non-owner, speakers and listeners. The nuclear family affirms and affirms, it is a positivity where the father creates and mother and children say yes. To introduce negativity, subjectivity, is discomforting for this paterfamilias arrangement. Women’s desire for greater possibilities terrifies nuclear family-society, especially when it means aborting a sacred pregnancy. Children’s desire to be something other than what their parents make them, especially their desire to be other than sons and daughters and to make themselves instead, is a scandal. Subjectivity is only acceptable as long as it is used to affirm, whether to affirm the specific nuclear family unit or the idea of family, order, lineage, rule, national loyalty etc. on a universal scale. The choices we make must be given, we must simply repeat this form of identity over and over. The negativity of subjectivity, freedom in a revolutionary sense, appears like red hot hellfire to this outlook. Abolition of the family doesn’t mean unleashing the bourgeois citizen as the only node for interpersonal relationships. Abolishing the family in the communist sense means liberating relationality from the bonds of blood, soil, and exploitation. The family creates, recreates, and subordinates ‘women’ to the demands of reproduction.38 Kinship mediated through an external domination and regulation of the womb becomes a stunted kinship, one which can only be considered in relation to a domination of nature more broadly.39 Abolish the family so that all

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez may be kin. If the bourgeois nuclear family produces stunted, dependent, and possessive consciousness, universal kinship must produce open, free, and loving consciousness.40 In this sense, the “Golgotha of the Spirit” interpretation Marx and Engels made of capitalism has some truth. The universal impersonal relations of capital have spread over the world and put us all under the hand of a common despotic paterfamilias—Capital. Yet, this has united us into a single system of relation. This means the possibility of universal kinship, a community of all communities. Capital does not abolish the logic that enabled the enslavement of outsiders from communities, and which led to the emergence of class society from out of that exploitation. It extends it into a globally universal claim that some are human and some are inhuman, rather than that some are kin and some are not kin. For this reason we must critique the idea of “primitive communism” as an original Eden or Innocence from which humanity has fallen. This ideal of an original unity is imagined from the standpoint of a split (Tacitus, Rousseau, Ibn Khaldun, etc.). The re-realization of the communal ethic is an active and conscious project, and to be “traditional” in the communal sense means to be revolutionary today. There is no original unity to return back to. We are on our own. “I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to begin” (Ernst Bloch).41 The original unity is a ceding of freedom, and so it is a false solution to the question of bourgeois civilization. It is no coincidence that there are fascist potentials already immanent to bourgeois consciousness and life—this is the temptation of passive revolution. But this passive revolution, where everything just change so everything can stay the same, is still passive nihilism. Nietzsche wrote this prophecy, facing bourgeois society:

“The need to show that as the consumption of man and mankind becomes more and more economical and the “machinery” of interests and services is integrated ever more intricately, a countermovement is inevitable. I designate tins as the secretion of a luxury surplus of mankind: it aims to bring to light a stronger species, a higher type that arises and preserves itself under different conditions from those of the

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Bourgeois Civilization average man. My concept, my metaphor for this type is, as one knows, the word ‘overman’[…] “He needs the opposition of the masses, of the ‘leveled,’ a feeling of distance from them! he stands on them, he lives off them. This higher form of aristocracy is that of the future.—Morally speaking, this overall machinery, this solidarity of all gears, represents a maximum in the exploitation of man; but it presupposes those on whose account this exploitation has meaning. Otherwise it would really be nothing but an overall diminution, a value diminution of the type man—a regressive phenomenon in the grand style.”42

In many ways, this came true in the mass societies of fascism in the 20th century. But fascism produced no supermen. Fascism was no social revolution, no revolution of freedom, and so it inherited the stultifying tendencies of bourgeois society in its attempt to reject it. Nation, race, and state-society are creations of bourgeois society.43 The fascist is a subhuman—it reveals the deep demonic drives laying unacknowledged submerged within the social-psychological recesses of bourgeois mass citizen-man. The subhuman fascist is bourgeois normality ruptured into a pathetic half attempt at revolution, it is socialism blocked to itself. Fascism as a mass movement finds vitality in subterranean drives to socialism (universal humanity), but they are redirected so that everything can stay fundamentally the same.44 The hatred for bourgeois society, for citizen-contracting, for consumerism finds itself embracing the mass production of bureaucrat-soldiers, who slaughter their fellow human beings like a farm worker slaughters chickens. The fascists consistently return to the slogans: Long live death! Live dangerously!45 Yes —long live death, but hail the death that subjectivity wields on itself. Hail the negativity in subjectivity, the death in freedom. It’s communism that produces the overman of Nietzsche as a social type, while fascism churns out subhumans. Even the fascist critics of fascism-as-state, who denounce it for preserving bourgeois society, fall into the same error. They replicate the idea of a return to origins which always comes back to what is given. Fascism rejects bourgeois liberalism and yet it is really a bourgeois desire

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez for meaning, for foundations—whether this is the father, value production, or the recreation of nature in the image of the Volk. Fascism remains bound to instrumental rationality even while rejecting instrumentality and demanding a totally heroic way of living. What truly works through the meaninglessness of life and the absence of all foundations is love and loving kinship.46 Love does not have to depend on an absolute referent, on an absolute justification. Love is the self loving the other for the other being themselves, exercising freedom specifically through relationality. In this sense love, and the loving kinship of communism, is active nihilism. The desire for authenticity which emerges as a response against coloniality is also a potential for fascism. Authenticity is an original unity which one comes to from colonial consciousness. One thinks one must be great in one’s being, in what one already is on some level, in order to assert oneself against Eurocentrism. This is confronting coloniality on the terms of the colonizer, begging for recognition either from the colonizer outside of or inside of one’s own subjectivity. Self-creation is decolonization.47 Decoloniality is social revolutionary, not anthropological.48 Truly thorough for the masses of people in the world means control over their everyday lives, it means free association. We can see the pitfalls of fascist confrontations against Eurocentrism in the examples of Imperial Japan and Salafi Islam. These kinds of projects develop an identity with the tools of Western anthropology and Orientalism. They have try to build a powerful state that confronts Euro-bourgeois civilization on its own terms. This merely introduces competitors. Both examples ended in death, suffering, and slavery. Real spiritual, civilizational transformation can only be carried through by communist revolutionary decolonization. We should think of capitalism not as decadence, inauthenticity, or rootlessness. We should not think of revolution as origin, authenticity, and absolute foundation. We should think of capital as a Plan, and one which drives to subordinate all Plans to itself. We can exercise autonomy outside of a Plan, but this is not merely an expression of a wellspring of Being. This autonomy is autonomy of Plans, it is the negativity of choice and possibilities. Fascism simply offers another version of a single, despotic Plan. We should ask instead how to create a world with open freedom in planning. This demands that we think simultaneously about

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Bourgeois Civilization our sense of selves, our own needs and capacities, and our relationship to the world. Do we want to be the consumer, the producer, the consumer-producer, the destroyer, or the Comrade?

Communist Civilization The proletariat is the negativity of bourgeois civilization. This is an old, perhaps even the initial, Marxist insight.49 If capitalism is the negation of all preceding human history, the proletarian revolution is the negation of the negation.50 And yet revolution is not only inside, it is also outside. The proletariat is never entirely identical to capital, though it can act in identity to capital in a slavish loyalty to bourgeois civilization. Revolution is also wrought by those resisting capitalist subsumption, particularly the Indigenous peoples of the world who still do not accept the myth of 1492. There can be no identity fixed to the struggle for freedom, because freedom is negating the identity of the world to itself. For this reason, we who live under and within bourgeois civilization are not yet communist subjects. Realizing communism, a free society, is a process, it is a labor. Freedom does not simply appear in the world instantly, although we might exercise it more or less successfully in certain moments. Communist revolution is relative—we begin from within the imperium of bourgeois civilization, looking to the horizon of communism. To travel to that horizon, we must go through the desert of struggle. We must face capitalism directly, we cannot run with our back to it. Even after Pharoah promises the Jews their freedom after God has put Egypt through ten plagues, he pursues them relentlessly. Communist revolution is of a communist character relative to capitalism. It is “stamped with the birthmarks of the old society.”51 It is not yet able to turn away—it is still a slave revolt, not yet a free society. The slave revolt certainly practices forms of freedom and solidarity much truer to their concepts than bourgeois civilization, but it is still a revolt from within the civilization. Moses could not go with the Jews to the Promised Land, so the methods of struggle against capital cannot be understood as already communism-in-itself.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez “The present generation is like the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It has not only a new world to conquer, it must go under in order to make room for the men who are able to cope with a new world.”52

But the Promised Land is not a pie in the sky. The Kingdom of God is already among us. Communism is a potential within sociality itself. It’s up to us to realize it, to ourselves and future generations to hone our practices of freedom and build a new civilization. Communist civilization, absolute communism, must be something unrecognizable from a bourgeois standpoint. Communism itself is Absolute, the free association of all determinacy in universal kinship. This is a new beginning, built out of the ashes of the genocidal abstract universalism of bourgeois civilization. Active nihilism means rejecting the subjectivity which seeks to subordinate the whole world to an alienated One (capital), which is undead and hostile to life and death alike. Capital eats up the dead as its raw material and forces the living to give their blood to it as a sacrifice. Capital demands worship as a God, as the center of the world. The active nihilism of communism shouts that there are no foundations in life, and that capital is only an idol with subjectivity stolen from those it mutilates. There is no ultimate center in the world, much less capital. The entire world should be sacred, and all things in this world are relational. Nothing in the world is interchangeable by one measure, as in bourgeois civilization, but neither is everything apart. Communism is not transcendental homelessness, and it is not the subordination of the cosmos into a draft animal. Communism means constituting ourselves as universal kin, universal gemeinwesen, and realizing universal community for the first time in history. Communism means an entirely new civilization, which we build in love and comradeship.

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Bourgeois Civilization Footnotes 1 Aimé

Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), p. 31. 2 “You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society private property is already done away with for nine tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its nonexistence in the hands of those nine tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto (New York, New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 225. 3 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The State and Revolution (Paris, France: Foreign Languages Press, 2020), p. 86. 4 “The ‘Negro question’ eclipsed the question of the social in the United States. Racism thwarted the development of social rights; perhaps the amazing indifference to physical and material needs resulted from the ascription of blacks as the ultimate bearers of the bodily and/or to the quieted needs of the white working class effected through an imagined racial integrity-membership in a grand and incorruptible ruling group that enabled an escape from the immediacy of needs or the willingness to forfeit them. Blacks have largely occluded and represented the social, and by dint of this, the issue of social rights was neglected until the New Deal. Worse yet, when social rights were belatedly addressed, they were configured to maintain racial inequality and segregation. When one is examining the social question from this historical vantage point, it is clear that the history of enslavement and racism shaped the emergence of the social in the United States. This is not to minimize the clash of capital and labor that stirred the regulatory efforts of the state in the attempt to alleviate crisis or the role of private organizations in relief of the poor and scientific charity. However, it is equally apparent that the parameters of the social were shaped by racial slavery and its vestiges and an indifference to black misery,” Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), p. 299. 5 “When we leave this sphere of simple circulation or the exchange of commodities, which provides the 'free-trader vulgaris' with his views, his concepts and the standard by which he judges the society of capital and wage-labour, a certain change takes place, or so it appears, in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his worker. The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but - a tanning,” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, Vol. 1, Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1976), p. 280. 6 “What this reveals, on the other side, is the foolishness of those socialists (namely the French, who want to depict socialism as the realization of the ideals of bourgeois society articulated by the French revolution) who demonstrate that exchange and exchange value etc. are originally (in time) or essentially (in their adequate form) a system of universal freedom and equality, but that they have been perverted by money, capital, etc. Or, also, that history has so far failed in every attempt to implement them in their true manner, but that they have now, like Proudhon, discovered e.g. the real Jacob, and intend now to supply the genuine history of these relations in place of the fake. The proper reply to them is: that exchange value or, more precisely, the money system is in fact the system of equality and freedom, and that the disturbances which they encounter in the further development of the system are disturbances inherent in it, are merely the realization of equality and freedom, which prove to be inequality and unfreedom. It is just as pious as it is stupid to wish that exchange value would not develop into capital, nor labour which produces exchange value into wage labour. What divides these gentlemen from the bourgeois apologists is, on one side, their sensitivity to the contradictions included in the system ; on the other, the utopian inability to grasp the necessary difference between the real and the ideal form of bourgeois society, which is the cause of their desire to undertake the superfluous business of realizing the ideal expression again, which is in fact only the inverted projection [Lichtbild] of this reality,” Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1973), pp. 248-249.

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“From the moment at which totality (capital; capitalist) subsumes exteriority (living labour, labourer), Marx’s discourse starts, showing all the intrinsic determinations of capital, of the totality. Thus ‘totality’ may seem to be the ultimate category, for it absorbs almost all of his later discourse (one of the three remaining volumes of Capital). As we have seen, however, everything starts from the exteriority of living labour and, in any case, Marx continually remarks on the exteriority of the creative source of value. The never-forgotten affirmation of such exteriority, of the real alterity of the labourer (though in fact subsumed by capital as wage labour), shall constitute the fulcrum of Marx’s criticality. The exteriority of living labour is the point of support outside the system, so demanded by Archimedes, the non-Capital; the reality that goes beyond the being of past objectified value. This is also the fulcrum of the Philosophy of Liberation, although its superficial detractors deny it due to ignorance,” Enrique Dussel, Towards an Unknown Marx: A Commentary on the Manuscripts of 1861-63, ed. Fred Moseley, trans. Yolanda Angulo (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 245. 8 Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from the South 1, no. 3 (2000): pp. 533-534. 9 “In the historical process of the constitution of America, all forms of control and exploitation of labor and production, as well as the control of appropriation and distribution of products, revolved around the capital-salary relation and the world market. These forms of labor control included slavery, serfdom, petty-commodity production, reciprocity, and wages. In such an assemblage, each form of labor control was no mere extension of its historical antecedents. All of these forms of labor were historically and sociologically new: in the first place, because they were deliberately established and organized to produce commodities for the world market; in the second place, because they did not merely exist simultaneously in the same space/time, but each one of them was also articulated to capital and its market. Thus they configured a new global model of labor control, and in turn a fundamental element of a new model of power to which they were historically structurally dependent. That is to say, the place and function, and therefore the historical movement, of all forms of labor as subordinated points of a totality belonged to the new model of power, in spite of their heterogeneous specific traits and their discontinuous relations with that totality. In the third place, and as a consequence, each form of labor developed into new traits and historicalstructural configurations. “Insofar as that structure of control of labor, resources, and products consisted of the joint articulation of all the respective historically known forms, a global model of control of work was established for the first time in known history. And while it was constituted around and in the service of capital, its configuration as a whole was established with a capitalist character as well. Thus emerged a new, original, and singular structure of relations of production in the historical experience of the world: world capitalism,” Quijano, “Coloniality of Power,” pp. 535-536. 10 “Colonial enterprise in the sixteenth century produced capital in a number of ways. One was gold and silver mining. A second was plantation agriculture, principally in Brazil. A third was the trade with Asia in spices, cloth, and the like. A fourth and by no means minor element was the profit returned to European investors from a variety of productive and commercial enterprises in the Americas, including profit on production for local use in Mexico, Peru, and elsewhere; profit on sale of goods imported from Europe; profit on a variety of secondary exports from America (leather, dyestuffs, etc.); profit on land sales in America; profit returned to Europe by families and corporations holding land grants in Mexico and other areas. A fifth was slaving. A sixth, piracy. Notice that all of this is normal capital accumulation; none of it is the mysterious thing called ‘primitive accumulation.’ (Value from wage labor, not to mention forced labor, was involved, and much of it was value from production, not simply from trade.) Accumulation from these sources was massive. It was massive enough so that the process cannot be dismissed as a minor adjunct of protocapitalist accumulation in Europe itself, and it was massive enough, I believe, to fuel a major transformation in Europe, the rise to power of the bourgeoisie and the immense efflorescence of preindustrial capitalism, in ways that we will discuss,” J. M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York, New York; London, United Kingdom: The Guilford Press, 1993), pp. 188-189. 11 “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. Hard on their heels follows the commercial war of the European nations, which has the globe as its battlefield. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes gigantic dimensions in England's Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the shape of the Opium Wars against China, etc,” Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 915.

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“The slaves worked on the land, and, like revolutionary peasants everywhere. they aimed at the extermination of their oppressors. But working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which covered the North Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time. and the rising was, therefore, a thoroughly prepared and organised mass movement,” C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Touissaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed. (New York, New York: Vintage Books, n.d.), pp. 35-36; W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York, New York: The Free Press, 1999), pp. 3-16. 13 “These effects embedded in the logic of commodification are awkward to describe because their operation is neither material nor visible. I find Poovey's language especially useful for this reason, as it draws (and holds) our attention to the fact that commodification is fundamentally a representational act. The ‘breaking down’ and ‘subdividing’ Poovey describes is not a material process—the chair is not physically disassembled as it is being commodified. Rather, the action involved in commodification is entirely conceptual—it occupies a ‘provisional’ realm ‘which is neither wholly subjective nor quite objective,’ one whose operation we cannot witness, as the only evidence we have of it is its effect, the representation of the thing as a commodity. Simply put, when things become commodities, it is their representational qualities—or rather those representational qualities that are regarded as most meaningful that undergo transformation. Commodification's power resides in language, in discursive forms (ledgers, bills of sale) carefully crafted to define and imagine things in the terms that best facilitate their exchange and circulation. Thus, for example, rather than signifying a social or cultural value, a slave's gender is made to signify an economic value quantified labor power: 1 male slave equals a Portuguese ‘peça,’ or Spanish ‘pieza de India.’ “The life of the commodity, then, begins not with its material production through labor but rather with its epistemological constitution through discourse in the political economic thought of early modern Europe. When we deploy the action-noun derived from the word ‘commodity’ we are concerned to isolate a discursive process that makes things ‘commoditable,’ or ‘fit’ for market exchange. We are pursuing the idea, then, that the commodities Marx identified as the root of capitalism have their own history–a history to which we have not paid sufficient attention. If commodities and their fetishization are the necessary beginning point of an understanding of industrial capitalism, then commodification is the necessary starting point for understanding capitalism's murky pre-history,” Stephanie E. Smallwood, “Commodified Freedom: Interrogating the Limits of Anti-Slavery Ideology in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 2 (2004): pp. 292-294. 14 David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2007), pp. 45-47. 15 “But at times the forces of the world below become hostile because they have been denied the right to live in daylight. These forces rise up and threaten to lay waste the community. To turn it upside down. Refusing to be that unconscious ground that nourishes nature, womanhood would then demand the right to pleasure, to jouissance, even to effective action, thus betraying her universal destiny. What is more, she would pervert the property/propriety of the State by making fun of the adult male who no longer thinks of anything but the universal, subjecting him to derision and to the scorn of a callow adolescence. In opposition to the adult male, she would set up the strength of youth possessed by the son, the brother, the young man, for in them, much more than in the power of government, she recognizes a master, an equal, a lover. The community can protect itself from such demands only by repressing them as elements of corruption that threaten to destroy the State. In fact these seeds of revolt, in principle, are quite powerless, are already reduced to nothing by being separated from the universal goal pursued by the citizens. Any community has a duty to transform these too immediately natural forces into its own defenders by inciting the young men–in whom the woman's desire takes pleasure–to make war upon each other and slaughter one another in bloody fights. It is through them that the still living substance of nature will sacrifice her last resources to a formal and empty universality, scattering her last drops of blood at a multitude of points which it will no longer be possible to gather up in the intimacy of the familiar cave,” Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 225-226.

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“This ‘neuter' is hard for Freud to account for in his theory of the difference of the sexes, as we can see from his repeated admissions that the subject of woman's sexuality is still very ‘obscure.’ As for what he will have to say about it, what has become "apparent" to him about it, female sexuality can be graphed along the axes of visibility of (so-called) masculine sexuality. For such a demonstration to hold up, the little girl must immediately become a little boy. In the beginning ... the little girl was (only) a little boy. In other words THERE NEVER IS WILL BE) A LITTLE GIRL. All that remains is to assign her sexual function to this ‘little boy’ with no penis, or at least no penis of any recognized value. Inevitably, the trial of ‘castration’ must be undergone. This ‘little boy,’ who was, in all innocence and ignorance of sexual difference, phallic, notices how ridiculous ‘his’ sex organ looks. ‘He’ sees the disadvantage for which ‘he’ is anatomically destined: ‘he’ has only a tiny little sex organ, no sex organ at all, really, an almost invisible sex organ. The almost imperceptible clitoris. The humiliation of being so badly equipped, of cutting such a poor figure, in comparison with the penis, with the sex organ can only lead to a desire to ‘have something like it too,’ and Freud claims that this desire will form the basis for ‘normal womanhood.’ In the course of the girl's discovery of her castration, her dominant feelings are of envy, jealousy, and hatred toward the mother or in fact any woman—who has no penis and could not give one. She desires to be a man or at any rate ‘like’ a man since she cannot actually become one. The little girl does not submit to the ‘facts’ easily, she keeps waiting for ‘it to grow,’ and ‘believes in that possibility for improbably long years.’ Which means that no attempt will be made by the little girl-nor by the mother? nor by the woman?—to find symbols for the state of ‘this nothing to be seen,’ to defend its goals, or to lay claim to its rewards. Here again no economy would be possible whereby sexual reality can be represented by/for woman. She remains forsaken and abandoned in her lack, default, absence, envy, etc. and is led to submit, to follow the dictates issued univocally by the sexual desire, discourse, and law of man. Of the father, in the first instance,” Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, pp. 48-49. 17 It should also be noted that it is capital which brings all of these together with civilization. See Loren Goldner, “Capital as Civilization,” The Charnel-House: From Bauhaus to Beinhaus (blog), May 15, 2016, https:// thecharnelhouse.org/2016/05/15/capital-as-civilization-marxism-and-universality/. 18 “For example, the phenomenal fact that the exports of underdeveloped countries are produced by firms with a high organic composition would seem to contradict the fundamental law of dependency (this is Samir Amin’s argument in support of Emmanuel’s position). As we are no longer at the abstract and universal level of the essence, we see other determinations enter into play. If products of the developed capital of the peripheral country which do not establish competition (because they are not produced in the more developed country) are exported, the monopoly of the central country can act as a buyer. The more developed country, as the only buyer, sets the ‘international monopoly price’ of the product (coffee, for example) at less than the value of the commodity. If, on the other hand, it is a commodity which enters into competition, the more developed country can take various measures: it can protect its national products with customs barriers, such as imposing a tariff on the product of the less developed country; it can promote national production with fiscal incentives or subsidies, i.e. allocating funds to reduce its internal price, or it can loan capital on credit to the exporting firms of the less developed countries, as it did to the Mexican national petroleum company (Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex) (extracting surplus value through interest payments); or even set monopoly prices above their value for the means of production (which are only produced in the developed countries) and thereby eliminating all competition. All this indicates that the example provided by Samir Amin is a particular case that appears to annul the law. In reality there exist many possible measures that counteract that alleged annulment, with the result that tendentially the law of dependency is fulfilled,” Dussel, Towards an Unknown Marx, pp. 227-228.

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“Although these phenomena are not entirely new, in the sense that all sorts of historical precedents can be found in the operations of international corporations, the scale and sophistication of commodity chains today represent qualitative changes that are transforming the character of the entire global political economy. This has generated enormous confusion in political-economic analyses on both the right and left. Thus, the shift in industrial employment and the rapid growth of some countries in the periphery, particularly in East Asia, led even as important a Marxist theorist as David Harvey to conclude that the direction of imperialism has somehow reversed, with the West, or the Global North, now on the losing end. As he puts it, ‘The historical draining of wealth from East to West for more than two centuries has . . . been largely reversed over the last thirty years. . . . I think it is useful to take up Giovanni Arrighi’s preference to abandon the idea of imperialism (along with the rigidities of the core-periphery model of world system theory) in favor of a more fluid understanding of competing and shifting hegemonies within the global state system.’ “Yet such assessments are based on the illusion that twenty-first century imperialism can be approached, as in earlier periods, mainly on the level of the nation-state without a systematic investigation of the increasing global reach of multinational corporations or the role of global labor arbitrage, sometimes referred to in business circles as low-cost country sourcing. At issue is the way in which today’s global monopolies in the center of the world economy have captured value generated by labor in the periphery within a process of unequal exchange, thus getting ‘more labor in exchange for less.’ The result has been to change the global structure of industrial production while maintaining and often intensifying the global structure of exploitation and value transfer,” Intan Suwandi, Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (New York, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019), pp. 44-45. 20 “The general result of the struggle between capitalism and simple commodity production is this: after substituting commodity economy for natural economy, capital takes the place of simple commodity economy. Non-capitalist organisations provide a fertile soil for capitalism; more strictly: capital feeds on the ruins of such organisations, and although this non-capitalist milieu is indispensable for accumulation, the latter proceeds at the cost of this medium nevertheless, by eating it up. Historically, the accumulation of capital is a kind of metabolism between capitalist economy and those pre-capitalist methods of production without which it cannot go on and which, in this light, it corrodes and assimilates. Thus capital cannot accumulate without the aid of non-capitalist organisations, nor, on the other hand, can it tolerate their continued existence side by side with itself. Only the continuous and progressive disintegration of non-capitalist organisations makes accumulation of capital possible,” Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzchild (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Routledge Classics, 2003), p. 397. 21 “With her ad hoc model of the need for non-capitalist markets Luxemburg thought she was killing two birds with one stone-refuting the equilibrium dreams of the neo-harmonist writers by showing that there is an inexorable economic limit to capitalism and simultaneously explaining imperialism. “Capitalism is dominated by a blind, unlimited thirst for surplus value. According to the interpretation that Luxemburg gives it would appear as if the system suffers from an excess of surplus value, that it contains an unsaleable residue of surplus value and in this sense possesses too much surplus value. Such a theory is quite illogical and self contradictory in terms of trying to understand the most important and peculiar function of capital, the function of valorisation. “The whole matter is quite different in the interpretation I have given. The capitalist mechanism falls sick not because it contains too much surplus value but because it contains too little. The valorisation of capital is its basic function and the system dies because this function cannot be fulfilled. In explaining how this happens the logical unity and consistency of Marx's system finds its most powerful expression. Unless we are going to overthrow the logical unity of the system we have to be able to demonstrate the necessary breakdown of capitalism in terms of the theory itself- that is, on the basis of the law of value without recourse to unnecessary and complicating auxiliary hypotheses. The Marxian theory of crises can account for recessions and their necessary periodic recurrence without having to invoke special causes. This illustrates the essential character of the logical structure of Marx's theory of breakdown and its difference from all other theories of the business cycle. The latter are theories of equilibrium. They bear a static character. They cannot deduce the general crisis–seen as a discrepancy between demand and supply–from the system itself because in equilibrium theory prices represent an automatic mechanism for adjusting one to the other,” Henryk Grossman, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System: Being Also a Theory of Crises, trans. Jairus Banaji (London, United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 1992), p. 126. 22 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Paris, France: Foreign Languages Press, 2020), p. 8. 23 Suwandi, Value Chains, p. 44.

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“In the Global North, the infrastructures of everyday life in areas such as food, transport, electricity, heat, or telecommunications to a large extent rely on material flows from elsewhere, on the workers who extract the respective resources, and on the ecological sinks on a global scale that absorb emissions produced by the operation of infrastructure systems. Workers in the Global North draw on these systems not just because they consider them to be components of a good life, but because they depend on them. Mostly, it is not an individual choice that makes workers purchase cheap ‘food from nowhere’ (Philip McMichael), drive a car, or light their homes with electricity that is generated by burning fossil fuels. Rather, they have to do so in order to nourish their families, to get to work, or because the utility does not offer renewable alternatives since in many countries renewable energy has been offered at a higher price so far. Thus, workers are forced into the imperial mode of living simply because the latter is materialized and institutionalized in many of the life-sustaining systems of the Global North,” Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, “The Imperial Mode of Living and Capitalist Hegemony,” Global Dialogue, November 5, 2021, https://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/articles/the-imperial-mode-of-living-and-capitalist-hegemony. 25 “The dialectic of negativity is the fundamental trait of immunity. The immunologically Other is the negative that intrudes into the Own [das Eigene] and seeks to negate it. The Own founders on the negativity of the Other when it proves incapable of negation in turn. That is, the immunological self-assertion of the Own proceeds as the negation of negation. The Own asserts itself in—and against—the Other by negating its negativity. Immunological prophylaxis, that is, inoculation, follows the dialectic of negativity. Fragments of the Other are introduced into the Own in order to provoke an immunoreaction. Thereby, negation of negation occurs without the danger of death, because the immune system does not confront the Other itself. A small amount of self-inflicted harm [Gewalt] protects one from a much larger danger, which would prove deadly. Because Otherness is disappearing, we live in a time that is poor in negativity. And so, the neuronal illnesses of the twenty-first century follow a dialectic: not the dialectic of negativity, but that of positivity. They are pathological conditions deriving from an excess of positivity. “tivity—not just from the Other or the foreign, but also from the Same. Such violence of positivity is clearly what Baudrillard has in mind when he writes, ‘He who lives by the Same shall die by the Same.’ Likewise, Baudrillard speaks of the ‘obesity of all current systems’ of information, communication, and production. Fat does not provoke an immune reaction[...] “In a system where the Same predominates, one can only speak of immune defense in a figural sense. Immunological defense always takes aim at the Other or the foreign in the strong sense. The Same does not lead to the formation of antibodies. In a system dominated by the Same, it is meaningless to strengthen defense mechanisms. We must distinguish between immunological and nonimmunological rejection. The latter concerns the too-much-of the-Same, surplus positivity. Here negativity plays no role. Nor does such exclusion presume interior space. In contrast, immunological rejection occurs independent of the quantum, for it reacts to the negativity of the Other. The immunological subject, which possesses interiority, fights off the Other and excludes it, even when it is present in only the tiniest amount. “The violence [Gewalt] of positivity that derives from overproduction, overachievement, and overcommunication is no longer ‘viral.’ Immunology offers no way of approaching the phenomenon. Rejection occurring in response to excess positivity does not amount to immunological defense, but to digestive-neuronal abreaction and refusal. Likewise, exhaustion, fatigue, and suffocation—when too much exists—do not constitute immunological reactions. These phenomena concern neuronal power, which is not viral because it does not derive from immunological negativity. Baudrillard’s theory of power [Gewalt] is riddled with leaps of argument and vague definitions because it attempts to describe the violence of positivity—or, in other words, the violence of the Same when no Otherness is involved—in immunological terms,” Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford, California: Stanford Briefs, 2015), pp. 3-6.

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“The Meditationes de prima philosophia provide the pattern for an ontology of the subjectum with respect to subjectivity defined as conscientia, Man has become subiectum. Therefore he can determine and realize the essence of subjectivity, always in keeping with the way in which he himself conceives and wills himself. Man as a rational being of the age of the Enlightenment is no less subject than is man who grasps himself as a nation, wills himself as a people, fosters himself as a race, and, finally, empowers himself as lord of the earth. Still, in all these fundamental positions of subjectivity, a different kind of I-ness and egoism is also possible; for man constantly remains determined as I and thou, we and you. Subjective egoism, for which mostly without its knowing it the I is determined beforehand as subject, can be canceled out through the insertion of the I into the we. Through this, subjectivity only gains in power. In the planetary imperialism of technologically organized man, the subjectivism of man attains its acme, from which point it will descend to the level of organized uniformity and there firmly establish itself. This uniformity becomes the surest instrument of total, i.e., technological, rule over the earth. The modern freedom of subjectivity vanishes totally in the objectivity commensurate with it. Man cannot, of himself, abandon this destining of his modern essence or abolish it by fiat. But man can, as he thinks ahead, ponder this: Being subject as humanity has not always been the sole possibility belonging to the essence of historical man, which is always beginning in a primal way, nor will it always be. A fleeting cloud shadow over a concealed land, such is the darkening which that truth as the certainty of subjectivity–once prepared by Christendom's certainty of salvation– lays over a disclosing event [Ereignis] that it remains denied to subjectivity itself to experience,” Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, by Martin Heidegger, trans. William Lovitt (New York, New York; London, United Kingdom: Garland Publishing, 1977), pp. 152-153; “The scientific ‘anathemas’ in regard to this approach [mythology] are well known: ‘Arbitrary!’ ‘Subjective!’ ‘Preposterous!’ In my perspective there is no arbitrariness, subjectivity, or fantasy, just like there is no objectivity and scientific causality the way modern men understand them. All these notions are unreal: all these notions are outside Tradition. Tradition begins wherever it is possible to rise above these notions by achieving a superindividual and nonhuman perspective; thus. I will have a minimal concern for debating and ‘demonstrating.’ The truths that may reveal the world of Tradition are not those that can be ‘learned’ or ‘discussed’; either they are or they are not. It is only possible to remember them, and this happens when one becomes free of the obstacles represented by various human constructions, first among which are all the results and the methods of specialized researchers; in other words, one becomes free of these encumbrances when the capacity for seeing from that nonhuman perspective, which is the same as the traditional perspective, has been attained. This is one of the essential ‘protests’ that should be made by those who really oppose the modern world,” Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, trans. Stucco Guido (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International, 1995), p. xxxv. 27 “The one thing needed to achieve scientific progress – and it is essential to make an effort at gaining this quite simple insight into it is the recognition of the logical principle that negation is equally positive, or that what is selfcontradictory does not resolve itself into a nullity, into abstract nothingness, but essentially only into the negation of its particular content; or that such a negation is not just negation, but is the negation of the determined fact which is resolved, and is therefore determinate negation; that in the result there is therefore contained in essence that from which the result derives – a tautology indeed, since the result would otherwise be something immediate and not a result. Because the result, the negation, is a determinate negation, it has a content. It is a new concept but one higher and richer than the preceding – richer because it negates or opposes the preceding and therefore contains it, and it contains even more than that, for it is the unity of itself and its opposite. – It is above all in this way that the system of concepts is to be to erected – and it has to come to completion in an unstoppable and pure progression that admits of nothing extraneous,” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, ed. and trans. George di Giovanni, Cambridge Hegel Translations (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 33. 28 “I mean, to say what man is is absolutely impossible. If biologists are right – that it is precisely characteristic of the human to be itself open and not defined by a determined field [Umkreis] of objects of action, then it also lies in this openness that we cannot at all foresee what will become of the human. And that applies to both sides, including the negative. I recall Valéry’s statement that inhumanity still has a great future,” Theodor W. Adorno and Arnold Gehlen, “Is Sociology a Science of Man? A Dispute (1965),” in Institution: Critical Histories of Law, ed. Cooper Francis and Daniel Gottlieb, trans. Jacob Blumenfeld (London, United Kingdom: CRMEP Books, 2023), p. 182. 29 “Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along within it, whose mere nuances have developed explicit significance within it, etc. Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known. The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient, etc,” Marx, Grundrisse, p. 105.

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Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 5-6. 31 “Abolition geography starts from the homely premise that freedom is a place. Place-making is normal human activity: we figure out how to combine people, and land, and other resources with our social capacity to organize ourselves in a variety of ways, whether to stay put or to go wandering. Each of these factors—people, land, other resources, social capacity—comes in a number of types, all of which determine but do not define what can or should be done,” Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2023), pp. 474-475; “In any event, it is very important for the critique of everyday life to know (and to know that the masses know) that the transcendence of the internal splits and contradictions in the human realm (intellectual versus manual work, town versus country, private versus social) can no more be reduced to a simple act, to some decisive and 'total' moment, than revolution itself. The total man is but a figure on a distant horizon beyond our present vision. He is a limit, an idea, and not a historical fact. And yet we must 'historicize' the notion, thinking of it historically and socially. And not naively, like those who believed that the new man would suddenly burst forth into history, complete, and in possession of all the hitherto incompatible qualities of vitality and lucidity, of humble determination in labour and limitless enthusiasm in creation,” Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Introduction, trans. John Moore, vol. 1 (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 66-67. 32 “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejUdices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind,” Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 212. 33 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ed. Maurice Dobb, trans. S. W. Ryazanskaya (Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers, 1970), p. 22. 34 Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1938-1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings and Howard E. Eiland, vol. 4 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 402. 35 Elisée Reclus, “The Extended Family (1896),” in Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of Elisée Reclus, ed. John P. Clark and Camille Martin, trans. John P. Clark, Camille Martin, and John P. Clark (Oakland, California: PM Press, 2013), p. 136.

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“This movement-building step is critical in all movements, but it is particularly crucial to think this through in the age of the Internet, when a seemingly easy shortcut exists. Seemingly, because on a very basic level, I wonder how the Internet, as another structure of control whose primary purpose is to make corporations money, is at all helpful in building movements. I wonder if the simulated worlds of the Internet arc simulations that serve to only amplify capitalism, misogyny, transphobia, anti-queerness, and white supremacy and create further dependencies on settler colonialism in the physical world. I wonder if this creates further alienation from oneself, from Indigenous thought and practices, and from the Indigenous material world. I wonder if this is a digital dispossession from ourselves because it further removes us from grounded normativity. The Internet is the ultimate Cartesian expression of mind and mind only. There are no bodies on the Internet. There is no land. Insertion of Indigeneity in cyberspace is not insertion of Indigeneity in the physical world. As much as it pains me to admit, grounded normativity does not structurally exist in the cyber world, because it is predicated on deep, spiritual, emotional, reciprocal, real-world relationships between living beings. Dispossessed from our Indigenous material worlds, our thought systems and our practices, are we losing the ability to be makers and to solve problems, or at the very least are we accelerating this loss because most of our time is spent on screens connected to the Internet? How are we generating theory as practice on the Internet? How are we building a movement that centers Indigenous makers when Internet access is so unevenly distributed across our territories? How is the Internet anything more than a house of cards when the next distraction is just one second away? How would my Ancestors feel about me being so fully integrated into a system of settler colonial surveillance and control when I have very little knowledge of how any of this technology works? I can't ‘fix’ my phone. I don't know how to set up alternative digital communication systems. I don't know how to protect myself from state surveillance. I do know how to do exactly what larger corporations–Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and Google–want me to do to make them money, and I do it for the most part uncritically. I do know how to engage in apps and software. I can even be a content provider, but I have no ability to structurally intervene. Yet, almost more than any other structure, the Internet has structurally intervened in my life. There is a tremendous asymmetry here. The Internet and digital technologies have become a powerful site for reinforcing and amplifying settler colonialism, and I see losing the ability to structurally intervene is highly problematic. Code and algorithms are controlling our (digitall) lives, and capitalism is controlling code. For Indigenous peoples, this takes place in the wider context of colonialism as the controlling structure in Indigenous life. Every tweet, Facebook post, blog post, Instagram photo, YouTube video, and e-mail we sent during Idle No More made the largest corporations in the world, corporations controlled by white men with a vested interest in settler colonialism, more money to reinforce the system of settler colonialism. Our cyber engagements were also read, monitored, collected, surveyed, and archived by the state. They were also read, monitored, collected, and surveyed by the segment of Canadian society that hates us, and they used these to try and hurt us. This worries me. I think we must think critically and strategically about adopting digital technologies as organizing and mobilizing tools. What are we gaining? What are we losing? How do we refuse the politics of recognition, engage in generative refusal, and operate with opaqueness on the Internet? Can we operate from a place of grounded normativity on Facebook when the algorithm attacks its very foundations?” Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Constellations of Coresistance,” in As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Minneapolis, Minnesota; London, United Kingdom: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), pp. 221-222. 37 Katherine Fung, “Read Vivek Ramaswamy’s Fiery Closing Statement From Republican Debate,” MSN, August 24, 2023, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/read-vivek-ramaswamys-fiery-closing-statement-fromrepublican-debate/ar-AA1fJcJF. 38 M. E. O’Brien, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (London, United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 2023), pp. 21-26.

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feminine character, and the ideal of femininity on which it is modelled, are products of masculine society. The image of undistorted nature arises only in distortion, as its opposite. Where it claims to be humane, masculine society imperiously breeds in woman its own corrective, and shows itself through this limitation implacably the master. The feminine character is a negative imprint of domination. But therefore equally bad. Whatever is in the context of bourgeois delusion called nature, is merely the scar of social mutilation. If the psychoanalytical theory is correct that women experience their physical constitution as a consequence of castration, their neurosis gives them an inkling of the truth. The woman who feels herself a wound when she bleeds knows more about herself than the one who imagines herself a flower because that suits her husband. The lie consists not only in the claim that nature exists where it has been tolerated and adapted, but what passes for nature in civilization is by its very substance furthest from all nature, its own self-chosen object. The femininity which appeals to instinct, is always exactly what every woman baa to force herself by violence—masculine violence—to be: a she-man. One need only have perceived, as a jealous male, how such feminine women have their femininity at their finger-tips -deploying it JUSt where needed, flashing their eyes, using their impulsiveness - to know how things stand with the sheltered unconscious, unmarred by intellect. Just this unscathed purity is the product of the ego, of censorship, of intellect, which is why it submits so unresistingly to the reality principle of the rational order. Without a single exception feminine natures are conformist. The fact that Nietzsche's scrutiny stopped short of them, that he took over a secondhand and unverified image of feminine nature from the Christian civilization that he otherwise so thoroughly mistrusted, finally brought his thought under the sway, after all, of bourgeois society. He fell for the fraud of saying 'the feminine' when talking of women. Hence the perfidious advice not to forget the whip: femininity itself is already the effect of the whip. The liberation of nature would be to abolish its self-fabrication. Glorification of the feminine character implies the humiliation of all who bear it,” Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso, 2005), pp. 95-96. 40 “The hypocritical morality of bourgeois culture resolutely restricted the freedom of Eros, obliging him to visit only the ‘legally married couple’. Outside marriage there was room only for the ‘wingless Eros’ of momentary and joyless sexual relations which were bought {in the case of prostitution) or stolen (in the case of adultery). The morality of the working class, on the other hand, in so far as it has already been formulated, definitely rejects the external forms of sexual relations. The social aims of the working class are not affected one bit by whether love takes the form of a long and official union or is expressed in a temporary relationship. The ideology of the working class does not place any formal limits on love. But at the same time the ideology of the working class is already beginning to take a thoughtful attitude to the content of love and shades of emotional experience. In this sense the proletarian ideology will persecute ‘wingless Eros’ in a much more strict and severe way than bourgeois morality. ‘Wingless Eros’ contradicts the interests of the working class. In the first place it inevitably involves excesses and therefore physical exhaustion, which lower the resources of labour energy available to society. In the second place it impoverishes the soul, hindering the development and strengthening of inner bonds and positive emotions. And in the third place it usually rests on an inequality of rights in relationships between the sexes, on the dependence of the woman on them and on male complacency and insensitivity, which undoubtedly hinder the development of comradely feelings. ‘Winged Eros’ is quite different. “Obviously sexual attraction lies at the base of ‘winged Eros’ too, but the difference is that the person experiencing love acquires the inner qualities necessary to the builders of a new culture—sensitivity, responsiveness and the desire to help others. Bourgeois ideology demanded that a person should only display such qualities in their relationship with one partner. The aim of proletarian ideology is that men and women should develop these qualities not only in relation to the chosen one but in relation to all the members of the collective. The proletarian class is not concerned as to which shades and nuances of feeling predominate in winged Eros. The only stipulation is that these emotions facilitate the development and strengthening of comradeship. The ideal of love-comradeship, which is being forged by proletarian ideology to replace the all-embracing and exclusive marital love of bourgeois culture, involves the recognition of the rights and integrity of the other’s personality, a steadfast mutual support and sensitive sympathy, and responsiveness to the other’s needs,” Alexandra Kollontai, “Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth,” in Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, by Alexandra Kollontai, ed. and trans. Alix Holt (Westport, Connecticut: Lawrence Hill Books, 1978), pp. 289-290. 41 Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 1. 42 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York, New York: Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 463-464. 43 George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Towards a General Theory of Fascism (New York, New York: Howard Fertig, 1999), pp. 194-197.

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Bourgeois Civilization 44

“The further dreams of olden times, those that are still misty, are not also the safest ones. After all, precisely the total opposite has set in in their name, the opposite not of the mist, but of the dream. But must the seed therefore be sacrificed with the husk, or is it not the case that even the seed of the dream, properly extricated, refutes the monstrous forgery which the Nazis have perpetrated by means of the misty husk?[...] We have already touched on the question whether precisely the mist did not make the old dreams so useful to the Brownshirts. Economic ignorance has undoubtedly made their deception easier for the Nazis, and they have undoubtedly exploited the old dark words in a highly demagogic way. But much more important is the question whether this use, this abuse, did not succeed so easily precisely because the genuine revolutionaries did not keep a look-out here. Economic vagueness, petit-bourgeois mustiness and mystical mist certainly go splendidly together; one assists the other. But economic clarity and the critique of metaphysical appearance do not yet therefore need to disavow a priori the entire extent and content of the constituents described as irrational. This had a revolutionary point in Voltaire's times, but today, as the German effect has shown, it almost exclusively serves the forces of counter-revolution. There is also no realism at all in this mechanism of refusal; on the contrary, large strata of social, and indeed physical, reality are cordoned off by such mechanical banality,” Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville Plaice and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley, California; Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 133-134; Mosse, The Fascist Revolution, pp. 9-12. 45 Mosse, The Fascist Revolution, pp. 83-86. 46 Richard Gilman-Opalsky, The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value (Chico, California: AK Press, 2020), pp. 17-18. 47 “This new humanity, for itself and for others, inevitably defines a new humanism. His new humanism is written into the objectives and methods of the struggle. A struggle, which mobilizes every level of society, which expresses the intentions and expectations of the people, and which is not afraid to rely on their support almost entirely, will invariably triumph. The merit of this type of struggle is that it achieves the optimal conditions for cultural development and innovation. Once national liberation has been accomplished under these conditions, there is none of that tiresome cultural indecisiveness we find in certain newly independent countries, because the way a nation is born and functions exerts a fundamental influence on culture. A nation born of the concerted action of the people, which embodies the actual aspirations of the people and transforms the state, depends on exceptionally inventive cultural manifestations for its very existence,” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, New York: Grove Press, 2004), pp. 178-179. 48 “So comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions, and societies that draw their inspiration from it. “Humanity expects other things from us than this grotesque and generally obscene emulation. “If we want to transform Africa into a new Europe, America into a new Europe, then let us entrust the destinies of our countries to the Europeans. They will do a better job than the best of us. “But if we want humanity to take one step forward, if we want to take it to another level than the one where Europe has placed it, then we must innovate, we must be pioneers. “If we want to respond to the expectations of our peoples, we must look elsewhere besides Europe, “Moreover, if we want to respond to the expectations of the Europeans we must not send them back a reflection, however ideal, of their society and their thought that periodically sickens even them. “For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man,” Fanon, The Wretched of the Eart, p. 239; Quijano, “Coloniality of Power,” pp. 129-130. 49 “When the proletariat announces the dissolution of the existing world order, it merely declares the secret of its own existence, for it is the de facto dissolution of this world order. When the proletariat demands the negation of private property, it merely elevates into a principle of society what society has advanced as the principle of the proletariat, and what the proletariat already involuntarily embodies as the negative result of society. The proletariat thus has the same right relative to the new world which is coming into being as has the German king relative to the existing world, when he calls the people his people and a horse his horse. In calling the people his private property, the king merely expresses the fact that the owner of private property is king,” Karl Marx, “From the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (§§261-313),” in Marx: Early Political Writings, by Karl Marx, ed. and trans. Joseph O’Malley and Richard A. Davis, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 69.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez 50

“This expropriation is accomplished through the action of the immanent laws of capitalist production itself, through the centralization of capitals. One capitalist always strikes down many others. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by a few, other developments take place on an everincreasing scale, such as the growth of the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the planned exploitation of the soil, the transformation of the means of labour into forms in which they can only be used in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and, with this, the growth of the international character of the capitalist regime. Along with the constant decrease in the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated,” Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 929. 51 Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx: Later Political Writings, by Karl Marx, ed. Terrell Carver, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 213. 52 Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 (Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers, 1972), p. 106.

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Abolition of Property “The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few. “In this sense the theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence: “Abolition of private property.” — Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)1

Owner, owned. Owner, non-owner. It is impossible to establish a concept without referencing the total constellation of concepts, shifting the significance, the relation, the shape of everything. The strictly personal characterization of private property is illusory. To insist that what’s mine is mine is to already claim something about the self, about the self’s relationship to the world, and about others. Property today has become a social power, a means of command over others rather than being what it veils itself as—merely an extension of the owner. Rather than to be an owner without relation to non-owners,:

“To be a capitalist is to have not only a purely personal but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.”2

The myth of ‘pulling yourself up by the bootstraps’ conceals this situation. Capitalism abolishes personal property—or property as an extension of one’s labor—for most people.

Abolition of Property Workers can toil for their entire lives and have no share in the product of their labor, which has become capital. In fact, the growing product of their labor—in the form of capital—only serves to exploit its very mother, the workers themselves.3 In this relationship—where labor has become exploited by its own product, acting as if it had come alive—capitalism is the culmination of all class societies. It is the ultimate expression of class, incorporating manifold forms of domination into itself even in abolishing their place as coherent, complete ways of life apart from itself. Everything is subordinated to the general capital, to the general demand of accumulation. This demand of accumulation for accumulation’s sale is the truth of class society, the finality of its mutilation of nature. The history of hitherto existing class societies is a history of the exploitation of nature. The historical sketches of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels should be read with this in mind. For them, the history of our increasing alienation from nature is also a history of freedom.4 But such freedom today rests on a gamble: that the manifold manufacture of possibilities opened by capital does not rot and stink before the communist revolution liberates them from its innards. Capital has finally pushed us into an absolute decision, either a free society (communism) or extinction. And yet in this it is only the final, all-or-nothing expression of a thread weaved throughout the history of all class societies. The construct of ‘primitive communism,’ the beginning of human history in Marx and Engels’s schemas, is not meant to describe a ready-made, all-round communism. It is not even meant to be a coherent, total social mode of production. What it refers to is a communalist ethic to everyday life, the organization of social life around community, community-membership, community-homeland. In other words, a particular, local relationality. Here, the two considered human beings to still be bound by an umbilical cord to Mother Nature, not yet having severed it with a broader development of labor (and thus an alienation from nature).5 The possibilities for life were limited to a community scale. In this the seeds of selfnegation already existed, namely in the distinction of community-members and outsiders which became the mechanism for raids, warfare, and enslavement. This domination of outside could either lead to the transformation of the community into a dominating class society or be the

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez means for foreign conquerors to integrate the community into a more unified system of domination. Thus society emerges as what might broadly be described as tributary modes of production, what traditionally were labeled by Marx and Engels as “feudalism” and “Asiatic modes of production.”6 The ruling caste, whether developed into a coherent state bureaucracy or not, extracts tribute from the producers, who are not severed from their natural conditions of existence on a mass scale. Such societies, however, tended to practice slavery, though not in the chattel form associated with the trans-Atlantic slave trade.7 Slavery as a social death, as a denial of relationality, here appears as a means for the slave to live as an extension of the Owner—the old model of personal property, rather than capitalist private property as the victims of Atlantic chattel slavery found themselves as.8 The states of Ancient Egypt, China, and Byzantium offer prime models of this tributary mode of production. Characteristic of these forms’ relationship with nature, as distinguished from communalism, is the claim of the state or ruling caste to mediate between the territorial community and nature, or the cosmos. Though ties to nature are not entirely removed from the world around regular, laboring people—nature and ancestor worship historically tended to be just as important, though less so in Western Europe—nature is supposed to center around the sovereign.9 This extended to the legal fictions, so important to Marx and Engels, of the sovereign owning entire imperial territories as his property.10 In such a system, all other property claims were to be derived from the fundamental property claim of the sovereign. Property thus amounted to either a means for extracting tribute, which served as the means of consumption for the nobility, bureaucracy, and sovereigns, or an extension of labor - ‘personal property,’ which the former justified itself as.11 The very gaps in such a universal property claim, however, became the site for the emergence of capital. The weakness of states in Western Europe, the thinness of social bonds, was exactly an opportunity for a density of capital-relations to emerge and become society themselves.12 The earliest forms of capital tended to be concentrated around port cities and trade routes, sites of world exchange. This was a commercial or merchant capital.13 This, however, could not be considered to already be the specifically capitalist mode of production proper,

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Abolition of Property because such capital could not command broad swathes of associated labor as today except in the wealthiest trade-centric cities. But the emergence of capital in such a context reveals an association between regional markets and capitalist power—in the modern world, the general capital or capitalist system broadly can only be constituted by the global market.14 Marx considered the historical uniqueness of the capitalist mode of production to be the penetration of capital into relations of production, rearranging them around itself as their center in a global, general capital. From early on, he identified the emergence of this form of capital with agrarian class struggles in Western Europe and the development of semi-autonomous cities populated by bourgeoisie (towncitizens).15 In connection with the emergence of a truly global market for the first time, beginning in 1492, these seeds of capital could grow into a mode of production unto themselves by acting through the networks of international exchange, penetrating through and into town and country.16 With the capitalist mode of production, we see a final split of human beings from nature, and by extension, the alienation of laborers from their own natural conditions of existence. And so:

“For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production.”17

The mass of human beings have been severed from their self-relationship to labor as a metabolism with nature. Yet, to Marx and Engels, this very alienation also cultivates broad possibilities for freedom—for labor is developed radically, albeit for the sake of augmenting exchange-values.18 ‘Humanity’ has been constituted, abstractly, by the world market. We can speak of a common global human society, though it is riven by exploitation. Capitalism cultivates and accumulates a wealth of possibilities, but limits them to the demands of accumulation. It disciplines labor in the name of this production, but leaves labor without an end

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez except for labor itself, repeated until death. Life is for labor, and labor is for accumulation. Thus, the ultimate property: private property which owns labor rather than being a subordinated extension of labor. Property is present in the very beginnings of domination. Property is the domination of nature, the subordination of the wealth of nature into merely an expression of the Owner. Implicitly or explicitly, it demands the Self-Sameness of property and owner, otherwise the property is no longer the property of the Owner.19 Domination of nature is the ground of all other forms of domination, as all domination is domination of one part of nature by another part. The capitalist mode of production is the apogee of domination in being domination of life itself, possible only with by means of a dichotomous split between ‘Man’ and ‘Nature.’ Capitalist private property is the colonization of nature, it is a desire to “rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature.”20 The coloniality of capital spares no aspect of nature, especially not other human beings. Capitalist colonization demands the split of ‘Man’ and ‘Nature,’ and thus the expropriation of those who still relate to the land as a relative and as a home. Capitalists colonize these lands to turn them into interchangeable commodities, delineated things which are buyable and sellable. The colonial standardization of property systems in the Americas and beyond demands such a separation of Subject and Object. This fact decolonial struggles have recognized since 1492. Crazy Horse (Oglála Lakhóta Oyáte) inveighed, “One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.”21 Max Horkheimer described the consequences of this form of living:

“The human being, in the process of his emancipation, shares the fate of the rest of his world. Domination of nature involves domination of man. Each subject not only has to take part in the subjugation of external nature, human and nonhuman, but in order to do so must subjugate nature in himself. Domination becomes 'internalized' for domination's sake.”22

In an existence which is necessarily relational, domination demands a self-mutilation of that relationality. That extends to subjectivity. Every subject must dominate their naturalness in

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Abolition of Property order to construct themselves as subjects of a dominating society. There must be a turn inwards, to the self, to discipline one’s existence into a subjectivity. Michel Foucault noted the importance of the Christian practice of turning inward and denying the self in favor of God for developing that very self.23 That very form of self-domination is a self-creation, it is a separation of self from the manifold qualities of nature, including one’s inner nature.24 Subjectivity is a principal product of civilization, and the split of subject and object found, for example, in the philosophy of René Descartes is a symptom of it. The culminating form of this split can be found in that form of private property known as capital, which is a property premised on fundamental, ongoing expropriation. The capitalist mode of production foundationally treats all exchange as that of disembodied owner-subjects who contract, freely and equally, between each other. This contract-exchange conceals the foundational relationship of the exploitation of embodied life, as labor. The wage laborer appears as a salesperson of a commodity, as the owner of their bodily capacities in the form of commodity labor-power.25 Their exploited labor is treated as something other than them in the form of contract-maker, even if the same person who made the contract is expected to physically show up for work in an agreed upon space. The owner of the commodity labor-power is a disembodied subject, while the laborer is embodied.26 Commodity labor-power is a product of centuries of violence and discipline in human bodies, cultivating their capacities into interchangeable commodities available on the market for purchase and command by capital.27 The commodification of labor-power is by no means as natural, obvious, and immediate as it appears in capitalist society. This colonization of (natural) bodies and colonization of nature are identical. This appears quite explicit in the colonization of human communities. The colonial disciplining of Indigenous bodies into Anglo-ified labor-power salespersons was the stated aim of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The school shed much tears and blood in trying to ‘teach’ Indigenous peoples to no longer treat their bodies as inherently tied by nerves, tendons, flesh, and love with their communities and homes, but to treat them as property which must be kept up in value and disciplined for the sale of labor-power.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Capital is the subject of the capitalist mode of production, the subject which all other subjects look to as the center which they position themselves relative to. The subjectivity of capital is subjectivity, a long-cultivated historical product, unleashed into a mania for transforming the world into repetitions of capital—into chains of valorization and accumulation. Capital’s subjectivity is a borrowed subjectivity, borrowed from the life of laborers. Nevertheless, it is as real as anything in everyday life. It dominates mortal subjects as an objective power standing above and behind them, and reduces them in their everyday lives to the property of empowered objects. Capitalism is a system where everyone appears to be a property owner, where even the propertyless are supposed to own their labor-power as their own ‘property.’ In this, everyone appears to commonly colonize ‘Nature’ as ‘Humanity.’ But this is a relationship of capital’s subjectivity to ‘Nature,’ and thus the responsibility of colonization is concentrated where there is an accumulation of capital. Capitalists as the personification of capital are thus embodiments of the colonizing function, and must be treated as such. To speak of common ‘human’ responsibility for the present global ecological catastrophe is to reproduce the illusion of free, equal exchange between owners. This is to say nothing of the overwhelming burden of the consequences on indigenous peoples, who civilizations cast in a common lot with nature as ‘natural peoples.’28 The illusion of classless society, so often touted at the end of the 20th century, is in reality derived from this function.29 Classless society is class society without a politically autonomous, confrontational proletariat.30 The propertyless exist just as much now as ever, but labor, consumption, and everyday life have been restructured and standardized to promote the illusion of classlessness.31 The individuals of this ‘classless’ society appear as only different in quantity, i.e. income inequality. Even with such immiseration, thought leaders insist that this is the case of a ‘declining middle class’ and not the demand of a new regime for the exploitation of labor. The old institutions of mass politics, in particular labor unions, were gutted as part of a global counterrevolution from the 1960s onward.32 Instead of mass politics, what we have today are gaggles of citizens. Whether in the form of digital citizens or political citizens, such interchangeability and strict individuation is the rule of the day. Thus the impotence of every attempt at constituting political autonomy through this form.33 The citizen-owner is in fact a

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Abolition of Property counterrevolutionary form, it is a veil of capitalist subjectivity. Capital’s subjectivity is borrowed once over, and the citizen-owner borrows their subjectivity twice over from this borrowed subjectivity. Within the boundaries of each citizen, we find the illusory inwardness of the self. Each citizen is fenced off from others, it is supposedly left up to them to decide what to fill the interior of their property with. The junk that is to makes up their selves is their choice, though they inherit plenty from their ancestors. They can hoard as much as they like, or they can raze the citizen-plot completely flat. Whatever is to their liking, as long as it does not fundamentally disrupt the system of separate citizen-plots. And so, many people find a natural solution to the hectic modern world in a retreat into the self. But this is far from inwardness—it is only navelgazing. This retreat is not a meditation on the wealth of experience, even if it makes use of meditation for the utilitarian purpose of ‘self-help.’ True inwardness cannot be complacency with the plot-system. True inwardness demands a dissolution of the self into the infinite uniqueness of the world.34 A natural expression of this truth is embodied community action, struggle, revolution —those activities which Uniquely affirm the Unique. And so we come to the decision of revolution. But revolution has been encrusted with the muck of the ages. What often passes for revolution cannot be allowed to stand in any revolution of Uniqueness. The limit of ‘radicalism’ in the United States tends to be some program of nationalization, or the extension of said logic into such proposals as a single-payer healthcare system. But nationalization is not as radical as what the situation demands of us. In normal conditions (that is, nationalization carried out by the bourgeois state) it is merely the national state taking on management of capital in a particular industry. To nationalize something is to declare it the property of the nation. But the nation is no more neutral and no less discriminating than any other property-owner. It can just as well rent the use of its property out to the highest bidder, or can find itself in desperation to sell the product of labor exercised by the medium of its property. This is the neocolonial dependency so many nations find themselves in, even those with nationalized property. The nationalization campaigns of the 20th century did not prevent this—import-substitute industrialization was a failure of an attempt at decolonization.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez In the United States, such nationalization goes hand in hand with settler ‘socialism.’ This would make colonized lands, carved up into settler exploitations, into the property of the general settler, the state. Indigenous peoples do not relate to their homelands as private property, whether property of individuals or property of nation-states. The framework of the nation-state with its security, territory, and population limits any such indigenous relational nexus. Nationalization is not the same as socialization. Socialization does not signify private property, not even the private property of the nation, but the abolition of private property. As Karl Korsch said:

“The structure of the capitalist society which socialism struggles against is determined by the fact that in a capitalist economic order the social processes of production are essentially viewed as the private affair of individual persons. In contrast socialization aims at the creation of a socialist communal economy; that is, an economic order in which the social process of production is considered a public affair of the producing and consuming whole.”35

This is a revolutionary break, an active struggle against the old society of capitalist private property. Socialization is a self-conscious relationality. It is a reclamation of relationality, the flesh of life, acting through the dense sociality created by capitalism. But socialization brings us to something important—how will the new society arrange its relations? What are the new society’s ethics? Following from this question, I believe we must rethink labor as the traditional, positive central category of communism. Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme is substantially relevant on this score, rather than being an obscure political intervention. Against the slogan “labour is the source of all wealth,” Marx reminded his fellow revolutionaries that “Nature is just as much the source of use-values (and what else is material wealth?) as labour, which is itself only the expression of a natural power, human labour power.”36 The split between ‘Man’ and ‘Nature’ is illusory, laboring ‘Man’ cannot escape the ground of his naturalness. He represses it, trying to act as only a subject in the form of capital, but needs it anyways. For capital must take its form as wealth, as use-values, and thus is nature.

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Abolition of Property The proletariat is not revolutionary in the positive virtue of labor as an ethic in itself. Labor as we have known it, across the history of civilization, is a curse. The proletariat, rather, is radical in embodying the negativity, the waste, the wrong of this civilization, that negativity bound up inseparably from its relationship to its labor itself. This is a class “with radical chains, a class in civil society that is not of civil society, an estate that is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere of society having a universal character because of its universal suffering and claiming no particular right because no particular wrong but unqualified wrong is perpetrated on it[...]”37 The production of surplus-value becomes the material for the whole of society across classes, distributed by means of profit, interest, rent, and taxes.38 The very source of these in surplus-value is obscured by their distribution, but where the proletariat disrupts and refuses value-production, as in a revolution, it becomes a conscious object of defense for the forces of reaction. The proletariat’s revolutionary, universalist potential lies in the nature of its domination itself, because it “cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.”39 This is exactly why capital has struggled so hard to disperse cooperative labor since the 20th century, even if it can never do away with it entirely. The rearrangement of the global division of labor, the precariousness of labor, the emergence of the gig economy, and the streamlining of labor-tasks are all weapons in the class struggle to fragment the self-composition of the revolutionary proletariat. But the density of sociality, so necessary for capitalism, remains. Capital can never escape labor, because capital is labor. It can struggle to reduce the role of living labor in the production process, but by this it only contributes to the suffocation of its own regimes of accumulation by reducing the fuel of surplus-values relative to capital as a whole.40 Proletarian revolution today can no longer rely so immediately on the old ‘collective worker,’ the subject of socialist mass politics in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. But the “radical chains” of the proletariat have not disappeared. The proletariat today must recompose itself by re-building, through an agonizing struggle, the ground of mass politics. This cannot be done through labor as a positive virtue, particularly not in an age of such structural unemployment, but through their self-assertion as the propertyless, the dispossessed. Their collectivity cannot be a collectivity of positive labor, but of dispossession.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez The character of a revolutionary movement is articulated more through conscious relationality than positive labor, though we must labor hard to constitute an autonomous political bloc. The revolutionary proletariat must understand itself not as the true carrier of bourgeois civilization, that rapist of nature, but the revenge of nature on civilization. They must reclaim their embodied experience of life through revolutionary action, refusing the orderly routines of everyday bourgeois life in favor of autonomous, self-conscious forms of relating to each other. They must fight to defend life against capital accumulation, building the means for us to survive the global ecological catastrophe. The revolutionaries “have a world to win,” and they must build a new civilization premised on free, universal kinship with all of life. This demands working through labor as a metabolism of human beings and nature, but it also demands the abolition of labor as we have known it. A communist society cannot practice labor as an instrumentalization of life’s wealth, as it has been up to now, but must instead practice a form of social usufruct—to manage the product of labor, our collective metabolism with nature, in an open fashion without claiming it as the property of any one in particular. To treat labor as an open relationship of producer and consumer, subject and object, care and cared for. Not to exclusively claim and separate, but to tighten our ties for another by the care of labor for the good of each and all, enjoying the wealth of developed, rationally exercised forms of labor as a security for the creativeness of living activity.41 What we have known labor as is an instrumentalization of life, but communist labor must be an expression of the broad wealth of life:

“In bourgeois society living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In communist society accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.”42

To reconcile ourselves with the rest of nature, we must also reconcile ourselves with our own naturalness. We need to cultivate a healthy relationship with our own labor. This is the substance of Marx’s apparently baffling defense of child labor, in which he said “an early combination of productive labor with instruction is one of the most powerful means for

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Abolition of Property transforming present-day society.”43 This is not the exploitation of children, but accommodating children to their own embodiment. It is experiential education, education which refuses the separation of mental and manual labor and promotes a healthy relationship with labor as a metabolism with nature. Pedagogy produces, reproduces, and reveals a society’s sense of its relationship to the world. Viola Cordova (Jicarilla Dindéi) noted that her nation considered pedagogy as key to humanization of children, bringing them into their own place in the matrix of relationships that makes up the world.44 Reconciliation with nature would be the key aspect of the new labor promoted by such pedagogy. This task is inseparable from the abolition of property and the emancipation of labor. For the new generations, those to be born after the constitution of proletarian rule over society, will be those who live communist civilization. They will be those who will not bear the marks of capital. The importance of decolonial pedagogy extends to our self-decolonization from the vampiric capitalist colonization of nature. Communism is above all the abolition of private property and the liberation of our dialogic relationship with nature on the very universal scale blasted open by capital. Instead of nature being dead, external property, nature will once again become a wealth of relatives—but this time, on a beloved universal scale. Communist civilization can only be born by embracing the openness of human relationality.45 It is that openness which enables us to articulate ourselves, and to articulate the wealth of nature in our labor. Humanity can only be universal by being free in a radical emptiness, open to the universal wealth that lives in everything.

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Footnotes 1

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto (New York, New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 223. 2 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 224. 3 “But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage labor, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labor,” Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 224. 4 “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?,” Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto; “The further back we trace the course of history, the more does the individual, and accordingly also the producing individual, appear to be dependent and to belong to a larger whole. At first, the individual in a still quite natural manner is part of the family and of the tribe which evolves from the family; later he is part of a community, of one of the different forms of the community which arise from the conflict and the merging of tribes. It is not until the eighteenth century that in bourgeois society the various forms of the social texture confront the individual as merely means towards his private ends, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, namely that of the solitary individual, is precisely the epoch of the (as yet) most highly developed social (according to this standpoint, general) relations. Man is a Zoon politikon in the most literal sense: he is not only a social animal, but an animal that can be individualised only within society. Production by a solitary individual outside society—a rare event, which might occur when a civilised person who has already absorbed the dynamic social forces is accidentally cast into the wilderness—is just as preposterous as the development of speech without individuals who live together and talk to one another,” Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ed. Maurice Dobb, trans. S. W. Ryazanskaya (Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers, 1970), p. 189.

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In other words: the original conditions of production appear as natural presuppositions, natural conditions of the producer 's existence just as his living body, even though he reproduces and develops it, is originally not posited by himself, but appears as the presupposition of his self; his own (bodily) being is a natural presupposition, which he has not posited. These natural conditions of existence, to which he relates as to his own inorganic body, are themselves double: (1) of a subjective and (2) of an objective nature. He finds himself a member of a family, clan, tribe etc.—which then, in a historic process of intermixture and antithesis with others, takes on a different shape; and, as such a member, he relates to a specific nature (say, here, still earth, land, soil) as his own inorganic being, as a condition of his production and reproduction. As a natural member of the community he participates in the communal property, and has a particular part of it as his possession; just as, were he a natural Roman citizen, he would have an ideal claim (at least) to the ager publicus and a real one to a certain number of iugera of land etc. His property, i.e. the relation to the natural presuppositions of his production as belonging to him, as his, is mediated by his being himself the natural member of a community. (The abstraction of a community, in which the members have nothing in common but language etc., and barely that much, is obviously the product of muchlater historical conditions.) As regards the individual, it is clear e.g. that he relates even to language itself as his own only as the natural member of a human community. Language as the product of an individual is an impossibility. But the same holds for property,” Marx, Grundrisse, p. 489-490; “Those ancient social organisms of production are much more simple and transparent than those of bourgeois society. But they are founded either on the immaturity of man as an individual, when he has not yet torn himself loose from the umbilical cord of his natural species-connection with other men, or on direct relations of dominance and servitude. They are conditioned by a low stage of development of the productive powers of labour and correspondingly limited relations between men within the process of creating and reproducing their material life, hence also limited relations between man and nature. These real limitations are reflected in the ancient worship of nature, and in other elements of tribal religions. The religious reflections of the real world can, in any case, vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man, and man and nature, generally present themselves to him in a transparent and rational form. The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process, i.e. the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control. This, however, requires that society possess a material foundation, or a series of material conditions of existence, which in their turn are the natural and spontaneous product of a long and tormented historical development,” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1, 3 vols., Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1976), p. 173. 6 John Haldon, The State and the Tributary Mode of Production (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 1996), pp. 63-69. 7 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 148-150. 8 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, pp. 204-206. 9 See John Haldon, “State Formation and the Struggle for Surplus,” in The State and the Tributary Mode of Production, by John Haldon (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 1996), pp. 203–265. 10 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 467-468. 11 Haldon, The State and the Tributary Mode of Production, pp. 65-70. 12 Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (New York, New York; Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 361-364. 13 See Jairus Banaji, A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2020). 14 “But it is only foreign trade, the development of the market to a world market, which causes money to develop into world money and abstract labour into social labour. Abstract wealth, value, money, hence abstract labour, develop in the measure that concrete labour becomes a totality of different modes of la- bour embracing the world market. Capitalist production rests on the value or the transformation of the labour embodied in the product into social labour. But this is only [possible] on the basis of foreign trade and of the world market. This is at once the precondition and the result of capitalist production,” Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, vol. 3 (Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers, 1971), p. 253. 15 “But mindful of their contrasting origin—of their line of descent—the landowner knows the capitalist as his insolent, liberated slave of yesterday now become rich, and sees himself as a capitalist who is threatened by him. The capitalist knows the landowner as the idle , cruel and egotistical master of yesterday; he knows that he injures him as a capitalist, and yet that it is to industry that he, the landowner, owes all his present social significance, his possessions and his pleasures; he sees in him an antithesis to free industry and to free capital—to capital independent of every natural determination,” Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 89.

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“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. Hard on their heels follows the commercial war of the European nations, which has the globe as its battlefield. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes gigantic dimensions in England's Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the shape of the Opium Wars against China, etc,” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 915. 17 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 410 18 “The great historic quality of capital is to create this surplus labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use value, mere subsistence; and its historic destiny [Bestimmung] is fulfilled as soon as, on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves—and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations [Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species [Geschlecht]—and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased. Accordingly, capital and labour relate to each other here like money and commodity; the former is the general form of wealth, the other only the substance destined for immediate consumption. Capital's ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness lNaturbedürftigkeit], and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. It ceases to exist as such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself,” Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1973), p. 325. 19 On the other hand, we communists strive for an individuality which is premised on uniqueness. Property cannot be so, because property is the image of the Owner. But all uniqueness is relational. Marx noted of this: “In a certain sense, a man is in the same situation as a commodity. As he neither enters into the world in possession of a mirror, nor as a Fichtean philosopher who can say 'I am I', a man first sees and recognizes himself in another man. Peter only relates to himself as a man through his relation to another man, Paul, in whom he recognizes his likeness. With this, however, Paul also becomes from head to toe, in his physical form as Paul, the form of appearance of the species man for Peter,” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p.144 n. 19. 20 Friedrich Engels, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man,” in Engels: Anti-Dühring, Dialectics of Nature, by Friedrich Engels, vol. 25, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Collected Works (New York, New York: International Publishers, 1987), p. 461. 21 Quoted in Dee Alexander Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (Chicago, Illinois; San Francisco, California: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), p. 273. 22 Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 64. 23 See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Confessions of the Flesh, ed. Frederic Gros, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 4 (New York, New York: Vintage Books, 2022).

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“Thus the old view, in which the human being appears as the aim of production, regardless of his limited national, religious, political character, seems to be very lofty when contrasted to the modern world, where production appears as the aim of mankind and wealth as the aim of production. In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity's own nature? The absolute working out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois economics and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds—this complete working-out of the human content appears as a complete emptying-out, this universal objectification as total alienation, and the tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end. This is why the childish world of antiquity appears on one side as loftier. On the other side, it really is loftier in all matters where closed shapes, forms and given limits are sought for. It is satisfaction from a limited standpoint; while the modern gives no satisfaction; or, where it appears satisfied with itself, it is vulgar,” Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 487-488. 25 “When we leave this sphere of simple circulation or the exchange of commodities, which provides the 'free-trader vulgaris' with his views, his concepts and the standard by which he judges the society of capital and wage-labour, a certain change takes place, or so it appears, in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his worker. The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but - a tanning,” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 280. 26 This situation facilitates a tendency towards indifference to nature, even to one’s own naturalness, in the production process: “The fact is that these workers, indeed, are productive, as far as they increase the capital of their master; unproductive as to the material result of their labour. In fact, of course, this 'productive' worker cares as much about the crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn't give a damn for the junk. But, looked at more precisely, it turns out in fact that the true definition of a productive worker consists in this: A person who needs and demands exactly as much as, and no more than, is required to enable him to gain the greatest possible bene fit for his capitalist,” Marx, Grundrisse, p. 273. 27 Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, History and Obstinacy (Brooklyn, New York: Zone Books, 2014), pp. 92-94. 28 John Mohawk, “How the Conquest of Indigenous Peoples Parallels the Conquest of Nature,” ed. Hildegard Hannum (Schumacher Center for a New Economics, October 1997), https://centerforneweconomics.org/ publications/how-the-conquest-of-indigenous-peoples-parallels-the-conquest-of-nature/. 29 Marx predicted this situation as emerging at a high point of the capitalist mode of production—in fact, at its very point of self-negation. In his non-determinism, however, he was able to give us a means to think through both the radical potentials and the radical blocks of this situation: “The credit system has a dual character immanent in it: on the one hand it develops the motive of capitalist production, enrichment by the exploitation of others' labour, into the purest and most colossal system of gambling and swindling, and restricts ever more the already small number of the exploiters of social wealth; on the other hand however it constitutes the form of transition towards a new mode of production,” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach, Vol. 3., Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981), p. 572.

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“The new technological work-world thus enforces a weakening of the negative position of the working class: the latter no longer appears to be the living contradiction to the established society. This trend is strengthened by the effect of the technological organization of production on the other side of the fence: on management and direction. Domination is transfigured into administration. The capitalist bosses and owners are losing their identity as responsible agents; they are assuming the function of bureaucrats in a corporate machine. Within the vast hierarchy of executive and managerial boards extending far beyond the individual establishment into the scientific laboratory and research institute, the national government and national purpose, the tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the facade of objective rationality. Hatred and frustration are deprived of their specific target, and the technological veil conceals the reproduction of inequality and enslavement. With technical progress as its instrument, unfreedom-in the sense of man's subjection to his productive apparatus-is perpetuated and intensified in the form of many liberties and comforts. The novel feature is the overwhelming rationality in this irrational enterprise, and the depth of the preconditioning which shapes the instinctual drives and aspirations of the individuals and obscures the difference between false and true consciousness. For in reality, neither the utilization of administrative rather than physical controls (hunger, personal dependence, force), nor the change in the character of heavy work, nor the assimilation of occupational classes, nor the equalization in the sphere of consumption compensate for the fact that the decisions over life and death, over personal and national security are made at places over which the individuals have no control. The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves, but they are slaves[...]” Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, 2nd ed. (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 35-36. 31 See Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2018); Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York, New York: Basic Books, 1987); Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott, 2nd ed. (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2018). 32 See Mario Tronti, “Towards a Critique of Political Democracy,” trans. Alberto Toscano, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 5, no. 1 (2009), https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/ view/127.; Mario Tronti, On Destituent Power, trans. Andreas Petrossiants, (Ill Will, 2022); Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2012). 33 See Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello, The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession (Verso Books, 2023). 34 “An honest man is one who has never consciously obscured anything. One who has never felt the urge to fish in muddy waters even when he fished, piously, up there. Mysticism, it is true, was at one time very popular; and the word comes from “myein,” to shut the eyes— but to do so, like the blind seer, with the intention of seeing ever more clearly. Convulsion, possession by spirits, foaming at the mouth, went by the name of Shamanism, not mysticism. Mysticism properly so-called, as it is found most clearly in Eckhart, was inaugurated at a high point of reason; it had its birth on one of the peaks of philosophy, and was brought into the world by the last great thinker of ancient times, Plotinus. To him it was “haplosis,” the intense simplification of the reasoning soul that occurs when it withdraws into its depths, which are the same in their essence as the primordial One. As in orgiastic ecstasy, so here too, consciousness plays no part; but here it is for the sake of a would-be still higher light, not in order to end up in convulsion, mental fog and blood,” Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of Exodus and the Kingdom, trans. J.T. Swann (London, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Verso Books, 2009), p. 51. 35 Karl Korsch, “What Is Socialization? A Program of Practical Socialism,” trans. Frankie Denton and Douglas Kellner, New German Critique, no. 6 (Autumn 1975): p. 61. 36 Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx: Later Political Writings, by Karl Marx, ed. Terrell Carver, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 208. 37 Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Marx: Early Political Writings, by Karl Marx, ed. and trans. Joseph O’Malley and Richard A. Davis, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 68. 38 “People forget Sismondi‘s significant saying: The Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat,” Karl Marx, “Preface to the Second Edition (1869),” in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marxists Internet Archive, 1852), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ 1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm. 39 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, pp. 220-221.

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Henryk Grossman, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System: Being Also a Theory of Crises, trans. Jairus Banaji (London, United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 1992), pp. 124-127. 41 “The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite,” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach, vol. 3, 3 vols., Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981), pp. 958-959. 42 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 224. 43 Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” p. 225. 44 “In Western societies, more so in some than in others, the newborn child is recognized as fully human at birth. The child comes into the world with a full personality (the ‘true self’ that is the subject so many attempt to find) that is then thwarted by the group. For an indigenous society, the group offers the individual the possibility of rising to his fullest potential in a manner that helps to maintain the survival of the group; in a Western society, the individual represents a potential burden to the group unless it is coerced in some fashion. In both cases the child is seen as in need of socialization. The ends may be the same, but the means are very different and lead to a very different definition, in each case, of what it is to be human,” Viola F. Cordova, How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova, ed. Kathleen Dean Moore et al. (Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 2007), pp. 169-170. 45 “A humanity come of age will have to transcend its own concept of the emphatically human, positively. Otherwise its absolute negation, the inhuman, will carry off victory,” Theodor W. Adorno, “Messages in a Bottle,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, New Left Review 1, no. 200 (August 1993): p. 8.

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Universal History “So comrades, come rally “And the last fight let us face “The Internationale unites the human race.” — Eugène Pottier, “The International” (1871)1

To be is always to be in time. The question is how to be, and in what time? Time is not one. There are many forms of time, just as there are many forms of living. Is time a scale? Do we live by time as a measure of accomplishment, a storehouse of plans for the future? Is time a rhythm of living? Is it a cycle? Is it time on a clock, time in the cycle of the moon? Time is the plane for difference in space. All of life perceives, carries forms of subjectivity. Movement is across time, flux in substance is possible through the plane of temporality. Labor acts through time, subjecting beings to the perception of a laboring subjectivity through their transformation. Labor is the temporality of life realized, the creation of historical time. As Adam and Eve realize mortality, finitude, and through the Fall, labor realizes the irreversible accumulation of time known as history. In class society, the aim of labor becomes the production of surpluses —the subordination of nature to the end of the dominating social subject. This places time above nature, which decays in the face of the passage of time or the ‘progress’ of labor in recreating the world in the image of laboring subjectivity. Thus life is truly beingtowards-death. It is an experience of linear time towards finitude. Class society marks the birth of death as a central dilemma of life, as the possibility of final oblivion. Being is haunted by Nothing—it may try to wield Nothing to define its own

Universal History contours, subordinating it, but Nothingness is a disintegrative force. Nothingness is the curse of flux, contingency, and mortality in imperial Being. Contrarily, communalist ways of life perceive perspective in all beings.2 All things perceive, all things live, all things are related. To die is not oblivion, but to change. Death in permanence is not possible here, as life is not organized along the lines of linear time as in class society. The problem of mortality and immortality is introduced by linear time, by time as an accumulation of history. We cannot know what death is, as living subjects. We only know what death means to us as we live, not what it is to die.3 But death in permanence is only possible when nature is an object to us. Dying is ‘returning’ to nature, to the earth. To die is to lose subjectivity, to lose one’s negativity, to become a pure object. Fear of death is fear of the limits of the subject. It is the subject’s fear of its own impermanence. The individuation of humanity across l historical time means living under the shadow of accumulated dead labor and one’s own final death. Subjectivity looks to the past as an accumulation of dead time, as a weight building up of the products of labor. The production of surpluses by labor, aspiring to ever increase the scale of social labor as a whole, expands the reach of laboring subjectivity in the world. The mass of past labor grows across each generation, facilitating the illusion of linear progress through the illusion of a linear growth in accumulated labor and knowledge as the product of such labor. Dead labor dominates living labor, imposing the linearity of time on the scale of capital accumulation. Thus time becomes the measure of life. Time is the laboring of life to continue to maintain the past in an endless modality of expression. Capital can incorporate near infinite experiences of actual, living labor in its form, and can be realized in equally near infinite activities. In its abstractness it is the unity of many things, it becomes the transcendent subjectivity ordering all subjectivities. Capital accumulation is the ultimate meaning which endless meaninglessness is produced in the name of.4 We are not free to embrace the meaninglessness of life as a form of freedom, as a rejection of domination in the name of some aim. Rather, manifold activities are subordinated to the needs of capital. Capital becomes the measure of all things in the place once occupied by the limited horizon of the ‘human.’5 Everything is dead matter, a dead object in the face of the universal

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez subjectivity of capital which sets the entire world to work reconfiguring itself into its capitalimage. As Karl Marx said in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847):

“Therefore, we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcass.”6

Our lives are lives on a single, universal scale of time. The times of the whole world are united into the single time of the accumulation of the general capital, composed of all of the capitals in the world. For the first time in history, through death and destruction, capital created a single World. Capital realized the universality of history, so that many histories can now be written and accumulated as so many histories of The World. Capital is a bad universal, the densest society in history which is at the same time only indirectly society. It is society mediated by commodities. This temporal scale is Eurocentric, as the continuity of history centers around the accumulation of Western capital and the project to recreate the world along Western lines.7 Capital’s origins are manifold, infinite even, but they are an accumulation monopolized in Western hands.8 Decolonial critique has correctly recognized the despotism of linear time as Western, or Euro-bourgeois.9 The experience of life as being thrown into the world, as linear progress, as the history of civilization is the domination of the capitalist mode of production.10 Linear time is the permanence of death, it is the accumulation of death. Capital acts in a spiral moving outward, but can never succeed in closing fully the circuits of accumulation. It depends on the exteriority of living labor, of the colonized to accumulate new capital, although it aims to be a closed system of exchange. Because it fails to become a closed totality, it fails in constituting itself as a permanent civilization. Capital is doomed in the very scale of linear historical time which it configures the world in the track of. Linear time is a characteristic of class society (‘civilization’) which haunts its very rulers. The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest recorded stories in history, is itself a story of an Uruk king confronting the mortality of linear time. When Marduk put order into the cosmos,

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Universal History abolishing the indeterminate, measureless chaos of Tiamat, great mortals like Gilgamesh found themselves facing their own finitude. The Egyptian Old Kingdom text, Maxims of Ptahhotep, reveals this dilemma of mortality and insecurity as well. This consciousness is similarly evident in the Akkadian Dialogue of Pessimism, a story entailing the mockery of a slave master’s attempt to find security amidst mortality and flux. All of these ancient texts counsel moderation, balance, and measure in rulership. For most of the history of class society, such advice could usually be followed (though rulers were haunted perpetually by atrophy and decay). State societies like Egypt and China lasted for generations, establishing a relative continuity of time. Capital, however, cannot stomach such counsel. The calling of accumulation exists in tension with the calling of social organic unity. The priority of capital is not the continuity of a dynasty, not the harmony of society under the aegis of a ruler, not even the personal status or consumption of capitalists. It is simply to secure and expand accumulation, under pain of death. Thus the human beings living under capital find their aspirations frustrated. One must either adjust to accumulation in ethic, or develop a strategy to confront it. Some embrace the accumulation of capital as the heart of life, tying their value and the values of others to the valorization of capital. They consider life a grind, a war of all against all, the survival of the fittest. This is living life as linear time, as a little quantity of years one has to ‘earn’ a big quantity of money. One should live life so that, by the end of the little quantity of years, one feels satisfied with the capital generated out of the dead, wasted time of their entire lifetime. Others try and find breathing room by turning inwards. They try to make their own meaning in life in spite of it all, or even try to subordinate the demands of production and consumption in their everyday lives to some life-project. This is especially characteristic of popexistentialism. This industry does not necessarily tell its consumers that everything is peachy, but it does tell them that they can make individual choices that transform themselves and their lives without ever having to ask about the fundamental transformation of social relations themselves. These attempts at solutions ultimately fail at high points of crisis, even as they’re designed to address the everyday crises of capitalist production. The demand to grind is especially ridiculous when there are no jobs available, and the advice to make your own meaning

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez is laughable when the possibilities of life are limited by the absence of money in your bank account. For some, it becomes evident that there is a need for another response. This is a question of civilization. Our relationship to our life and times must change. What seems like the most obvious response is to escape history. Linear, historical civilizations already posit ‘savage’ outsiders as beyond history and time. Where there’s a ‘historical people,’ there’s always a ‘people without history.’ History in the linear sense is imperial. From The Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian to The Philosophy of History by G. W. F. Hegel, universal history is always written as an exclusion. What is defined as within the universal lineage and progress of history also defines what is outside of history, what is nonhistorical.11 Thus, to those living within linear civilizations, it seems that the only outside to history is the ‘original innocence’ preceding history. The Fallen seek to return to the Garden of Eden. Hesiod’s Works and Days posits a freedom enjoyed by the ‘noble savages’ of the world, a trope continuing through Tacitus, Ibn Khaldun, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and beyond.12 It seems that if we wish to leave the accumulation of time, we must instead become content with placid Being. The perennial source of life must be returned to. This response has taken many forms in history, whether the anarchist Romanticism of William Morris, Gustav Landauer, and Fredy Perlman or the fascist primordialism of René Guénon, Martin Heidegger, and Julius Evola. This approach is, however, a regression to myth. There is no original foundation which we can return to. The outside is defined by the colonizing force of the inside. Today, the outside is more than anything an illusion. It is more appropriately an underside, exploited to define the universality of the imperial inside.13 Disalienation cannot depend on an original wellspring, a central core of life. The desire for solid foundations is a desire of domination. It is the desire of subjectivity to subject the world to itself, conscious or unconscious. To face the accumulated tragedy of history means working through it. It means shifting the winds of time, flying through the infinity of life’s relations towards freedom. It means redeeming history, ensuring that the misery of time is not for naught. Only the victims of history birthing a free universal society out of the very agony of their radical bondage to the world offers the chance of redemption.14

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Universal History Communism must break through history, not seek the non-historical beyond. To reestablish a harmonic experience of life and time, we must build a universal community. We cannot return to the past. Euro-bourgeois colonialism have subordinated the entire world to the global capitalist mode of production, to a single world-system. To defend the values of communalist ways of life, there must be social revolution within and against the entire capitalist civilization. The encounter of communalism with its oppressors in the “civilizing” colonizers is the occasion in which these societies to crafted a universalizing philosophy. This has been recognized by Viola Cordova (Jicarilla Dindéi), Taiaiake Alfred (Kanien’kehá:ka), and others when they teach that a Pan-Indigenous idea of philosophy and identity across the many distinctions of people-place specific “tribal” cosmologies only becomes possible in contrast to the worldview and way of life of the invaders.15 The revolt against colonial universality with decolonial universality opens the universal potentials of “communalism,” which is exactly the point of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon who said they do not aspire to return to the precolonial situation exactly as it was but to realize its ethics in a new, universal situation.16 In communalism, possibilities are limited by the limited scale of wealth. Wealth not in the sense of commodities, but the accumulation of possibilities. Production of things, of objects is also the realization of the possibilities immanent within them. Capital accumulates seemingly infinite possibilities in the form of commodities, but they are unrealizable for the majority of capitalist subjects. The accumulation is for its own sake, for the outward spiraling of capital. Capital is universal in its abstractness, incorporating far more than communities, but is only indirectly social. Capital is directly antagonistic to all principles of sociality which are incompatible with the directive of accumulation, either tolerating what remains or transforming it in its own image.17 Communism is the universal form of communalism, founded on the universalizing form of wealth that capital has built. But it can only become so if it respects and learns from the continuing ethics of communalism, rather than living and breathing the capitalist form of wealth. Communism must refuse myth and Romance. Communism must take the meaninglessness of life far further than capital—into a rejection of the imperial logic of utility. Subjectivity cannot be free until it recognizes its outside, until it refuses the hopeless pursuit of

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez identifying the world with itself. Life must be an end in itself. Marx predicted communism as a civilization wherein labor would be an end in itself, no longer a misery suffered for the reproduction of life but a free expression of life.18 For labor to be a free expression of life, it must also be labor which does not reduce life to a mere object of itself. Labor cannot posit a dead object as the receptor of the active, laboring subject. It must recognize subjectivity, activity in all of life. Labor must be understood as aspiring towards harmony, understanding with the world. Communist wealth will be the wealth of the infinity in all things. There are endless vistas in all of life, all things have immanent within, between, and through them the infinity of possibilities. Communist labor will be a free relationality with the earth, with others, with time, with the self. All things must be understood as an infinity of finitude. This means a transformation of our times. Time cannot be the measure of life, the despotic scale on which life is lived. But we also cannot abolish time, just as we cannot abolish history. Time must instead become a tool, a measuring instrument like a thermometer or a pressure gauge. Not something which represents, defines, or dominates, but something which facilitates the rational self-organization of labor. As Marx told us, time should become a means for the society of cooperating producers to manage the total labor available to them.19 Merely a means of planning and self-regulation, not a measure of life. Communism is, to be fair, a narrative of linear time. Universal history has prepared the conditions of our redemption—in the eyes of critics like Vine Deloria Jr. (Íŋyaŋ Woslál Háŋ), Russell Means (Oglála Lakhóta Oyáte), Fredy Perlman, or John Mohawk (Onödowá’ga:’), this simply appears as a more perfected form of the imperial-historical way of life.20 Communism is certainly a product of this life, but it is within and against it. Communism embraces the rootlessness of capital in order to work across networks of dependency and bondage. It seeks to unite the wretched of the earth. This unity of the proletariat, the homeless and the dispossessed of the capitalist earth, aims to create a universal homeland. It is cosmopolitanism which claims loyalty to life itself rather than fealty to any Blood and Soil. But this loyalty to life is only an aspiration which must be realized in history. Humanity is not an origin or foundation, but something which must be created by realizing history as the history of freedom’s emergence. This can only be the case when we accuse history, refusing to be

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Universal History complacent with its blood-soaked march. The universal community of life can only be built from the ashes of the universal suffering dealt upon us by capital—the culmination of class society. To realize freedom through history, we must wrestle tirelessly with it as Jacob wrestled with the angel of God.

We have nothing to lose but Our chains! We have a world to win!

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The Horizon of Decolonial Communism by M. Sanchez Footnotes 1

Eugène Pottier, “The International,” 1871, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/ sounds/lyrics/international.htm. 2 “We need to have it quite clear: it is not that animals are subjects because they are humans (humans disguise), but rather that they are human because in they are subjects (potential subjects).This is to say culture is the subject's nature, it is the form in which every subject experiences its own nature. Animism is not a projection of substantive human qualities cast onto animals, but rather expresses the logical equivalence of the reflexive relations that humans and animals each have to themselves: salmon are to (see) salmon as humans are to (see) humans, namely, (as) human. If, as we have observed, the common condition of humans and animals is humanity not animality, this is because ‘humanity’ is the name for the general form taken by the subject,” Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds (Chicago, Illinois: Hau Books, 2015), p. 245; Viola F. Cordova, How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova, ed. Kathleen Dean Moore et al. (Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 2007), pp. 145-147; Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology, trans. Robert Hurley and Abe Stein (Brooklyn, New York: Zone Books, 1989), pp. 169-175. 3 “Nevertheless the thought, that death would be the simply and purely ultimate, is unthinkable. Attempts to express death in language, are in vain all the way into logic; whoever would be the subject, of which it is predicated, that it is here, now, dead. Not only pleasure, which, according to Nietszsche’s luminous word, wants eternity, recoils against transience. If death were that absolute, which philosophy positively conjured in vain, then everything is nothing at all, every thought is thought into the void, none could be somehow truly thought. For it is a moment of truth, that it would endure along with its temporal core; without any duration, there would be none at all, even its last trace would be devoured by absolute death,” Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. Dennis Redmond (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001), https://probablydave.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/adornotheodor-negative-dialectics-2019-dennis-redmond-translation.pdf, pp. 404-405. 4 “But the hiding places of mindless artistry,, which represents what is human against the social mechanism, are being relentlessly ferreted out by organizational reason, which forces everything to justify itself in terms of meaning and effect. It is causing meaninglessness to disappear at the lowest level of art just as radically as meaning is disappearing at the highest.” Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 114. 5 “Thus the old view, in which the human being appears as the aim of production, regardless of his limited national, religious, political character, seems to be very lofty when contrasted to the modern world, where production appears as the aim of mankind and wealth as the aim of production,” Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1973), pp. 487-488. 6 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Paris, France: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), p. 47. 7 J. M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York, New York; London, United Kingdom: The Guilford Press, 1993), pp. 14-17; Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System,” International Social Science Journal, no. 134 (November 1992): 549–57. 8 Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from the South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–80. 9 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, North Carolina; London, United Kingdom: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 79.

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“The real distance between an indigenous way of thinking and a way of thinking consistent with traditional philosophy is the same as that between the Aymara term utcatha and the German term Da-sein. Heidegger takes up this word from ordinary German speech, first because Sein signifies being (ser)—which allowed him to take up again the themes of traditional ontology—and second because Da—which means ‘there’ signaled the circumstance into which being had fallen. Heidegger’s problematic is centered on an awareness of a diminished being, a thrown being. His merit lies in having taken up in the twentieth century the theme of being with an exactitude that befitted the lives of the German middle class. This class had always felt the fall of being as its own, with all of the anguish that implies. If we add to it the concepts of time and authenticity, we notice that a thematic so threaded is not so far from the thinking of a European bourgeoisie which feels the crisis of the individual and tries to remedy it. “It is different among the Aymara. An equivalent to Da-sein might be cancaña. According to Bertonio, cancaña means ‘barbecue spit, being, or essence’; it is also linked to ‘’flow of events.’ But the term utcatha is much closer to the indigenous sensibility. Bertonio translates utcatha as ‘estar.’ Moreover, it appears to carry in the first syllable a contraction of the term uta, or dwelling, which would link it to the concept domo—that is domicile or being-in-thehouse (estar en casa)—so vilified by Heidegger and Gusdorf. It also means ‘‘to be sitting down,’’ which paradoxically takes us to sedere which is the source of the Spanish word being (ser). Finally, Bertonio mentions the form utcaña, ‘the seat or chair and also the mother or womb where woman conceives.’ In short, the meanings of utcatha reflect the concept of a mere givenness or, even better, of a mere estar, but linked to the concept of shelter and germination,” Rodolfo Kusch, Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América, trans. María Lugones and Joshua M. Price (Durham, North Carolina; London, United Kingdom: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 4-5. 11 Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, p. 79. 12 Robert A. Williams, Jr., Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization (New York, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012). 13 “2.4.4.1 The other is the precise notion by which I shall denominate exteriority as such—historical, not only cosmic or physico-living, exteriority (4.1). The other is the alterity of all possible systems, beyond ‘the same,’ which totality always is. ‘Being is, and non-Being is,’ or can be, the other, we could say, contrary to Parmenides and classical ontology. “2.4.4.2 Others reveal themselves as others (3.4.8.1) in all the acuteness of their exteriority when they burst in upon us as something extremely distinct, as nonhabitual, nonroutine, as the extraordinary, the enormous (‘apart from the norm’)—the poor, the oppressed. They are the ones who, by the side of the road, outside the system, show their suffering, challenging faces: ‘We’re hungry! We have the right to eat!’ That right, outside the system, is not a right that is justified by the proyecto or the laws of the system. Their absolute right, because they are sacred and free, is founded in their own exteriority, in the real constitution of their human dignity. When the poor advance in the world, they shake the very pillars of the system that exploits them. The face (pnim in Hebrew, prosopon in Greek), the person, is provocation and judgment by its mere self-revelation. “2.4.4.3 The others, the poor in their extreme exteriority to the system, provoke justice—that is, they call (-voke) from ahead (pro-). For the unjust system, ‘the other is hell’ (if by hell is understood the end of the system, chaos). On the contrary, for the just person, the other is the utopian order without contradictions; the other is the beginning of the advent of a new world that is distinct and more just. The mere presence of the oppressed as such is the end of the oppressor’s ‘good conscience.’ The one who has the ability to discover where the other, the poor, is to be found will be able, from the poor, to diagnose the pathology of the state,” Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 1985), p. 43. 14 Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2006), pp. 92-94; “Which comes down to saying that the salvation ofEurope is not a matter of a revolution in methods. It is a matter of the Revolution–the one which, until such time as there is a classless society, will substitute for the narrow tyranny of dehumanized bourgeoisie the preponderance of the only class that still has a universal mission, because it suffers in its flesh from all the wrongs of history, from all the universal wrongs: the proletariat,” Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), p. 78. 15 Cordova, How It Is, pp. 1-3; Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 88.

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“For us, the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond. It is not a dead society that we want to revive. We leave that to those who go in for exoticism. Nor is it the present colonial society that we wish to prolong, the most putrid carrion that ever rotted under the sun. It is a new society that we must create, with the help of all our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, warm with all the fraternity of olden days,” Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, pp. 51-52; “We should not therefore be content to delve into the people’s past to find concrete examples to counter colonialism ’s endeavors to distort and depreciate. We must work and struggle in step with the people so as to shape the future and prepare the ground where vigorous shoots are already sprouting. National culture is no folklore where an abstract populism is convinced it has uncovered the popular truth. It is not some congealed mass of noble gestures, in other words less and less connected with the reality of the people. National culture is the collective thought process of a people to describe, justify, and extol the actions whereby they have joined forces and remained strong. National culture in the underdeveloped countries, therefore, must lie at the very heart of the liberation struggle these countries are waging,” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 168. 17 “Monetary greed, or mania for wealth, necessarily brings with it the decline and fall of the ancient communities [Gemeinwesen]. Hence it is the antithesis to them. It is itself the community [Gemeinwesen], and can tolerate none other standing above it. But this presupposes the full development of exchange values, hence a corresponding organization of society,’ Marx, Grundrisse, p. 223. 18 “In a higher phase of communist society, after the subjection of individuals to the division of labour, and thereby the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has disappeared; after labour has become not merely a means to live but the foremost need of life; after the multifarious development of individuals along with their productive powers, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be wholly transcended, and society can inscribe on its banner; from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!” Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx: Later Political Writings, by Karl Marx, ed. Terrell Carver, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 214-215. 19 “There is no necessary connection, however, but simply a fortuitous one, between on the one hand the total quantity of social labour that is spent on a social article, i.e. the aliquot part of its total labour-power which the society spends on the production of this article, and therefore the proportion that the production of this article assumes in the total production, and on the other hand the proportion in which the society demands satisfaction of the need appeased by that particular article. Even if an individual article, or a definite quantity of one kind of commodity, may contain simply the social labour required to produce it, and as far as this aspect is concerned the market value of this commodity represents no more than the necessary labour, yet, if the commodity in question is produced on a scale that exceeds the social need at the time, a part of the society's labour-time is wasted, and the mass of commodities in question then represents on the market a much smaller quantity of social labour than it actually contains. (Only when production is subjected to the genuine, prior control of society will society establish the connection between the amount of social labour-time applied to the production of particular articles, and the scale of the social need to be satisfied by these.) These commodities must therefore be got rid of at less than their market value, and a portion of them may even be completely unsaleable. (The converse is the case if the amount of social labour spent on a particular kind of commodity is too small for the specific social need which the product is to satisfy.)” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach, vol. 3, 3 vols., Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981), pp. 288-289.

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“Marxism appears to provide a different answer than Christianity in the sense that it seeks to combine nature and history within a process that can best be described as evolving social sophistication-that is, a greater qualitative social response to experience than mere increase in the quantity of goods or the conquest of nature. Marx wrote that the ‘human significance of nature only exists for social man, because only in this case is nature a bond with other men, the basis of his existence for others and of their existence for him.’ And, he argued, ‘the natural existence of man has here become his human existence and nature itself has become human for him. Thus society is the accomplished union of man with nature, the veritable resurrection of nature, the realized naturalism of man and the realized humanism of nature.’ While one might argue that such a format produces basically the same result as Christianity, in fact it escapes the other-worldly, judgment day eschatology that characterizes the Christian faith in favor of a progressive and seemingly inevitable goal which nature finds in the historical process. “This projected conclusion to the historical process whereby nature and our species are reconciled assumes without further questioning that nature and our species are initially at odds and that the transformation of nature through the fulfillment of human personality provides the final linkage which restores the separation. This scenario, while comprehensible to Western minds, fails to confront the American Indian apprehension that nature and our species are not opponents. Not only would American Indians seriously question the gulf between our species and nature, but of equal seriousness would be the critique leveled by Indians against the Marxian view of social institutions,” Vine Deloria Jr., “Circling the Same Old Rock,” in Marxism and Native Americans, ed. Ward Churchill (Boston, Massachusetts: South End Press, 1992), pp. 124-125; Russell Means, “The Same Old Song,” in Marxism and Native Americans, ed. Ward Churchill (Boston, Massachusetts: South End Press, 1992), p. 21; Fredy Perlman, Against HisStory, Against Leviathan! (Detroit, Michigan: Black & Red, 1983), p. 14; John Mohawk, Utopian Legacies: A History of Conquest and Oppression in the Western World (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Clear Light Publishers, 1999), p. 264.

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Index abolitionism—21 n57, 23, 111, 118, 127, 132-133, 136, 207, 280 abstractness—27, 30, 69, 70, 98, 120, 123, 126-127, 130, 135, 137, 143, 144, 145, 162, 163, 165, 188, 195, 227, 251, 265 and capital—28, 29, 49, 56, 57, 58, 64, 101, 102, 164, 17-171, 182, 230, 236, 257, 260, 262, 263, 266, 278, 320, 321, 330, 354, 370, 374 concrete—27, 31, 32, 49, 56, 58, 60, 63, 70, 100, 167, 223, 224-225, 228, 267, 301, 370, 66, 97, 99, 100, 101-102, 110, 112, 122, 126, 128, 132, 135, 136, 140, 167, 177, 188, 189, 191, 223, 229, 231, 249, 251, 255, 257, 260, 263, 264, 267 abstract enriching the concrete —27, 62, 63, 136-137, 226-227, 297, 302 concrete universalism—53, 61, 62, 63-64, 65, 68, 69-70, 137, 138, 141, 243 and domination—59, 60, 66-68, 136, 138, 164, 176-178, 179, 224-225, 236, 277, 319, 321 in givenness—31, 35, 50, 100, 111, 327-328, of ‘the people’—3-4, 243, 249 and universalism—27, 35, 53-54, 55, 57, 58, 60, 101, 130, 173, 277, 319, 337, 354, 374 Adams, Howard—83 n39, 169-170, 192-193, 195, 297 Adorno, Theodor W.—31-32, 35, 54-55, 76, 179, 194, 323 Afghanistan–116 African Blood Brotherhood—136 Alfred, Taiaiake on Indigenous traditionalism—193 on Indigenous values—182-183

on non-Native thought—187 on Pan-Indigenism—374 on “red capitalism”—158 Algeria—285, 304 n5 American Civil War—120-121, 132-134, 142, 145, 282, 284 American Indian Movement—10, 136 American Revolution—58-59, 113-115, 118-119 and rights of Englishmen—114, 118 Amin, Samir—296 Anahuac—12 n1, 212 ancestors—45, 137, 155, 168, 211, 353, 358 ancient states—353, 372 Apache—99, 102, 282, 283 Apess, William—160 Armenians—8 arrivants definition of—9 Assyrians—8, 371-372 Australia—10, 95, 287 authenticity—35, 70-75, 118, 124, 125, 143, 178, 194, 214, 264, 279, 291-297, 301, 312 n67, 325, 335 Aztlán—211-215 Babeuf, Gracchus—114 Baker, Ella—15 n3 Baku Congress—8 Bakunin, Mikhail—238-245, 259-260, 265, 292, 293 Batalla, Guillermo Bonfil—138 Bauer, Bruno—139 Being—178-179 and non-Being—47, 319 and Nothing—369-372 Belgium—296 Benjamin, Walter—124, 330-331 Benoist, Alain de—293 Bhattacharya, Tithi—249-250 Black Hammer Party—106 n27, 109 Blackness—49, 59, 65, 68, 135, 207-210, 284, 319, 321 Black Panther Party—10, 136, 147 n15, 215, 285 Bloch, Ernst—333

Index boarding schools and assimilation—55, 101, 183, 356 Bolsheviks—7-10, 122, 191, 205, 222, 304 n5 Brazil—208-209, 216, 233 Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra—216 Britain—113-114, 116, 117, 126, 160, 244, 284-285, 302, 321 buffalo soldiers—99, 284 bureaucracy—2-4, 24, 26, 28, 33, 126, 184, 229, 263, 267, 275-276, 291, 304 n5 Bush, George H. W.—71

and imperialism—63, 92, 116, 190, 277, 281-283, 293, 323-325 impersonal power—52, 63, 72-73, 75, 157-158, 181, 184-185, 197, 236, 256, 278, 289, 318, 327-328, 333 primitive accumulation of—90, 91-93, 255 capitalocene—31 Carlyle, Thomas—292 Césaire, Aimé—104, 285-286, 296, 317, 374 Chaplin, Ralph—121 Chican@—68, 206, 211-214, 21 China—9-10, 118, 189, 353, 372 Christianity—58, 120, 153, 158-159, 160-164, 167, 173, 182, 223, 294, 317, 356 Church—74, 90, 161, 163 citizenship—3, 14 n12, 55, 57-58, 66, 99-100, 114, 120, 122, 125, 127, 137, 193, 206, 215, 284, 320 Collier, John—295 Collins, Patricia Hill— on embodied knowledge—23, 24, 36 on intersectionality—27 on Marx—27, 28, 35 Columbus, Christopher Columbia—294 Comanche—100, 282 Combahee River Collective—23 commodity—56-57, 59, 92, 100-101, 157, 166, 181, 221, 235, 248-249, 251, 254-255, 258-260, 263, 279, 281, 288, 298, 320-321, 322, 327, 355-356, 371 cash crops—98, 281, 290 circulation of—86, 157, 320 commodification—49, 57, 60, 94, 98, 114, 135, 257, 321, 356 commodity fetishism—30, 76, 166 communalism and class societies—34, 55, 86-93, 95, 100-101, 103, 119, 138 as a mode of production—85-86, 88-89, 95, 98, 100, 102, 156, 168, 175 as a social form—6, 69, 86, 90, 91-93, 99, 138, 168, 297-298, 301

Cabet, Étienne—1-2 Cafiero, Carlo—245-251, 264, 267 California—211, 288-289 Camp Grant Massacre—99, 144, 28 Canada—10, 83 n39, 95, 192-193, 297 capital accumulation of—1, 4, 86, 93, 97, 99, 156, 158, 247, 256, 263-264, 278-279, 281, 300, 318-319, 322, 324-325, 328, 330, 352, 354-355, 357, 360, 361, 370-372, 374 autonomous subject but not independent —156-157, 181, 357-358 commercial form of—353-354 culmination of class society—4-5, 277, 228-227, 352, 356, 376 distinct from personal property—181, 236, 289, 318, 352-353 fictitious capital—155 finance capital—63, 266 formal and real subsumption—157, 184, 190 general capital—6, 28, 92, 257, 266, 278-279, 283-284, 319, 320, 323, 328, 352, 354, 371 generalized commodity production—56, 77, 91, 101 and human-nature dichotomy—30, 52, 60, 86, 103, 164, 168, 170-172, 175-176, 182, 185-186, 287-288, 301, 352-357, 359, 361-362, 370

416

Index as a source of resistance—6, 51, 69-70, 79, 87, 93-94, 99, 103-104, 160, 189, 192-194, 238 communism—240, 298, 302, 361, 375 crude form of—34 higher—4, 337, 257-259, 362 lower—4, 336, 257-259, 362 transition—4, 303, 330-331, 335-336, 362 Communist Party—1, 216 formal or ephemeral–2 historical—2-4, 11 Communist Party of China—9 Communist Party of Colombia—297 Communist Party USA—107 n26, 110 comradeship—336, 337, 369 Congress of Industrial Organizations—8 Constitution, U. S.—119 contingency—73, 87, 112, 120, 126-127, 138, 174, 178-179, 194, 230, 256, 302, 370 Coomaraswamy, Ananda—292 cooperative production—78, 89-90, 173, 183, 216, 235, 243, 255, 261, 360 Copway, George—160 Cordova, Viola critic of Christianity—160 embodied knowledge—29, 163, 167 on humanity—172-174, 180, 362 on nature—168-170 on non-Native thought—187, 195 on Pan-Indigenism—374 on the sacred—196 Coulthard, Glenn on capital—193 on grounded normativity—154, 163, 183 on Marxism—158-159, 187, 195 Cuba—116, 118, 185 Curtis, Charles—100

Deloria, Philip J. on “playing Indian”—294 Deloria Jr., Vine—54, 61, 65, 137, 154, 160, 187, 193, 375 democracy Jacksonian—118, 113 Jeffersonian—114, 118 limits of—3-4, 15 n13 114-115, 118, 119, 120, 147 n15 and self-determination—206 Democratic Party—2 Descartes, René—28-29, 40, 42, 163, 356 dialectic—25, 31, 32-34, 35, 47-50, 67, 72-75, 78, 110-116, 122-124, 126, 128, 135, 140, 142, 188, 222, 228, 230-234, 236, 245, 251, 265-267, 281, 317 Dialogue of Pessimism—372 Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement—136 Douglass, Frederick—118, 120-121, 132, 134, 135 Du Bois, W. E. B.—114-115, 116, 134, 321 Dühring, Eugen—7, 139 Dunayevskaya, Raya—31, 247 Dussel, Enrique—35 Eastman (Ohiyesa), Charles—137, 160, 163, 164, 182 ecology—77, 86, 92, 96-98, 102, 104, 125, 170, 193, 221, 290, 301, 357, 361 Egypt—292, 295, 296, 336, 353, 372 Engels, Friedrich—75, 139, 189, 245, 259, 352, 352-353 on communism emerging from capitalism—330-331, 333, 354 on democracy—7, 8 on egoism—226-228, 230 and Eurocentrism—5-6, 8, 278-280, 294-295, 323-324 on labor as humanizing—43 on national liberation—7, 240 on nation-states—131 on the U. S.—132 on utopian socialism—251 England—6, 87, 91-92, 118

Dakota—98, 282 Darwin, Charles—164-165 Dawkins, Richard—165 Debs, Eugene V.—118 Delany, Martin—132

417

Index Enlightenment—28, 162, 165, 239, 277, 293, 317 The Epic of Gilgamesh—371 Epicureanism—170 equality—34, 47, 53-60, 66, 68, 94, 114, 164, 187, 206, 222, 225, 235, 250, 253, 259-260, 263, 317-318, 320, 322-324, 356-357 Estes, Nick—98, 125, 137, 195 Eurocentrism—4, 5-6, 11, 160, 190, 276-278, 279, 291, 292, 296, 301, 318-319, 322, 335, 371 Evola, Julius—326, 373 existentialism—223-224, 272

French Revolution—114, 132, 276 Freud, Sigmund—159 Gandhi, Mahatma—292 Garvey, Marcus—210 gemeinschaft—194-195 gemeinwesen—136, 194-195, 298, 337 gender—27-29, 33, 35, 47, 49-50, 70-71, 73-74, 89, 92, 126, 127, 249-250, 322, 332-333 Germany—2, 8, 87, 130, 139, 143, 161-163, 240-241, 242, 259, 263 Geronimo—237 gesellschaft—194-195 Ghana—94 Goebbels, Joseph—241 Goldman, Emma—225 Grant, Ulysses S.—123 Greeks—8 Grossman, Henryk—279 Guénon, René—373

family—71-72, 79, 87, 91, 175, 249-250, 296 abolition—331, 332-333 Fanon, Frantz on decolonial revolution—33, 34-35, 65-67, 78, 104, 275-276, 296-297, 374 on lived experience—32-33 on Marxism—277 on the U. S.—294-295 on whiteness—35 Fascism—7, 110, 141-143, 147 n15, 178-179, 212, 242, 275-276, 285-286, 291-293, 295-298, 300-302, 326, 333-335 Nazism—178, 212, 219, 240, 295 Federici, Silvia—91-92, 171 feminism—23, 25, 35, 64, 127, 208, 249-250 Feuerbach, Ludwig—165, 187-188, 223, 225-228, 231, 239 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley—222 Forbes, Jack D.—60-61 Foucault, Michel—256 Fourth World—295-296 France—92, 113-114, 132, 181, 232-233, 246, 275, 285, 296 Franklin, Benjamin—119 freedom—1, 60, 67, 74, 79, 101, 112, 115-116, 120, 127, 132-133, 138, 142, 194, 212, 223-224, 231-232, 239, 247-248, 251, 257, 261, 263-264, 267, 276, 278, 317-320, 326-330, 332-337, 352, 354, 370, 373, 375-376

Haiti—132, 283, 296 Haitian Revolution—55, 113 Handsome Lake—160 Haudenosaunee—117-118, 119, 160, 184, 280 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich—75-76 on the Absolute—30-31 on the bad infinite—27 on civil society and nature—165 on identity—33-34, 231 critique of materialism—162 and Protestantism—161-162 and the Prussian state—129 on the rabble—5, 18 n22 on universal history—373 Young Hegelianism—223, 228 Heidegger, Martin critique of modernity—293, 326, 373 on the ontological difference—178-179 critique of technology—292 Herrenvolk democracy—114-116, 119, 147 n14, 284-285, 287, 300 Herzl, Theodor appeal to Cecil Rhodes—294 Hesiod

418

Index Works and Days—373 Hess, Moses—223, 225, 231, 294 Hill, Gord—220 n32 Hitler, Adolf—302 Hobbes, Thomas—165 Holocaust—31 Horkheimer, Max—335-336 Humanity—33, 55, 57, 59, 64, 66, 77-78, 103, 156, 164, 167, 189, 194, 196, 221, 223, 227-228, 238, 250, 251, 252, 255, 287, 297, 301, 319, 330, 333, 334, 354, 370, 375 humanism—33, 223, 226-227, 239, 298 humanization—173-174, 239, 362 human nature—49, 223, 238-239, 242, 252, 253, 262, 264, 297, 327 and nature—86, 103, 164, 168-180, 185, 357, 361

Jews—141, 161, 169, 212 n67, 336-337 and antisemitism—211, 241-242, 29-295, 301 Johnson, Andrew—134 Jones, Claudia—10 Judaism—223 Kafka, Franz—296 Kellogg, Laura Cornelius on the factory system—182-183, 187 Khaldun, Ibn—233, 273 Kim Il-sung—222 Kita Ikki—293 Korea—116 Korsch, Karl—359 Kropotkin, Peter critique of Collectivism—253-254, 259-260 concept of communism—252-253, 263, 265 on exploitation—254-256 influence on Mao Zedong—222 and nature—252-253

Ignatiev, Noel—299-300 India—6, 87, 275 Hindutva movement—302 indigeneity—98-99, 103, 119, 188, 193-194, 214-215, 287, 212 n67 Indonesia—296 Industrial Workers of the World—121, 136, 266 Inka—180, 219 n22 International Communist Current—276 International, First—238-240, 245-246, 259 International, Second—7 International, Third—9, 205 internet—357 inwardness—167, 258 Iqbal, Muhammad—10 Iranian Revolution—11 Ireland—6, 87, 91 Islam—8, 9, 292, 296, 335 Israel—3, 96, 117, 287, 295, 312 n67 Italy—245, 319

labor dual character of—28, 247, 260, 298, 322-333 free labor—157, 234, 251, 278 imperial forms of—119, 287-288, 295, 300, 302 labor-power—57, 92, 147, 249, 251, 255, 263, 281, 320, 321, 322-333, 356, 357 as metabolism—42-43, 45, 74, 171-174, 177, 179, 300, 302, 354, 361-362 and property—289, 320, 352-353 relational nature of—43, 157-158, 170, 172-173, 177, 287, 252, 359, 361-362, 375 wage labor—34, 57, 90, 91-92, 94, 101, 101, 127, 157, 183, 184, 234, 242, 247, 253-254, 262, 263-264, 265-266, 278, 279, 282, 283, 299, 318, 320, 321, 325, 326, 356 Laclau, Ernesto—147 n15

Jacob—376 Jackson, George—109, 285 James, C. L. R.—15 n13, 210, 321 Japan—9, 275, 293, 335 Jefferson, Thomas—55, 59, 114

419

Index LaDuke, Winona—137 on Wiindigoo Economics—176, 181 Lakota—96, 98, 103, 282 Lame, Manuel Quintín—297 Landauer, Gustav—273 language—44-45, 49, 59, 67, 75-76, 85, 87, 101, 165, 177, 228, 291 la raza—211-212, 219 n21, 295 Lassalle, Ferdinand—170, 238, 259, 265 latinx—67 Lefebvre, Henri—36 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich—8, 189, on democracy—205-206, 319 on imperialism—281-282, 324 on national liberation—7, 9, 205-206, 210 on the U. S.—280-283 Levins, Richard and Richard Lewontin—165 liberalism—55, 60, 97, 101, 117, 223, 295, 334 radical liberals—24-23, 25-27, 34-35, 57-58, 67, 72 Lincoln, Abraham—110, 131-132, 280 Linera, Álvaro García—277 List, Friedrich—129-131, 138, 145 Lorde, Audre—24 love—175, 188, 231, 269 n4, 289, 303, 332, 335, 337, 356, 362 Lukács, Georg—13 n4, 35, 187-188, 323 Luxemburg, Rosa—13 n7, 279, 284

on communism emerging from capitalism—2, 330-331, 333, 354 on the Communist Party—see Communist Party on democracy—7, 8, 195, 245 on egoism—see Stirner, Max and Eurocentrism—5-6, 8, 160, 190, 278-280, 294-295, 323-324 and humanism—174, 223, 226-227, 239 on humanity as the selfconsciousness of nature—171-172, 177 on labor—see labor on national liberation—7, 240 on nation-states—131 on patriotism—128-138, 143 on revolution—see communism, proletariat on the U. S.—119 mass politics—3-4, 112, 276, 286, 329, 357, 360 materialism—139, 142 historical—7, 31, 41-42, 44, 46, 78, 120, 124, 162-165, 228, 246 mechanical form—162-165, 317, 324 Maxims of Ptahhotep—372 McKay, Claude—210 McNickle, D’Arcy—118 Means, Russell—153, 162-163, 169-170, 375 Menchú, Rigoberta—29, 138, 214-215 mestizaje—211-212, 214 metabolic rift—96, 102 Métis—215, 297 Mexica—211, 212, 213 Mexica Movement—68, 220 n32 Mexican Communist Party—212 Mexico—12 n1, 90, 93, 116, 118, 120, 211-214, 280, 288, 295 Mignolo, Walter D.—275 Mi’kmaq—96 Mohawk, John—375 Morris, William—222, 373 Moses—336-337 Muhammad—292 Murrieta, Joaquín—121

Magón, Ricardo Flores—191-192, 195 Malatesta, Errico—272 n104, 323 Malcolm X—118, 209 Manuel, George—295 Mao Zedong—9-10, 222, Maoism—10, 297 Mariátegui, José Carlos—10, 85, 117, 138, 222, 296 maroon communities—208, 210 Marx, Karl on alienation from nature—182 on ‘animism’—159, 165, 174, 175, 177, 185, 190 on capital—see capital

420

Index Parker, Cynthia Ann—136, 191-192 Parsons, Lucy—118, 222 Partido Liberal Mexicano—136, 191 Pasha, Enver—8 patriarchy—3 and class society—89, 91-92, 93, 296, 332-333 emergence from communalism—89 of gender—50, 61, 79, 91-92 of wage system—91-92, 263-264 peasants—6, 92, 160, 161, 192, 195, 242, 301, 321 Perlman, Fredy—264, 273, 375 perspective—5-6, 8, 23, 26-27, 34-35, 41, 66, 184, 188, 213, 224-226, 276, 302 and domination—48, 55, 91-92, 142, 212, 214, 226, 241, 277-278, 283-284, 286, 287, 291, 294-295, 296, 300-301 and labor—171-172, 255, 259, 287, 327-328 and needs—171-172, 177, 327-328 as relational—2, 35, 41, 45, 48, 62, 75, 98, 101-102, 118, 125, 155-156, 163, 168, 172, 177, 186, 206, 228, 230, 261, 277-278, 300, 327, 335-336, 362, 370 petit-bourgeoisie—123, 149 n45, 195, 326 Philippines—116, 283, 284, 293 Phillips, Wendell—118 police—58, 230, 261 political spectrum—275-276, 296, 301 Postone, Moishe—276 Pretendians—194, 212-214 privilege—26-28, 250-251 proletariat and bodies—357 and capital—48-49, 57, 130, 131, 139, 187, 190-191, 280, 283, 298, 300, 320-321, 360 as negativity of capital—5, 64, 205, 246-249, 251, 317, 336, 360-361 and Communist Party—3-4, 7-8, 244-245 and cooperative labor—1, 49, 78, 95, 243, 253, 255, 261, 360

Nascimento, Beatriz—208 National Congress of American Indians—136 National Indian Youth Congress—136 nationalization—63 and socialization—358-359 Nation-state—63, 130-131, 145, 243, 323, 331, 359 colonization and decolonization—120, 126, 210, 212, 215, 295, 301 Nechayev, Sergey—222, 244 Negri, Antonio and Michael Hardt—307 n21 New Afrikan People’s Organization—209 New Deal—169 Indian New Deal—295 Newton, Isaac—162 New Zealand—10, 96 Niekisch, Ernst—293 Nietzsche, Friedrich Death of God—71 innocence of becoming—107 on slave morality—27 on the Overman—225, 333-334 Will to Power—224-225 nihilism—24, 244, active—226, 330-331, 335, 337 national—110, 139 passive—78, 325, 326, 329, 330-331, 333 Nixon, Richard—285 Nkrumah, Kwame—94 noble savage—119, 213, 293, 373 Owen, Robert—1-2 Owens, Candace—25 Paetel, Karl Otto—293 Paine, Thomas—114, 232 Palestine—10, 14 n12, 73, 117, 124, 283, 285, 286, 294, 295, 296 Pan-Africanism—66, 94 Pan-Indigenism—66, 103, 124, 285 Paris Commune—131-132, 137, 145, 218, 243, 252

421

Index and decolonization—211, 213, 216-217, 235, 276, 317 and democracy—8, 150 n73, 206, 216, 282 dictatorship of—3-4, 131, 215-217, 238, 243-244, 362 industrial—184, 195, 320 internationalism of—64, 103, 118, 121, 142, 144, 205, 213, 302, 375 and nation—130-131, 142, 205-206, 240-241, 245 and racialization—118, 127, 135, 300, 319, 321 and recuperation—294, 323-326, 357 slave laborers and—278-279, 321 self-abolition of—34-36, 251, 267, 302, 320-321 self-composition of—3, 123, 141, 145, 221, 360 semi-proletariat—92 and theory—31, 135, 141 and the Third World—8, 11 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph dialectic as ‘two sides to everything’— 110-112, 115-116, 120, 233 Marx’s critique of—232-238, 255, 257, 264, 265, 266 on mutualism—232, 255 Puerto Rico—116

Redstockings—23 reification—73, 75, 76, 78, 112, 135 Reinaga, Fausto 10, 189-190 Renaissance—317, 319 reproductive rights—74, 332 Republican Party—332 Republic of New Afrika—208-210 rhythm—45, 52, 86, 97-98, 102, 155, 159, 168-169, 171-172, 174, 177-179, 186, 195-197, 290, 369 Rickard, Clinton—284-285 Riel, Louis—83 n39 Rodney, Walter on Marxism—277 on the Third World—296 Roosevelt, Franklin D.—169 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques—333, 373 Russia—8, 160, 275, 281-282 Sakai, J.—283-300 Sayles, James Yaki—215-216 science—43, 74, 94, 159-160, 162, 164-165, 170, 177, 191, 232-233, 235, 246, 252-253, 317 Scotland—91 Serge, Victor—222 Settler-colonialism—109, 113-114, 117-118, 124, 133, 144, 294 and capital—92, 98, 100, 116, 175, 209, 280-283, 294-295 and decolonization—104, 194, 214, 217 definition and distinction from franchise colonialism—95-96, 99 and fascism—285-287, 298 and imperialism—8, 283-285, 294-295 Indigenous resistance against—10, 98, 103, 116, 124, 135, 208 and labor—116, 190-191, 280, 287-288, 290, 299-300, 359 and morality—97-100, 104, 158-159, 188 and nature—167-168, 175, 176-179, 289, 290, 300 visibility of—10, 95, 113-114, 117, 124-125, 135

quantification—2-3, 25-29, 31, 34, 53, 59-60, 155, 164, 182-183, 184, 192, 194, 254, 259, 357, 372 Quijano, Aníbal—321 quilombo—208 Qutb, Sayyid—292 race—33, 35, 49, 66, 122, 123, 126, 135, 190, 207-211, 241-242, 298 Ramaswamy, Vivek—332 Reclus, Elisée—231 Reconstruction, U. S.—120-121, 134, 209 Constitutional Amendments— 216, 284

422

Index Shakur, Assata—118 Shin Chae-ho—222 Sima Qian—373 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake—156, 195 Sismondi—267 n38 slavery—46, 48-49, 55, 59, 60, 69, 87-89, 92, 94, 109, 111, 113, 114, 115, 120, 122, 126, 125, 129, 132-135, 138, 144, 157, 189-190, 207-208, 209-210, 212, 225, 233-234, 279, 282, 293, 297, 298, 299, 319, 320-321, 330, 333, 335, 336, 352-353, 372 Smallwood, Stephanie E.—60 Sorel, Georges—222 Soviet Union—9, 118, 210 Spain—90, 181, 211, 213-214, 285 Spengler, Oswald—131, 141-142, 292, 311 n54 Spinoza, Baruch de—29, 169 Stalin, Joseph—9, 240 Standing Bear, Luther—137 on embodied knowledge—163, 168, 290 on Indigeneity—167-168, 175, 289-290 on settler consciousness—125, 160, 167-168, 175, 179, 289-290 standpoint epistemology—23-25 state of nature and bourgeois society—119, 239 Steinbeck, John—288-289 Sternhell, Zeev—275 Stewart, Maria—118 Stirner, Max Marx and Engels’s critique of— 227, 232, 242, 261, 265 Marx and Engels’s influence by —227, 233, 234, 236-237, 243, 260 and Nietzsche—225-226 on the ownness of the world—223-2224 on the Union of Egoists— 225-226 on the Unique—222-223, 225-226 St. Louis Commune—282 Stoller, Robert J.—47 Subcomandante Marcos—213-224

subjectivity—29, 41, 42, 45, 47-48, 50-52, 62, 72, 75, 79, 158, 165, 170, 175, 177, 186, 190, 285, 290, 300, 302, 317-318, 323, 325-330, 332, 334-335, 337, 355-358, 369-371, 373, 374-375 Sultan-Galiev, Mirsaid—8-10 Tacitus—333, 373 Táíwò, Olúfẹḿi O.—25 Tanzania Maoist influence on—10 Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa—103, 137 Texas Rangers—100 Third World—9, 276, 287, 293, 295-296 Three Sisters—290 time cyclical–86, 369 linear or historical—4, 54, 154-155, 193, 269, 369-375 as measure—56, 184, 193, 258-259, 370, 372, 375 totality and exteriority—47, 60, 66-67, 277, 279, 280, 283, 284, 286, 295, 300, 302-303, 371 and freedom—30, 115, 174, 197 and identity—35, 47-48, 54, 63, 114, 187, 191, 288, 291-293, 295, 297-298, 300-302, 322, 323, 355, 371 and society—2, 14 n4, 31, 63, 87, 187, 236-237, 265, 267, 276, 278, 279, 284, 298, 299, 318 tributary mode of production—85, 89, 253 Trump, Donald—25, 141 Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang—290 Tuhiwai Smith, Linda—29 Ture, Kwame—210 Turkey—8-9 Turtle Island—12 n1, 125 underside—5, 9, 277, 279, 284, 319, 373

423

Index United Nations—117, 124 utopianism—2, 54-55, 128, 131, 144, 153, 188, 251, 252, 295, 332

World War I—7 World War II—103, 123, 295 Wovoka—103, 137 Wright, Richard—32 Wynter, Sylvia—17 n19

value—4, 52, 62, 63, 64, 69, 70, 91, 92, 98, 155, 164, 180, 182, 256-258, 259, 261, 263-264, 266, 323, 335, 356, 372 distinct from wealth—288, 359 exchange-value—56, 59, 101, 130, 156, 157, 354 surplus-value—49, 56, 57, 157, 184, 235, 248, 249, 254, 255, 256, 260, 262, 279, 299, 320, 322, 323, 324, 360 use-value—1, 57, 90-91, 94, 95, 180, 287, 327, 359 value-form—28, 30, 59, 163, 166, 262, 319 Vasconcelos, José—211-212, 295, Vergès, Françoise—64 Vietnam—116, 123, 283 virgin soil myth—125, 133, 136, 191, 280, 287, 294 völkisch movement—139-142

Yazzie, Melanie K.—195 Zaire—296 Zapata, Emiliano—93, 138, 215 Zapatistas—61, 93, 138, 213-214, 296, Zionism—117, 223, 286, 293-294 Zinoviev, Grigory—8 Zitkála-Šá—137 1492—5, 17n19, 281, 293-294, 321, 336, 354, 355

Walker, David—118, 207-208 Washington, George—110 Watson, Thomas E.—122 Watsuji Tetsuro—293 wealth—27, 52, 70, 85, 94, 95, 136, 137, 174, 176, 247, 253, 261, 275, 277, 278, 283, 287, 288, 298, 302, 303, 325-326, 327, 354, 355, 358, 359, 361, 362, 374-375 Wet’suwet’en—96 whiteness—11, 25, 32, 66, 67, 116, 125, 135, 145, 167, 175, 179, 186, 190, 211, 289-290, 300 and class—35, 65, 115, 118, 123, 127, 133-134, 142, 182-183, 206, 319, 321 and feminism—25 nationalism of—68, 99, 118, 122, 123, 184, 285, 298-299 wilderness—86, 119, 168, 175-176, 186, 287, 294-295, 337 Williams Jr., Robert A.—119 Wolf, Eric R.—5, 160, 192

424