Unsettling America, which fills the role of fighting for the indigenous First Nations, states that "decolonization means the revitalization of indigenous sovereignty, and an end to settler domination of life, lands, and peoples in all territories of the so-called 'Americas.' All decisions regarding human interaction with this land base, including who lives on it, are rightfully those of the indigenous nations." If socialists on this continent can overcome arrogant settler attitudes and incorporate their class-based perspective into this kind of anti-colonial perspective, the injustices that America is built upon will be able to be rectified.
These injustices won't be rectified until the U.S. and its surrounding settler states are abolished, allowing the colonized to determine their own destinies. This goal isn't opposed to Marxist-Leninist revolution, but works according to the material conditions of the continent; Lenin wrote that "The article of our programme (on the self-determination of nations) cannot be interpreted to mean anything but political self-determination, i.e., the right to secede and form a separate state." Since we're in a continent whose indigenous nations have been dismembered by genocidal colonization, and the colonized groups are still being subjected to a myriad of violent policies by the settler states, decolonization is the correct way to make a revolution here reflect Lenin's interpretation of Marxism.
If we can make the Marxist-Leninist movement on this continent recognize that our mission includes anti-colonialism, we'll carry out our class-oriented goals in a way that helps rather than hinders the anti-colonial cause. If we build our socialist movement within the parameters of the First Nations, instead of within the borders that colonialism has created, we'll be able to make Marxism further advance the de-colonial process; putting control over the state into the hands of the proletariat is how the rule of the capitalist class can be ended, and therefore how the poverty and inequality that colonialism has created can be alleviated.
The reactionary cultural impulses that afflict communist-organizing spaces within the imperialist countries must be countered with a commitment to making the continent's struggle for socialism an anti-colonial struggle. Because as Ho Chi Minh said: "If you do not condemn colonialism, if you do not side with the colonial people, what kind of revolution are you waging?"
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