Building a new society demands beginning somewhere, and that means somewhere in 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 their own.
‘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, in 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, while 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:
“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 — and thus 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. Thus, 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
For to do so would leave them fully within the old imperial bourgeois melting-pot, or perhaps 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 is undeniably historically true. 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 thus must think through the entire field, the entire matrix of colonized peoples and oppositional movements.
At the forefront of this opposition within U.S. history has been Black radicalism. The entire empire was built on the backs of enslaved Black laborers. Slavery, expropriation, genocide, and dispossession are all foundational to the U.S. Historically, Black nationalism emerged as a response to this racialized colonialism. From the very outset, self-conscious Black nationalism was formulated 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
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 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 in the proposition for a Republic of New Afrika, nationalists consider the ties of Black nationalism and Indigenous nationalism to be extremely important. For this reason, 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 the Indigenous would often form communities together, developing forms of common territorial-spatial autonomy and means of resistance against Euro-American 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 Beatriz Nascimento, though 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.”¹¹
The 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.” 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. Further, since the Great Migration, this particular approach to spatializing 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.
The pitfalls of national consciousness in this case have very practical consequences which we can see in the history of North American Black autonomy. 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.
Chicanism@ has become quite controversial in the 21st century — both in spite and because of its origins. Chican@ as a political identification in the mid-20th century, specifically 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 itself originated from mocking stereotypes of Mexicano working class dialect.¹⁷ As part of the broad upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, radicals took Chicanism@ as having a more or less unproblematic relationship to other forms of decoloniality. At the time, 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, being expressed 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 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 development of la raza cósmica. Just as the Mexican state had done since its foundation, Vasoncelos used the myth 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.
It is important to caution against generalizing this fascist philosophy to the entire new mestizo moment. Vasconcelos in fact 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 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 one. 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, into the Chican@ movement.
While the Mexican Republic claimed the Aztec state as its forefathers, the Chican@s adapted this claim for their own place 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 that 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 second-class 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 authenticity, a return to some pure original, could only make sense from a fundamentally colonized perspective.
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 myth of Aztlán and Greater Mexico obscure 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 people in general and Indigenous peoples in general are blocked by a fidelity to a 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 been. 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 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:
“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 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 that obscures the real morphology of Mexican settler-colonialism — in fact, 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.
The Maya K’iche’ activist Rigoberta Menchú gives us an insightful analysis of our situation as mestiz@s:
“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.
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 national-state 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 of 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:
“[…]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.
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. Therefore, 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 for a new world. It is the decolonial negation of the colonial negation.
