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How do we understand the primary contradiction in settler states? (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 1 month ago by freagle@lemmygrad.ml to c/asklemmygrad@lemmygrad.ml

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I was recently in a conversation with a self-described MagaCommunist who held the position that the primary contradiction in the USA was that the financial owning class owned all of the means of production and that the contradictions of settler colonialism were secondary and could only be resolved through a workers' state.

I realized that I hold the position that settler colonialism is the primary contradiction in the USA, but I also found that I struggled to articulate it effectively. I'm looking for your own thoughts or writings that I can study to learn more on this topic.

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[–] freagle@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

This strikes me as fertile ground. So if the primary contradiction in the USA is imperialism, anti-imperialism would therefore necessarily entail smashing the ready-made apparatus of the state - and specifically that apparatus which serves imperialism: the military, the stock market, the banking systems, the IMF, the WTO, the various treaties, the oil and natural gas frameworks, the telephone and Internet frameworks, the media and IP frameworks, etc.

Is that generally the direction you're pointing?

[–] cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Sure. All those things. Anything to weaken the power of imperialism. But don't discount labor organizing. That also has a beneficial effect as it highlights the contradictions of capitalism, and we as Marxists understand that the declining rate of profit makes it impossible to go back to old concessions that the working class used to get. This heightens the class struggle in a time when there is less and less imperialist plunder to go around (if the global south continues to develop its own productive forces) and more factions are fighting over it.

[–] freagle@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 1 month ago

My point was that if you organized labor, and then seized the state, if you didn't smash the ready-made apparatus of the state, then you would have a labor aristocratic party holding the reins of an imperialist power and without smashing them, they would maintain the contradictions of imperialism.