Why Communists Should Care About Land Back (and LGBTQ+ liberation, ending white supremacy, disability rights, etc., etc., etc.)

A French drawing showing the capture of the emperor in exile, Ham Nghi.

Important Note: This article comes to us via my wife and comrade, Luna Nguyen, with editing and a few small contributions from myself. Luna is a Vietnamese woman who has a YouTube channel on Vietnam which you should check out here. The article is written from Luna’s first person perspective because much of the information is personalized to her own background and draws from her experiences as a Vietnamese communist woman and as a victim of colonialism.

Any time I talk about secondary contradictions of class society — Land Back and indigenous liberation, dismantling patriarchy, trans rights, dismantling whiteness, etc. — I hear the same objections over and over again.

These objections tend to stem from one of three core problems:

1. A misunderstanding of scientific socialism (the philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, based on the methodology and worldview of dialectical materialism).
2. A misunderstanding of whatever liberation movements and ideologies exist to address the secondary contradiction in question (the LGBTQ+ movement, Land Back/indigenous liberation, anti-racism, etc.).
3. Both of the above.

So, let’s try to clear things up and explain how anti-capitalism and other forms of counter-oppression aren’t simply compatible with each other — they are dialectically linked with one another, and understanding this linkage is vital for moving the global working class forward toward our goal of a classless, stateless society!

First, let’s address the three most common responses I receive from socialists when I talk about forms of oppression that aren’t capitalism:

Objection 1: “These are all distractions! You are dividing the working class! Ignore this idpol and focus on class!”

First, any discussion of identity is identity politics. There are many versions of idpol. I will be the first to admit that liberal idpol is harmful — not just to our communist movement, but also to the people who are being negatively impacted by such forms of oppression. Liberal identity politics tend to reduce and essentialize issues of identity to metaphysically static and isolated categories. These metaphysically distinct categories of human beings are then pitted against each other to compete with each other for resources and attention “within the system” through the phenomenon of “Oppression Olympics.” Of course all of this competitive theater between ostensibly divided groups never acknowledges the role capitalism plays both in reinforcing and being reinforced by all these other forms of oppression.

I would also like to note that insisting that we never discuss identity politics is, in itself, another form of identity politics. Just as (as I’m sure any communist would agree) insisting that we never discuss or address class is a form of class politics, erasing and suppressing discussion of identity-related forms of oppression is, itself, a form of identity politics.

So, given that no matter what, we will be engaging in identity politics, we as communists must find a form of identity politics which best suits our revolutionary morality and goals.

We must also understand the history of different forms of identity oppression and capitalism. Colonialism, for instance, stems from a brutal intersection between race and capitalism. Slavery was also an important vector of intersection between capitalism and race. The ways in which women have been exploited and our labor stolen by the patriarchy relates heavily to capitalism; the suppression of the proletariat has hinged upon both the domestic exploitation of women in households, and the division between men and women in the workplace has been a critical aspect of the divide-and-conquer strategy of the bourgeoisie all over the world.

Thus, class oppression is intertwined and reinforced by countless other forms of oppression. To even begin conceiving of how to unravel this monstrous tangle of contradictions, we have to find a starting point: a primary basis upon which all further investigation and practice can be built.

Ho Chi Minh wrote extensively to define a revolutionary conception of morality which is compatible with scientific socialism to be used as a first basis of inquiry and action. Ho Chi Minh’s model of revolutionary morality was rooted in one foundational charge:

“The determination to civilize and liberate human race from being oppressed and exploited.”

This is the foundation of all Marxist morality.

My husband and I have a 3-part video on Marxist morality, which you can watch here, based on the excellent book Ethics and Progress, by Howard Selsam, which you can read for free here, but to put it very briefly:

The Marxist viewpoint is rooted in the liberation of all of humanity from all forms of oppression. Marx and Engels properly identified economic class as the primary contradiction of human society, but they also firmly recognized that society was divided in many other ways.

While they certainly regarded a unified working class as instrumental to overthrowing class society, they knew that this unification was merely a potential and not the current state of human society.

A few relevant excerpts:

“Competition separates individuals from one another, not only the bourgeois but still more the workers, in spite of the fact that it brings them together. Hence it is a long time before these individuals can unite, apart from the fact that for the purposes of this union — if it is not to be merely local — the necessary means, the great industrial cities and cheap and quick communications, have first to be produced by big industry. Hence every organised power standing over against these isolated individuals, who live in relationships, daily reproducing this isolation, can only be overcome after long struggles. To demand the opposite would be tantamount to demanding that competition should not exist in this definite epoch of history, or that the individuals should banish from their minds relationships over which in their isolation they have no control.” — The German Ideology, by Karl Marx

In other words, the working class is defined by a complex set of internal and external dialectical relationships with other forms and manifestations of oppression. Marx wanted to see the contradictions which divided the working class negated, but he also realized that such negation could only come from long and arduous struggle in the material world.

It would be absurd to simply pretend as if the working class were already united when in material reality it is very clearly fractured and divided. Simply ignoring the nature and role of these divisions will only severely delay the unification of the working class and misguide the working people into deeper false consciousness and idealist utopian positions that we can overcome bigotry and division by simply “adjusting our mindset” or “consciously rising above” racism and other forms of oppression.

I say that these positions are utopian because they represent a worldview that fixates on purely abstract ideas that simply present a vision and a distant goal of an ethically just society, detached from material conditions and realities. One of the core principles of scientific socialism is that social problems must be objectively understood and attacked through material practice.

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. . . These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power. . . Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world. . . If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” — Capital Volume I, by Karl Marx

In the above passage, Marx recognizes the ways in which capitalism fuses, reinforces, and is reinforced by other forms of oppression. Chattel slavery in the United States of America was decidedly not a capitalist mode of production, as enslaved people received no wages. But the demand for raw cotton material in the textile mills of England created such demand for cotton that chattel slavery was necessary to meet the market demands. In this manner, capitalism worsened the conditions and expanded the practice of chattel slavery, while chattel slavery reinforced capitalism and led to other social problems in far-away lands, such as child-slavery in English textile mills and other industries.

In 1869, Marx wrote in a letter to Engels:

“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.”

Clearly, Marx was very aware that the colonization of Ireland was harmful to both Irish workers and to English workers as well, and that before there could be any hope of dismantling capitalism in England, the colonial subjugation of the nation of Ireland had to first be negated. Ireland had to be decolonized. Ireland needed autonomy, self-determination, and to have their land restored, otherwise English workers would, in Marx’s own words, and with Marx’s own emphasis: “never accomplish anything.”

This blows away the argument, commonly held by class reductionists, that Marx believed that “we need to overthrow capitalism before we can address other forms of oppression.” Marx very clearly believed that the secondary contradiction of the colonization of Ireland needed to be addressed before capitalism could be tackled in both Ireland and the UK.

Positions like these are extremely common in the works of Marx and Engels, and have been expanded on and developed by countless Marxists since. Marxist revolutionaries have been aware of and seeking to understand the dialectical relations between capitalism and other forms of oppression going back to the beginning, because Marxism is a project of liberating all human beings from all forms of oppression.

Which brings us back to Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary morality, and the next characteristic which Ho Chi Minh ascribes to this morality. Revolutionists must:

• “Clearly understand good things and bad things.”

Uncle Ho taught that it’s important to understand the difference between right and wrong. Going back to the foundation of Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary morality, “good” is defined as that which furthers the cause of the liberation of all of humanity from all forms of oppression, while “bad” is defined as that which hinders the cause of the liberation of all of humanity from all forms of oppression.

In Marxist morality, good actions and bad actions are defined by the material conditions. Bourgeois moralists often ponder whether “the ends justify the means,” and try to construct metaphysical branches of moral categories to try to determine universal answers to moral quandaries, but revolutionary morality instead asks the question: “do the material conditions justify the means?”

Focusing on the ends makes no sense from a scientific socialist point of view, for two reasons:

1. We have no way of knowing what “the ends” will be. “The ends” might have unforeseen consequences or may manifest in unexpected ways.
2. “Ends” and “means” have a dialectical nature; whatever “ends” result from any action become the material conditions for future “means.” The material conditions we exist in now are the “ends” of countless prior struggles and human activities.

Therefore, when contemplating the moral question of what we should do, we should not focus on the “ends” and other hypotheticals but on the material conditions which exist in the time and place we currently occupy. We must have a vision for what we hope to accomplish with our actions, yes, but this must be a concrete vision which is grounded in our material reality, with a material sense of how we can get from where we are to where we want to go. This becomes particularly relevant because utopian class reductionists like to try to throw monkey-wrenches into liberation discourse by asking inane questions like:

“How are you going to give all the land back to indigenous people? What, do you want to kick all the white people out of the USA?”

“You can’t completely abolish whiteness, that will never happen, it’s an unrealistic goal!”

“It will take decades to fully liberate LGBTQ+ people, we don’t have that long! We have to end capitalism now!”

These kinds of idealist distractions, which focus on hypothetical “end states” instead of the current material conditions, ongoing struggles, and the existing dialectical relations between capitalism and other forms of oppression, distract from the real material conditions. Skipping ahead to matters of the end game forces oppressed people to engage in drawn-out hypothetical discourse about how we might completely eradicate this or that form of oppression instead of focusing on what can be done right now to weaken these secondary contradictions and, by extension, capitalism. We are expected to drop everything and focus on answers to hypothetical questions we can’t possibly know because the material conditions just haven’t developed enough for us to have any basis for discussing end game strategy.

So, clearly distinguishing between good and bad means focusing on what can be done in the here and now to alleviate the suffering and weaken the oppression of all human beings from all forms of oppression. Fixating on irrelevant and distant hypotheticals and couching oppressed people as mere distractions is, therefore, clearly, bad. Focusing on concrete steps which can be taken in the real world, right here, right now, to alleviate the suffering of the people is good.

Now, let’s move on to Ho Chi Minh’s next characteristic of revolutionary morality:

• Maintaining political standpoint.

A common criticism which utopian class reductionists throw around is that we are “not being Marxist” in seeking to negate secondary contradictions within the working class. As I’ve already shown, Marx was very aware that the working class is not yet united, and knew that before the capitalist class could be overthrown, it was vital that we negate secondary contradictions which keep the working class divided.

In Vietnamese dialectical materialism, the standpoint (or viewpoint) is the starting point of analysis which determines the direction of thinking from which phenomena and problems are considered. Scientific Socialism, the methodological philosophy developed by Marx and Engels, is a series of socio-political-economic theories intended to build socialism based on a foundation of science as well as society’s material conditions.

While it’s absolutely true that economic class antagonisms have developed under capitalism into two, and only two classes — the bourgeoisie and the proletariat — it’s also undeniable that the working class, itself, does not exist in monistic unity. It is not a single, invisible entity-in-its-own-right.

This is obvious for many reasons, but most essentially, because nothing in our reality exists as a monolith in monistic unity. Dialectical materialism upholds that every thing, phenomenon, and idea in our universe exists as a collection of internal and external relations. The working class, therefore, exists as an assemblage of internal and external relations. We are defined by our external relation with the capitalist class, yes, but we are also defined by the internal relations between the real human beings which make up the working class, including all the contradictions of bias, prejudice, social tension, false consciousness, etc.

Maintaining our political standpoint means not straying into utopianism, idealism, metaphysical monism, and other standpoints which contradict the core tenets of scientific socialism.

• Being pious to the people.

The word “pious” here is not a great translation. The word Ho Chi Minh used in the traditional Vietnamese is “hiêú thảo,” which has a traditional meaning of filial piety (treating your parents with unconditional love). Ho Chi Minh coopted this term, which has strong cultural connotations in Vietnamese society, to define the relationship which the revolutionary must have with the global proletariat. We must give the people our unconditional love, our utmost respect, our willingness to sacrifice and struggle for their wellbeing, protection, and liberation.

One aspect of what we can perhaps refer to as “proletarian piety” is listening to the people and being receptive to their suffering. One of the key points of victory which enabled the Communist Party of Vietnam to win over the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese was, simply, listening to them: understanding their struggles, and working to address their suffering directly.

When the people were starving under Japanese fascist-colonial rule, the Communist Party broke into the imperial storehouses and distributed food to the people. In order to earn the trust and comradery of ethnic minorities, Ho Chi Minh went and lived among them for extended periods of time to learn their struggles and worked to alleviate their suffering. Ho Chi Minh also identified the ways in which the South Vietnam puppet government was using fascistic “family values,” similar to those espoused by the Third Reich, to subjugate women, divide the working class, and build a sort of fascist Utopian moralism similar to what Michael Parenti describes in Black Shirts and Reds:

“Fascist doctrine stresses monistic values: one people, one rule, one leader. The people are no longer to be concerned with class divisions but must see themselves as part of a harmonious whole, rich and poor as one, a view that supports the economic status quo by cloaking the ongoing system of class oppression. . . Fascism’s national chauvinism, racism, sexism, and patriarchal values also served a conservative class interest. . . Patriarchal ideology was linked to a conservative class ideology that saw all forms of social equality as a threat to hierarchical control and privilege. The patriarchy buttressed the plutocracy: If women get out of line, what will happen to the family? And if the family goes, the entire social structure is threatened. What then will happen to the state and to the dominant class’s authority, privileges, and wealth? The fascists were big on what today is called ‘family values.’”

The fascist regime of the South Vietnam puppet government, and the fascist dictator Ngo Dinh Diem, emerged from reactionary elements of bourgeois Vietnamese society which merged the cultural conservativism of Confucianism and Catholicism with the brutality of fascism to preserve capitalist class relations. This ideology lined up nicely with the goals and political standpoint of Ngo’s handlers in the USA, which is why they undemocratically placed him in power to begin with, in 1954, shortly after the Geneva Agreement which officially divided the North and the South on the 17th parallel.

Ho Chi Minh wrote and worked extensively to negate these contradictions because he knew that patriarchy and the oppression of women only sought to keep the working class weakened and divided. He wrote countless articles about the liberation of women and helped build dual power structures like our Vietnam Women’s Union (which is an important and powerful structure in Vietnamese society to this day).

Uncle Ho didn’t do any of these things, like struggling for women’s liberation and living among ethnic minorities to understand their struggles, for the sake of “optics” like liberal idpol ideologists, but out of his piety for the people. He knew that listening to the concerns of the people was the only way to find a path forward, to know their material conditions intimately, to seek out the contradictions which divide the working class so as to find the best ways of negating them. But, this wasn’t just cold and cynical strategic calculus. He didn’t view women and other marginalized people as means to an end of communist revolution. He truly cared about the suffering of the people. Ho Chi Minh wanted to liberate all of humanity from all forms of oppression, and his love of the people would not allow him to stand for anything which caused misery and suffering, if he could help it.

Ho Chi Minh came to this worldview through his own experiences as a young, poor, itinerant worker during his travels around the world. He became politically active while living in Paris, and initially his primary concern was the liberation of his own people back home in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh attended various political meetings and found that only one group — the communists — would listen to his concerns about his homeland.

As he wrote in The Path Which Led Me to Leninism:

“The reason for my joining the French Socialist Party was that these ‘ladies and gentlemen’— as I called my comrades at that moment — has shown their sympathy towards me, towards the struggle of the oppressed peoples. But I understood neither what was a party, a trade-union, nor what was socialism nor communism.”

Here, we see Ho Chi Minh as a naïve young revolutionist, unsure of what path he would take. He came around to communism not because of a deep theoretical understanding of the nature of class conflict, nor an abiding hatred of capitalism, but because the communists showed to him proletarian piety. They welcomed him, listened to him, and sympathized with his own immediate concerns about the racist and colonialist subjugation of Vietnamese people, and because the writings of Lenin expressed this same thread of proletarian piety.

Ho Chi Minh continued attending meetings of the French Socialist Party. The great topic of discussion at the time was whether the French Socialist Party should join the Second or the Third International, which held competing ideological positions on various issues.

Ho Chi Minh attended these discussions with one question on his mind:

“What I wanted most to know — and this precisely was not debated in the meetings — was: which International sides with the peoples of colonial countries?”

Eventually, Ho Chi Minh came to see that it was Lenin’s Third International which addressed his sole concern — which had nothing to do with capitalism — and it was through reading Lenin and learning about the Third International that Ho Chi Minh become a communist. Ho Chi Minh became convinced through these interactions and discoveries that communism was not only sympathetic to the cause of decolonization of Vietnam, but that communism would be the key to the decolonization of Vietnam.

As Ho Chi Minh wrote:

“At first, patriotism, not yet communism, led me to have confidence in Lenin, in the Third International. Step by step, along the struggle, by studying Marxism-Leninism parallel with participation in practical activities, I gradually came upon the fact that only socialism and communism can liberate the oppressed nations and the working people throughout the world from slavery.”

Can you imagine what would have happened if the French communists, rather than welcoming Ho Chi Minh, listening to and sympathizing with his concerns, and demonstrating that they had an interest in decolonization, they instead dismissed Ho Chi Minh as “non-Marxist” for being concerned with colonialism, dismissed his objections to the brutal subjugation of Vietnamese along racial lines “a distraction,” told him to “focus on the working class and stop worrying about all that idpol?”

I shudder to think. It would certainly, at least, have delayed the chain of events which lead to the liberation of my people and the beginnings of our great socialist project which we struggle to continue building today.

As Ho Chi Minh developed into a mature and well-read communist, his work began to focus on addressing the French workers directly to extoll upon them the nature of colonialism and how it hurt not just colonial subjects, but French workers as well. In various publications, Ho Chi Minh wrote passages like the following:

“Capitalism is a leech with one hose attached to the proletariat in the main country, and another to the proletariat in the colony. If one wants to kill the animal, one has to cut both trunks at the same time. If only one is cut off, the other one will continue to suck the blood of the proletariat. The animal will continue to live, and the severed proboscis will grow back. . .

“All oppressed friends in the main country: the bourgeoisie in your country has deceived you and used you as a tool to invade our country. Today, still using the same insidious policy, your country’s bourgeoisie intends to use us to suppress all your efforts for self-liberation. In the face of capitalism and imperialism, our interests are united. Remember Marx’ call: proletariats of all countries, unite! Colonial union!” — French Colonialism on Trial, by Ho Chi Minh.

Unfortunately, Ho Chi Minh made little headway with getting the French proletariat to materially fight on behalf of and collaborate with the colonial subjects of Vietnam and other French colonies. As Ho Chi Minh wrote, somewhat bitterly, in an article for Le Humanite in 1922 titled “The Indifference of the Proletariat in the Main Country Towards the Colonies:”

“In his theses on the question of the colonies, Lenin wrote: ‘the mission of the workers in the main country is to assist the liberation movements of the colonies.’ In order to do that, the workers in the main countries need to know exactly what the colonies are, and to know what happens in those colonies. They have to know that colonial subjects are more miserable, a thousand times more miserable, than workers in the main country. They have to know what suffering their brother and sister proletarian workers in the colonies are bearing. In short, workers in the main country have to care about all the problems in the colonies. But sadly, the vast majority of the proletariat (in the main country) still think that colonies are just a sandy land with hot sun and some green coconuts and some people with different skin color, and they quite simply do not care about us.”

Ho Chi Minh never stopped appealing to the French workers, and the French soldiers and mercenaries working for the French who supported our revolutionary struggle deserve much praise and reverence. But they were, unfortunately, vanishingly few and far between.

There are many other examples of communists recognizing that uniting the working class is a process of negating internal contradictions. Lenin saw secondary contradictions such as the peasant/industrial worker divide as chief concerns, and worked tirelessly to find ways of negating this massive internal contradiction to build a united proletariat in Russia.

And it’s not just Marxist-Leninists who recognize the divisive nature of secondary contradictions and the harm they do to the working class. Anarchists like Nestor Makhno were intensely opposed to anti-semitism.

As Makhno wrote in 1927:

“All of the Jewish toilers of the Ukraine, as well as all other Ukrainian toilers are well aware that the movement of which I was for years the leader was a genuine revolutionary workers’ movement. At no time did that movement seek to divide the practical organization of the deceived, exploited and oppressed toilers on grounds of race. Quite the opposite: it aimed to unite them into a mighty revolutionary union capable of taking action against their oppressors, especially against the Denikinists who were dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semites. At no time did the movement make it its business to carry out pogroms against Jews nor did it ever encourage any. What is more, the vanguard of the Ukraine’s (Makhnovist) revolutionary movement contained many Jewish toilers. The Gulyai-Polye infantry regiment for instance had one company made up exclusively of two hundred Jewish toilers. There was also a four-piece artillery battery, the gunners and defense unit of which were all Jews, commander included. And there were lots of Jewish toilers in the Makhnovist movement who, for personal reasons, preferred to blend in with mixed revolutionary fighting units. . .

“All such Jewish insurgent toilers were under my command for a long period, not for days or months, but rather for entire years. All were witnesses to the manner in which I, the Staff and the entire army conducted ourselves with regard to anti-Semitism and the pogroms that arose from it.

“Every attempted pogrom or looting from our side was nipped in the bud. All found guilty of such acts were invariably shot out of hand for their misdeeds. This was the case for instance in May 1919, when some peasant insurgents from Novo-Uspenovka, on leaving the front line for some rest in the rear, came upon two decomposed corpses near a Jewish settlement: assuming these to be the corpses of insurgents murdered by members of the Jewish colony, they vented their spleen on the colony and slaughtered around thirty of its inhabitants. That same day, my Staff dispatched a commission of inquiry to the colony. It discovered the tracks of the perpetrators of the butchery. I immediately sent a special detachment to their village to place them under arrest. Those responsible for the attack on the Jewish colony, namely six individuals, one of them the Bolshevik district commissar, were all shot on 13 May 1919.”

So, it doesn’t matter what your political tendency might happen to be — if you want to unite the working class, you must recognize that internal contradictions must be negated. Indeed, the process of uniting the working class is, itself the process of negating internal contradictions which divide the working class.

We simply can’t negate such internal contradictions by ignoring them. Secondary contradictions will manifest differently in different places, and develop over time, but as long as they fester, the working class can’t be united.

Thus, contradictions like racism and colonialism aren’t distractions, they’re the internal social relations which define the working class in its current stage of development.

Objection 2: “How are you going to dismantle racism/achieve land back/liberate women/etc.? It’s just a vague ideal, what are the concrete steps!”

This is a misunderstanding of dialectical processes. It’s like asking “how do you build communism?” It’s a question that can’t be answered with any universal prescription.

All forms of oppression have dialectical continuity. It is true, as class reductionist utopians like to say, that “class is not an identity.” Class is an economic relation that represents what Marx would term the “base” of society.

Many other forms of oppression, such as sexism, transphobia, etc., relate more to the “superstructure,” but that doesn’t mean they exist in metaphysical isolation from the economic base. Marx knew that the base and superstructure of society have a strong dialectical relationship with each other: the base defines the superstructure, but the superstructure impacts the base.

It is clearly evident that capitalism defines the ways in which racism and sexism and other forms of identity-oppression manifest within capitalist societies, but it’s also quite clear that these forms of identity-oppression also impact capitalism itself.

Capitalism in the USA has been intertwined, since the very beginning, with racism, indigenous genocide and settler-colonialism, patriarchy, and various other forms of oppression which both reinforce and are reinforced by capitalism.

To claim that any form of social relation that exists internally within the working class is somehow hermetically separated from the working class itself runs counter to the very basis of scientific socialism. The working class is defined by external and internal relations, including internal contradictions.

Class is not an identity, but the identities of the working class constitute social relations which compose the working class. To attempt to surgically resect race, gender, disability, and other components of the identities of the real human beings who are the real working class in our material reality is a metaphysical act of utopian, non-dialectical metaphysics of the highest order. It is the rejection of reality for an ideal fantasy world in which a working class exists with neither internal relations nor component contradictions.

Take whiteness, for example. Whiteness developed dialectically with colonialism and capitalism. The two social formations didn’t sprout up independently. They arose and grew and strengthened through MUTUAL IMPACT. This has been fastidiously documented in books like Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern by J. Sekai and The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter and was also documented thoroughly by W. E. B. Du Bois in his seminal work Black Reconstruction, which documents the origins of capitalism and chattel slavery alongside each other in the foundation of the USA.

And of course, the dialectical relationship between race and capitalism continues to exist in the USA and around the world today. This relationship has developed and quality-shifted throughout modern history, yet the relationship continues. Whiteness reinforces capitalism just as capitalism reinforces whiteness. They feed and strengthen and mutually develop one another.

Dismantling capitalism and racism will be a similar dialectical process. Attacking one will weaken the other.

So if someone asks “how will you dismantle whiteness?” a big part of the answer is: “by weakening capitalism,” just as weakening whiteness will be key to dismantling capitalism. These social forces aren’t mutually exclusive. They are deeply, dialectically, intertwined.

Objection 3: “Ok but how do we concretely negate these dialectically-related contradictions?”

The answer to that question will vary wildly from one time/place to another. This is why you as a revolutionist must learn how to think and act.

A woman in Vietnam can’t tell you what to do where you live. I can only remind you of what Ho Chi Minh suggested: to have proletarian piety, to connect with the people, to maintain a political standpoint, and to struggle for the liberation of all of humanity from all forms of oppression.

Marx and Engels were never prescriptivists. They never offered rote formulas and precise instructions for how to carry out revolution, what revolution must look like, nor how a post-revolutionist society will definitely exist.

As the 1872 preface to the Manifesto states:

“The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been antiquated.”

This shows that Marx and Engels realized that the material conditions of the working class develop over time, and thus the nature of the working class develops over time, since we are dialectically linked to our material conditions. The fundamental contradiction of class remains relatively stable as long as capitalism is the mode of production of human society, but the role of the bourgeoisie and the role of the proletariat shift and develop over time.

In the manifesto itself, Marx writes:

“From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. . . We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.”

This process of development has never stopped. The bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and the relationship between the two have developed in countless ways throughout Marx’s and Engels’ lives (why else would they have written in 1872 that certain aspects of the Communist Manifesto were “obsolete?”), and they have continued to develop since their deaths. We, the living socialists of today, must identify and understand these developments if we are to have any hope of dismantling the bourgeoisie we face today in its current stage of development.

In order to do this, you have to learn to examine the material conditions where you are. Know where you are, know where you want to go, then figure out how to get there through practice.

But you must always keep in mind that conditions constantly develop. Capitalism is a process in motion. As you go through the dialectical process of action and observation, practice and theory, you must remember to stop and reassess your own assumptions and positions constantly, lest you find yourself irrelevant and adrift and detached from your fellow workers, mired in material conditions which you do not understand nor even recognize.

Whiteness and capitalism today is slightly different from what it will look like tomorrow. Practice and observation and systematic thinking are vital, here. This is why we say “listen to the oppressed.” You need to understand the dialectical processes of oppression. You must practice proletarian piety.

If you listen to trans people, indigenous people, disabled people, black people, and other marginalized groups which compose the working class, then you will better understand the mutual impacts which all these groups have with one another and with capitalism.

Helping the marginalized helps the entire working class. A real victory for trans people, for instance, is a blow against capitalism.

I say real victory because both liberals and fascists love to recuperate and weaponize these struggles to further their own ends. “More black female prison guards” at bourgeois state institutions, for example, is not a victory for black women. It’s a victory for the bourgeois state.

The bourgeoisie, through their liberal and fascist agents, will always seek to recuperate revolutionary ideas which challenge capitalism. This is the nature of our struggle. Even socialism itself has been the subject of attempted recuperation by literal BILLIONAIRES, as this article in National Review clearly shows:

A Billionaire Explains Why We Need Socialism | National Review

Recuperation can only be fought by supporting marginalized people in their struggles to alleviate the various forms of oppression which they face in capitalist society. Imagining that we can simply will these secondary contradictions away through having the proper mindset is idealist utopianism. It is, again, a form of utopian monism that imagines the working class as something it is not; by imagining that we can overcome objective social contradictions simply by pretending that they don’t exist.

Let us turn, now, to a case study: the rabid objection many utopian class reductionists have to the concept of “Land Back,” or indigenous liberation.

A Dialectical Materialist Analysis of Land Back

I have seen countless self-described communists display a spectrum of misunderstanding ranging from honest ignorance to aggressively reactionary bigotry and chauvinism pertaining to the philosophy of Land Back, which is rooted in addressing the systemic effects which land theft and genocide have had on indigenous peoples around the world.

Some people seem to have objections to the term “Land Back” itself, calling it a “bourgeois construction” which seeks to “restore private land ownership” to indigenous peoples. This is a gross misunderstanding of indigenous conceptions of the relationships between humans and land, so let me give you a brief overview of indigenous land philosophy.

First, let us recognize that the indigenous peoples of the world are NOT a monolith. I can’t speak for all indigenous people, nor could any indigenous individual. Land philosophy manifests in different ways for different indigenous people. This relates to the Dialectical Materialist concept which in Vietnamese socialism we call “private and common.”

Just like with communism, Land Back manifests in different ways for individual indigenous peoples (private aspects, to use the dialectical materialist terminology of Vietnamese socialism), but there are also commonalities which exist across most indigenous movements.

As Hawaiian native SilverSpook explains, Hawaiians have a concept of “‘aina” which conceives of the land as the mother:

SilverSpook explains that “‘aina” means balanced ecology of Mother Earth with “the thriving of the people:”

Native Hawaiians are hardly the only indigenous peoples to have this kind of philosophy of common land ownership.

As Julian Brave NoiseCat writes:

“Ingrained in each Salish community then is the idea — even older than our indigenous languages — that the people are of the land and the land is of the people. These kindred spirits are alive and inseparable.”

Admittedly, NoiseCat is not a Marxist. Marx, Lenin, and Mao are dismissed by NoiseCat as “no longer offer(ing) a scythe sharp enough to fell the stalks of capitalism.” On this point, we might differ, but NoiseCat’s philosophical description of indigenous conceptions of land line up with the conversations I’ve had with indigenous comrades from all around the world. We don’t need to agree about everything to agree that the communists were neither the first nor the only people in history to conceive of a world in which land and means of production are held in common.

In this incredible video by TwinRabbit, we are told the story of how indigenous philosophy served as the very foundation for many of the ideas of Marx, Engels, and various other founders of the various socialist philosophies of the West, and even of the bourgeois liberal democracy of the USA.

To erase the history of indigenous people as progenitors of many of the philosophical concepts which formed Western socialism, including common ownership, and by erasing the anti-capitalist struggles of indigenous people who live and breathe today, you’re helping the bourgeoisie recuperate these movements and hindering the negation of this internal contradiction which has plagued the working class since the foundations of capitalism.

Now, let’s introduce some basics about Land Back from a scientific socialist, dialectical materialist perspective. I should note that most indigenous people are not dialectical materialists, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use dialectical materialism as a frame for studying Land Back.

As a brief reminder, dialectical materialism views all of reality as processes in motion which are composed of internal and external relations. Everything is always developing. Therefore, just as Land Back exists differently for different people in different places, it also changes over time.

You can think of Land Back as a revolutionary philosophy of indigenous liberation centered around one core idea:

That the brutal theft of land from indigenous people has caused an incredible amount of harm to indigenous people: harm which indigenous people seek to undo systemically.

The 3 general goals of Land Back are:

1. Sovereignty: Self-determination and autonomy and an end to all colonialist oppression.
2. Land rights: Restoration of land, which was stolen, so indigenous people can restore our cultures, economic standing, and ways of life. (“How much land? Do they wanna kick everyone out?!” I’ll answer this later.)
3. Ecology: The protection of the land and the end of destructive practices which are irrevocably harming our planetary ecosystem. This is the highest priority for almost every indigenous person I’ve ever talked to, including myself.

Now, I have seen a lot of communists point to Land Back as “vague” and “idealist” because “they don’t say exactly what Land Back means! How much land do they want back?! What are their end goals?! What do they want?!”

Remember that communism has also been accused of being vague idealism because Marx and Engels didn’t give specific formulas for how to build communism and what a stateless society will look like.

Again, remember that preface from the Communist Manifesto:

“The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing.”

This lack of prescriptiveness and universal instructions on how to build communism and speculation about hypothetical communist societies of the future is very much by design. As Engels explains in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

“Hence, from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England. Hence, a mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of opinion: a mish-mash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of different sects, as excite a minimum of opposition; a mish-mash which is the more easily brewed the more definite sharp edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook.

“To make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis.”

This is a scathing attack against idealist utopian socialism. The “real basis” Engels refers to constitute the material conditions which vary from one time and place to another. So just as the steps needed to build towards communism will be different from one locality to another and will change over time, Land Back and its immediate agenda will vary from one locality to another and will change over time.

Land Back, like all things, will develop in stages. In some places (like in my home country of Vietnam) it has developed more fully. In most places there is a very long way to go. In all cases, speculating on the end stages right now would constitute the idle hypothesizing of fruitless utopianism.

Most indigenous people are focused on immediate problems and emergencies, which are plentiful in colonized societies. This is the proper dialectical materialist methodology: focus on immediate material conditions and contradictions. Yet settler “socialists” paint our immediate material concerns as “vague.”

To push back against these accusations of “vagueness,” let me now discuss Land Back concretely, from my own indigenous experience. So, here is a Land Back viewpoint analysis of Vietnam using dialectical materialist analysis.

Land Back in Vietnam

Though I can’t speak for other indigenous peoples, I can speak from the viewpoint of my own culture and my own nation, which has successfully enacted two important stages of our own (private) Land Back project in two ways: first, by wrenching our nation back from French, Japanese, and USA colonizers, and second, by taking it from our internal landed aristocracy.

On a personal note, one of my grandfathers was a member of this landed aristocracy who had his land seized from him and distributed to the poor peasants of my home village. My other grandfather was one of those poor peasants, who died fighting the USA invaders during the Tet Offensive in 1968. So I have a deep familiarity with the internal contradiction of land relations that existed with my people during this period of socialist struggle.

Today, everyone in my village is given a piece of land for free from the government at birth. Even though my wealthy aristocratic grandfather had his vast lands seized, he was given back a piece of land commensurate with the rest of the village. When I was born, I was granted a 500 square meter rice farm in my home village for free, which I am entitled to all my life.

This represents a massive development in relations between the people and the land in my village, but it isn’t the end of development. Our Land Back movement isn’t yet complete in four major ways:

1. Because we are a socialist nation making the long and arduous transition towards communism, we still have private ownership of land by capitalists and landlords. Our stated end goal is collective ownership of all land. We are dialectically moving towards that goal. In addition to the land redistribution I have already described, it’s also true that corporations and foreign investors can’t own land, they can only lease it from the state. 90% of Vietnamese people own their homes. We are making progress. But we have a long way to go. That said, we have developed significantly from the brutal colonial domination of land enacted by French, Japanese, and USA colonial projects.

2. Our sovereignty is still threatened by imperialism. This should be obvious to all communists. The USA and other nations try to bully, sabotage, and manipulate our sovereignty and exploit us at every turn. They want their colony back. We must resist such restoration of colonialism at all costs.

3. There is still disparity between different communities of Vietnamese people. Disparities for ethnic minorities, and even for some groups of Kinh people (our ethnic majority) who choose to live traditional ways of life like in fishing villages and isolated mountain towns and craft villages. Again, we are making rapid progress but have a long way to go. We now have a higher percentage of ethnic minorities in our national assembly than in the general population, and utilities and services are being extended everywhere very quickly. Wealth disparity is diminishing. But until such disparity is fully dealt with and all Vietnamese enjoy full equality (i.e., the stateless, classless society we seek to build through communism), our Land Back project shall remain an incomplete work in progress.

4. Ecology: This is where we have the longest way to go and the most commonality with all other people on earth. Obviously the entire planet’s ecology is in danger now due to climate change. Vietnam certainly contributes to climate change. Once again, our society is invested in working on this, we have made progress, and we have concrete goals, but obviously this needs to be an immediate concern for the Vietnamese people from a Land Back perspective, and we need to act quickly before time runs out.

Ok, so that’s an overview of Land Back in Vietnam. Based on this, I hope that you can now come to understand, in dialectical materialist terms, the struggles of indigenous people in your local area and how they dialectically interact with your own struggles against capitalism.

What Land Back Should Mean to You

If you are worried that Land Back means that indigenous people will “kick you out” and you’ll become homeless, or any other such nonsense, I would caution you against absurd idealist alarmism. Indigenous victims of colonization do not even have the power to do this almost anywhere in the world, and we don’t want to treat settlers the way you treated us. We simply want self-determination, which is a fundamental principle of Marxism, Leninism, Anarchism, and pretty much every other strain of socialism which exists in the West. If you are in favor of self-determination for the settler proletariat but not for indigenous people, I would ask you to interrogate this aspect of your ideology deeply.

Indigenous people are focused on our immediate problems and alleviating our own suffering, not kicking you out of your landlord’s house. Connect with local indigenous people in your area and ask them what problems they face. As a settler, it’s 100% on you to investigate and understand, then work towards, Land Back. Just talk to us — we are human beings, after all— and you’ll get a much better picture of our conditions, needs, and goals.

How to Engage in Land Back Struggle

I will end with some brief advice for how to participate in indigenous liberation and Land Back struggle. These guidelines can be extrapolated for any other form of social liberation (the liberation of trans people, disabled people, etc.), as all such struggles are rooted in the revolutionary moral principle that all human beings deserve liberation from all forms of oppression.

Step one would be to identify whose land you currently occupy (this website has a great global map). Just acknowledging that you occupy stolen land and knowing who it was stolen from will ground you and give you a starting point for further investigation. Come to learn more about the human beings whose genocide you personally benefit from (even if indirectly). It’s very possible those people now live very far away or have even been completely wiped out, but if they are still out there somewhere, it would be good to see what struggles they face and support them however you can — financially, by volunteering, even just by signal boosting to your fellow settlers on social media.

Identify other indigenous folks in your area and indigenous rights groups. Some indigenous rights groups are more radical, others are liberal or even completely recuperated by the bourgeoisie. It can get complicated and it’s not really my place to make decisions or offer opinions about specific groups— just listen to various indigenous folks and try to get a feel for the different agendas and orgs that exist out there.

If you possibly can, find a local group you can support at demonstrations, by volunteering, etc. If you can’t find anyone you can support locally, then look for opportunities to work online or consider traveling to demonstrations in other regions if you can. Read a lot of, and a wide variety of, indigenous literature, history, and tactical manuals. This site has some interesting resources to get started:

Materials - DTP

Follow indigenous people on YouTube and Twitter. Expect that it will take a good bit of effort to get familiar with all the different struggles and perspectives. Most importantly, don’t center yourself or try to be the “main character” through any of this. Practice proletarian piety. Be bold in confronting your fellow colonizers but also listen to feedback from indigenous people without taking it personally if they offer critiques. Self-criticism is a vital aspect of our socialist philosophy, after all.

Again, all of this advice can be applied to other forms of liberation struggle. You should also participate in the liberation of disabled people, of black people, of trans people, of all people suffer from forms of oppression which dialectically reinforce and are reinforced by capitalism. This will weaken capitalism by weakening the secondary contradictions which divide the working class.

All humans deserve liberation from all forms of oppression. The working class can only be united through the negation of secondary contradictions. Nobody will be free until everyone is free.

I will close with one last quote from Ho Chi Minh:

“Like a river must have water sources and a tree must have roots, revolutionary people must be truly imbued with revolutionary morals. If they are not, they cannot lead the people.”

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