Jared Houston analyzes Marxist theories of class consciousness and puts them in dialogue with the realities of settler colonialism, arguing that in order to “become proletarian” in such a context requires a revolutionary decolonial alliance with Indigenous peoples.

Kathe Kollwitz, Prisoners (1902-08)

Introduction

A surge in working-class militancy, unionism, and openness among workers to the history and future of revolutionary socialism suggests the importance of revisiting and refining Marxist theories of class consciousness. Meanwhile, reflection on the history and reality of settler colonialism has been prompted by a surge of genocidal violence by the state of Israel. As a relatively new settler state, Israel differs not in kind, but only in duration and maturity, from the “old” settler states (like Canada, Australia and the United States) that are supplying and supporting the genocide against Palestinians.

What follows is a critical investigation by a worker-theorist into Marxist theories of class consciousness and their relation to settler colonialism and decolonization. Elements of an adequately dialectical theory of class consciousness are assembled from various contributions in the history of revolutionary socialism: Marx and Engels, Lenin, and Mészáros. A distinction of analytical and political significance is proposed between “workers” and “proletariat” designating the latter as a collective revolutionary aspiration of class consciousness, suggesting that “Becoming Proletariat” could be a powerful mobilizing slogan for our time. Finally, it is argued that if we are to “become proletariat,” doing so on historically stolen land requires a revolutionary decolonial alliance with Indigenous peoples that makes the abolition of the settler state and a new treaty to share the land central elements of a communist political programme.

I. Class Consciousness

Capitalism must be abolished by proletarians as an act of self-emancipation. A commitment to this form of the abolition of capitalism follows from a Marxist understanding of what capitalism is. Specifically, an understanding that capitalist relations of production cleave apart the management and performance of labour,¹ relegating workers strictly to the latter, making the skills of organization and leadership in production appear exclusive to the bourgeoisie. Over time this imposed cleavage stabilizes into what “work” intuitively is, making the proletariat into “natural” dependents of a seemingly more dynamic, innovative, and intellectually superior bourgeoisie, who in their self-assured arrogance and materially secured dominance, claim not only economic but also political and ideological leadership over all society. For this reason, if the proletariat are rescued from capitalism rather than self-emancipated, capitalism will not be truly defeated and is likely to restore itself.²

Marxist theories of class consciousness explain how the proletariat, although structurally dominated by capital, develops collective identities, understandings, and practices that make the breaking of their own chains possible. A Marxist theory of class consciousness aims not only to be an accurate analysis, but also an effective strategic intervention that motivates and aids the proletariat in self-emancipation. Theories of class consciousness build self-understanding of the contingent and dynamic development of proletarian, self-emancipatory revolutionary agency against countervailing objective and subjective processes that aim to tighten and strengthen the chains of capitalist labour. Without labouring through the historical process that constitutes the development of class consciousness, including critical assessments of their failures, workers will either not confront capitalism, not commit to its defeat, or fail to enact that defeat.

Any theory of class consciousness should state up-front what the “full development” of proletarian class consciousness is taken to be. Herein, adequate Marxist theories of class consciousness are – in this first instance – those that analyze, motivate, and aid the fulfillment of the historic mission of proletarian self-emancipation as constitutive of the abolition of capitalism. In what follows, adequate theories of class consciousness are further said to be necessarily dialectical, the meaning of which is perhaps best drawn out by first reviewing some that are not so, before considering others that move closer to this goal. The next section assembles commitments, concepts, and contrasts that serve the analyses and proposals in sections II and III, where “Become Proletariat!” is suggested as a mobilizing slogan for our time, and decolonization a necessary commitment for our space.

Towards a Dialectical Theory of Class Consciousness

Inadequate theories of class consciousness focus on one of two processes as causally sufficient explanations for the full development of class consciousness: objective (a.k.a economic or structural) and subjective (a.k.a voluntaristic or agential).

In the first instance, purely objective theories of class consciousness claim that the spread of capitalist relations and/or forces of production are sufficient to produce revolutionary socialist understandings, identities, and practices in the working class. In Chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto, the ‘general phases of the development of the proletariat’ are historically sketched as to suggest they are reliably progressive forces in the development of class consciousness.³

The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.

Evidencing the enduring influence of this objective-progressive view, Ben Solidaridad has recently claimed that it continues to be the case that the organizational conditions imposed on the manufacturing sector under capitalism contribute positively and distinctly to class consciousness therein:⁴

…the mass, collective nature of the labor performed by industrial workers — particularly in such critical manufacturing sectors as auto, steel, meatpacking, etc. […] tends to endow industrial workers with a mass, collective proletarian consciousness that aligns with the socialist project.

On a purely objective theory of class consciousness, the objective forces of capitalist development at the point of production (the socialization of labor and the organizational impacts of highly mechanized production in the workplace) are paired with objective trends at larger economic scales (immiseration of the working-class, the emptying out of intermediary social classes, and the experience of regular economic and political crises) to produce positive progress in the development of proletarian class consciousness and socialist politics.

The well-known problem with such a purely objective and progressive theory of class consciousness is that it fails to adequately explain the varied ways in which the workers of the world have reacted to capitalist development and their subordination to it. From the historical evidence of a narrow period in Western Europe, it deduces too boldly a temporally universal and spatially uniform “law of development” of proletarian consciousness that takes there to be a direct, reliable, and positive correlation between class as structurally imposed by capital, and militant class organizations and socialist politics as allegedly reliable consequences thereof. But the construction of militant organizations of workers in “advanced” capitalist economies, united under a specifically socialist banner of resistance was one outcome of capitalist development, in a specific era, in Western Europe. The fact that in other times and places, such as our own, workers are not united under such a banner, shows that this view is incomplete. More attention needs to be paid to the particularities of the active agency of the working-class and the historical reactions of capital to the growth of revolutionary socialism.

Non-dialectical thinking can be diagnosed by its over-correction of one inadequacy for another. In this instance, a perceived over-emphasis on the material and structural circumstances imposed on workers by capital, and an allegedly reliable tendency toward socialist politics, is replaced with an exclusive focus on individuals under capitalism, their highly contingent psychologies and rationalities, and the impacts of powerful anti-proletarian forms of ideology and “false” consciousness. Purely subjective theories of class consciousness focus on individual beliefs, experiences, and identity formation in the context of highly developed capitalist ideologies and a popular political terrain said to be increasingly decoupled from class. Even when not directly concerned with developing a theory of class consciousness, the implications of subjective theories for it are clear. In attempting to correct for the narrowness of a perceived “economism” of purely objective theories, subjective theories end up displacing or rejecting the central role of the working-class in defeating capitalism,⁵ and become quiet or pessimistic on the possibility of proletarian self-emancipation. In this sense they are truly “post-Marxist”.

From these two false starts (purely objective and purely subjective theories), we can chart the path toward an adequately dialectical theory of class consciousness that details the conflictual and mutually transformative historical interaction between:

the current and relevant objective trends of the capitalist domination of labor and production, and the ideological interventions deployed to stabilize it,
worker self-activity and organization, and
the strategic interventions of revolutionary socialist practices and theories.

Fortunately, there is a ready historical example that approaches this theoretical goal: Leninism.

Leninist contributions to a dialectical theory of class consciousness

Leninism was born of the “Great Betrayal” wherein the ostensibly Marxist social democratic parties of early 20th century Europe betrayed anti-war commitments to side with their national bourgeoisie, coaching millions of workers to fight in the First World War to decide the imperial and colonial division of the world among European powers. A tectonic shift in Marxist understandings of class consciousness was caused by The Great Betrayal. Gone was the progressive optimism of the Manifesto that socialist consciousness would develop steadily alongside the development of capitalism and the attendant economic and political struggles of unions and parties. At the outbreak of WWI, what desperately needed to be explained was why European workers and labor organizations had decided to fight not against, but alongside their national bourgeoisie – against their own interests, and in lack of solidarity with foreign workers and colonized peoples.

Leninism therefore turned its theoretical attention not to capitalism’s inadvertent progressive influence on proletarian consciousness, but to the deliberate subversion thereof; on the corrupting obstacles causing stall or regress in consciousness.⁶ Backgrounding this analysis was a standing debate within Social Democracy on whether worker’s self-activity (2 above) could itself lead to revolutionary socialist consciousness, or whether this was mainly the task of the strategic interventions of revolutionary socialist organizations (3 above).⁷ Those holding the latter position, including Lenin, stressed that worker self-activity does not unfold in isolation, but is mired in bourgeois interventions that divert class consciousness away from revolutionary socialism. In the aftermath of the Great Betrayal, Lenin expanded on this position, stressing a number of obstacles to the development of class consciousness.⁸ Rather than a focus on bridging the gap between worker’s self-activity and socialist organizations, these new obstacles analyzed the corruptions of both revealed in the Great Betrayal. Reformism, revisionism, and opportunism became charges laid against organized “Marxists” who betrayed the revolutionary commitments thereof, instead seeking a gradual plan of conciliation toward the capitalist state. Workers were not only being misled by social democratic political leaders, but also by corrupt union leadership, the “labour aristocracy” who self-interestedly sought to become an upper strata of professional mediators between labour and capital. The material basis affording this corruption was imperialism (1 above), which had interrupted capitalism’s tendency toward immiseration by super-exploiting the labour and resources of oppressed nations and colonized peoples to fund the enrichment of the capitalist class and the bribery of the labor movements in the metropoles.⁹ Reformism, revisionism, opportunism, labor aristocracy, and imperial bribery; these concepts deepened the complexity of the theory of class consciousness from the progressive objectivity of the Manifesto by exploring how capitalism had not stood idly by as workers gathered under red banners. By expanding and diverting resources from its productive base, sharpening its own ideological interventions, and sponsoring those of reactionary and reformist class allies, capital deployed (or leveraged pre-existing) counter-processes to undermine, corrupt, co-opt, and divert the development of class consciousness. By analogy, any “gap” between worker and revolutionary anti-capitalist consciousness is not a quiet river over which a socialist bridge is built unopposed. The river runs through the frontline of a warzone, where bourgeois counter-processes that produce competing anti-proletarian class consciousness (i.e. petty-bourgeois, settler nationalist, racist, fascist, imperialist, etc.) wage a constant struggle against all revolutionary anti-capitalist tendencies. When these counter-processes historically prevail, the working-class tends to think and act in a non-socialist, and perhaps a profoundly anti-socialist manner.

To tip the scales of this battle, the revolutionary party (3 above) plays a central role in the Leninist theory of class consciousness. If all that Leninism offered was greater detail in the limitations and obstacles to class consciousness, it could easily descend into pessimism. Avoiding this, the Party is centred as the only organization that can rival the strength of the capitalist class’ offensive, detecting and combating its corruption of class consciousness, restoring progress in its development. For Lenin, only the Party has the combination of Marxist theorists and dedicated disciplined revolutionaries that can accurately survey capitalism’s objective maneuvers and subjective interventions, develop strategies to repel or oppose them, and internally guard against the corruption of the Party itself.

In their revisitation of the Leninist theory of class consciousness, Raju J. Das highlights a final and critically important element of Marxist theories of class consciousness,¹⁰ put by Ernest Mandel as follows:¹¹

The Leninist theory of organisation therefore attempts to come to grips with the inner dialectic of this formation of political class consciousness, which can develop fully only during the revolution itself, yet only on the condition that it has already begun to develop before the revolution.

It is commonly thought that a proletarian revolution is the end result of the already full development of class consciousness. In contrast, the Leninist theory holds that the full development of a self-emancipatory revolutionary proletarian class consciousness can only occur in-and-through a revolution. Only a revolution initiates the destruction of capitalist relations of production, undermines its “naturalizing” ideologies, fractures the obstructions and counter-processes that impede the development of class consciousness, and makes possible their replacement with socialist relations of production and a proletarian culture. Marx referred to this revolutionary labor as overcoming the “muck of ages”:¹²

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 [sic], an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this 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.

A proletarian revolution demands and puts into practice the full depth and mass scale of proletarian self-emancipatory agency. All workers are called to fully realize their potential for collective self-rule. Only in and through a revolution can the corrupting influences of capitalist relations and ideology on class consciousness be fully revealed and removed on a societal scale, and a fully proletarian consciousness and practice replace capitalist production and bourgeois society. Revolutionary organization and action initiates, and a stable proletarian state secures, the full development of proletarian class consciousness.

Mészáros on the complex reciprocal determinants of class consciousness

Reflecting on the initial publication in English of Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, István Mészáros adds a number of significant insights to a dialectical model of class consciousness. Workers are said to have both contingent and necessary class consciousness. As the working class is “stratified and divided by sectional interests,”¹³ they develop a contingent class consciousness according to the sociological particularities of their subordination to capitalism in a specific country, region, industry, etc. This is class consciousness as it actually exists, often heavily influenced by capitalist ideology, and accordingly corrupted or diverted in development. Necessary class consciousness, in contrast, perceives beyond these particularities the proletarian class position as a “constitutive part of the irreconcilable structural antagonism of capitalist society.”¹⁴ It perceives all aspects and contradictions embedded in and expressed through that antagonism in their inter-relatedness, or reciprocal determination.¹⁵ These include the fundamental antagonisms of class society between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, further complicated by conflicts between opposing factions and strata in these groups, and the growth or decline of peripheral groups (e.g. petty bourgeoisie, peasantry). The fundamental antagonism also has two levels, one that “does not call into question the established structure of society,” and another in which the proletariat seeks not simply a better deal under class society, but to end that society entirely.

While Mészáros agrees that organizational intervention by revolutionary socialism is required to develop toward a grasp of necessary class consciousness, he stresses that this organizational work is a dialectical and non-homogeneous process that goes beyond the Party.¹⁶ Necessary class consciousness is achieved through the intervention and interaction of a variety of organizational forms. Its result is not (and has never been) a “‘homogeneous psychological bond’ … but the elaboration of strategically viable programmes of action embracing a multiplicity of specific social groups in whatever variety of organizational forms may be required.”¹⁷

Furthermore, Mészáros stresses the global character of the development of class consciousness, which must perceive the strategic necessity of confronting capitalism at its global scale. The preceding dialectical inter-relatedness between various organizations and antagonisms, and their strategic outlook, cannot be restricted to particular countries, regions, or sociological sub-categories of workers. This is not simply a call for internationalism (as a stance) or an International (as a historically particular global organizational form) but as the connecting up of, again, varied organizational forms on the global scale appropriate to our time and the current trends in capitalist development.

Through these strategic programmes of actions, proletarians that attain necessary class consciousness do have an important common aim, and that is a ‘viable historical alternative’ to capitalism.¹⁸ Mészáros stresses that the development of proletarian class consciousness includes not simply an entry into political struggle, but the need for the proletariat to develop as a “class-for-itself” by conquering political power.¹⁹ This reinforces the Leninist point made above, that it is only in-and-through revolutionary experience that the proletariat can fully develop class consciousness on a mass global scale.

Lenin, Das, and Mészáros provide a useful grounding for dialectical engagement with the problem of class consciousness. In the next section, a proposal will be made that “Becoming Proletariat” offers a powerful mobilizing slogan for our time. In the final section, “Becoming Proletariat” will then be related to settler colonialism as an enduring obstacle to proletarian class consciousness for workers on historically stolen land.

II. Becoming Proletariat

This section aims to make a contribution to a theory of class consciousness that centers the idea of the dialectical becoming of the proletariat in revolutionary history. Marxism aims to not only understand the world, but to change it. Marxist theory must attend, on equal terms, to accurate and timely analysis that also effectively mobilizes revolutionary action against capitalism.

Proletariat as revolutionary goal of becoming rather than oppressed state of being

Marxist social theory and political agitation often assumes a simple theoretical equivalence between the concepts of the working-class and the proletariat. The proposal defended herein separates these terms as to place special political, social, and cultural significance on the latter by stressing the revolutionary becoming of the proletariat as a class-for-itself. On this view, a critical task of the working-class in the struggle for self-emancipation from capitalism is to become proletariat. “Proletariat,” a term so central and important to Marxism, should be treated as a title of revolutionary honor, strived for and earned through the shared labor of realizing collective revolutionary aspirations, rather than as a passive description of our common exploitation as workers.

This proposal is rooted in an interpretation of the concept of the proletariat in Marxist theory that, without detachment from their economic being, emphasizes their political becoming. Starting at the sources, Marx and Engels did not “discover” the proletariat as a revolutionary anti-capitalist force in a politically disinterested and empiricist way. Rather, they began as committed anti-capitalists that at the same time rejected utopian socialism’s refusals to detail how capitalism could be defeated under the very conditions created by its ascendancy, by the very people it dominates. Marx and Engels sought out the proletariat in order to initiate the dialectical interaction between revolutionary socialism (3 above) and the working-class (2 above) that creates the class for-itself;²⁰ to convince the workers of a historic political mission and to equip them to achieve it.²¹ As Engels eulogized,²² Marx was not above all a historian or an economist who discovered the proletariat like Darwin discovered finches. Marx was above all a revolutionary. He sought the proletariat not to discover them in subordinate being, but to influence their revolutionary becoming. Furthermore, upon seeking them out, Marx and Engels found that the proletariat must undergo a long path of self-development before becoming capable of self-emancipation. In detailing the Conditions of the English Working Class, Engels initially noted with optimism the militancy of the industrial workers there. But over time, he also observed how these very same workers were becoming “bourgeoisified,” informing Lenin’s contributions regarding the anti-proletarian tendencies and corruptions in class consciousness that would become clear in the Great Betrayal.²³ As Erik Olin Wright has observed, there are two streams of class analysis in Marx, one found in the economic writings (e.g. Capital 1) and another in the political writings (e.g. The Eighteenth Brumaire).²⁴ The latter stresses the historical development of the proletariat through class struggle, not only in the realm of production, but through the entirety of class society and in relation to the full array of class forces Mészáros points out above.

From these roots, proposing “becoming proletariat” favors an interpretation of Marxism stressing the political development of the proletariat in-and-through class struggles. It captures the fact that any theory of class consciousness must take a long-term historical and revolutionary perspective that accommodates the distinction between the working-class’ actual state of consciousness, and the relatively advanced or full development of class consciousness. It does so by designating “working-class” as a description of the former and “proletariat” as a distinction of the latter. Furthermore, it accounts for what is readily apparent to many: much of the working-class is not socialist and some are actively anti-socialist. The latter would scoff at being called proletariat. It is a title they neither yearn for, nor have they earned, on this proposal. In common parlance, “proletariat” remains a politically charged term. Yet often modern Marxist class analysis and informal political agitation does not treat it as such. There, it suffers an undeservedly banal and obscure reduction, becoming a boringly technical and politically divorced descriptive synonym for “workers.” This conceptual misalignment with the political significance of the term in reality is also a waste of a historically powerful concept. While the term “proletariat” may have originally referred to the lowest strata of wage laborers, and later those specifically brought into being by industrial capitalism, the origins of a term should not decide the unfolding meaning or content of the concept.²⁵ Even less so do they decide how the concept is to be deployed by a theory that aims to change the world. Proposing “becoming proletariat” returns to and reinvigorates Marx’s use of “proletariat” not as a descriptive economic category, but as a politically mobilizing concept. In short, it is time to put “proletariat” back to work.

In so doing, the call to “become proletariat” still retains a material and structural bond between the proletariat and the working-class.²⁶The working-class forms the structural core of the proletariat such that most proletarians become so through their struggles as workers. One way of understanding this is through the relation between theories of class structure, class formation, and class consciousness. Capitalism imposes a particular economic structure onto workers (class structure) who react to the coerced dependence and exploitation of this structure through self-organized resistance in which varied, though common, interests, understandings, and practices emerge (class formation). But theories of class structure/formation do not yield theories of class consciousness. The former are primarily analytical attempts to accurately understand the structural and sociological contours of both capitalism and workers resistance in their varied forms. Theories of class consciousness, in contrast, are not just analytical but, crucially, strategic interventions that aim not only to understand but to change the direction and outcomes of class formation in a substantive political direction. In the proposal advanced here, it is only through the historical development of forms of workers’ struggle with specific characteristics (discussed below) that the proletariat become a powerful class formation dedicated to revolutionary anti-capitalism. “Becoming proletariat” as a contribution to Marxist theories of class consciousness affirms and retains major analytical elements of theories of class structure and formation, but explicitly declares its proletarian partisanship as a strategic intervention upon class formation.

A theory proposing our “becoming proletariat” must be grounded in critical reflection on the historical struggles of those who are widely thought to have earned this title of honor through past revolutionary actions. In detailing and debating the histories of those who inspire our collective revolutionary imaginations, insights are gained into the characteristics of the proletariat as a class-in-becoming.²⁷ Refinements are made to our self-understanding of “becoming proletariat” and, using the proposal above, it can be deployed as a slogan to mobilize revolutionary action against capitalism in our time, carrying forward the generational development of class consciousness. Below, three interwoven historical characteristics of the proletariat are proposed to shape this self-understanding and focus revolutionary aspiration: militancy, solidarity, and revolutionary ambition.

Becoming proletariat across generations of struggle: militancy, solidarity, and revolutionary ambition

Moments such as the founding and defense of the Paris Commune reveal clearly the first characteristic of those becoming proletariat: militancy. The proletariat fight back against capitalism and its class allies. They declare capitalism to be a common enemy, the struggle against which is “irreconcilable,” ending only in capitalism’s abolition. Since capitalism will not go quietly, proletarians understand that this struggle will often not be immediately beneficial to them. Rather, it will cost many gravely. Parisians learned this quickly after declaring the Commune in March 1871, to which the French ruling-class responded with murderous rage. Behind the barricades during the Bloody Week, tens of thousands of Communards historically solidified proletarian militancy as a defining class characteristic, fighting to the death in defense of what Marx called the world’s first “social republic.”

Militancy does not itself make the proletariat . It is of little worth if not accompanied by the second characteristic of the proletariat: solidarity. The proletariat has historically interrogated and broadened the constituency of the class-for-itself beyond typified industrial male wage labourers, to include women, dependents, the unemployed, foreign workers, outcasts,²⁸ and dissidents who share the stigma of destitution and the proletarian understanding of capitalism as a common enemy that must be abolished. Solidarity does not follow from militancy but requires its own effort, often advancing at a slower historical pace.²⁹ In Paris, women contributed to the struggle to run and defend the Commune, while having to endure political subordination therein.³⁰ The Commune accepted a delegation of colonists from French occupied Algeria, while failing to support a revolt against French colonialism by native Algerians.³¹

At the same time that it broadens and deepens its understanding of itself, the proletariat seeks alliances with non-proletarians to advance its struggle against capitalism.³² History has shown that the proletariat do not fight capitalism alone. Proletarian solidarity moves from concept to practice in the form of the revolutionary alliance. In 1917, the alliance that shook the world and led to the first socialist state in Russia was between the revolutionary proletariat and the revolting peasantry, who fought together against their common enemy of Tsarism to form a workers’ and peasants’ government. Today, the hammer crossed with the sickle is a familiar symbol of communism and Marxism-Leninism. But it must be remembered that in its inception, it was the symbol of a historically novel and theoretically unorthodox alliance of solidarity – in Russian, the smychka.³³ Lenin argued that such alliances must extend internationally to form a “coalition of the oppressed” alongside exploited and colonized peoples the world over.

Third and finally, proletarians exhibit revolutionary institutional ambition to build new democracies and new economies; to prove – as Mészáros puts it – that there can be a “historically viable alternative to capitalism,” and to prove that they can build it themselves. They fight for this goal in-and-through revolutionary organizations (i.e. unions, councils, parties) in which the skills of political and economic self-rule are developed through shared labor. In this fight, they face the insidious and ubiquitous lie that politics and economics are the expert domain of the naturally ‘talented’ bourgeoisie, rather than universally latent undeveloped skills that must be mastered by all in a society of collective self-emancipation. Mass-participatory proletarian democracies are not just a strategic end goal of proletarian self-emancipation, but the only institutions in which proletarians can fully develop and stabilize the latent skills of collective self-emancipation and self-governance. Both the Communards and Soviets acted on these ambitions, building the world’s first social and soviet republics, the institutional innovations of which continue to be documented and debated.

Since workers become proletariat through revolutionary political action against capitalism and the state, we become proletariat together or not at all. Proletarian class consciousness is not achieved through the refinement of individualized anti-capitalist belief-sets or counter-cultural practices, disconnected from revolutionary organization and action. Since only the latter can threaten capitalism and fully develop the skills of collective self-emancipation, proletarian institutional ambitions must include the (re)construction of the fighting organizations of a class-for-itself – as Mészáros puts it – in whatever form appropriate to our time, networked regionally and coordinated globally.

Militancy, solidarity, and institutional ambition are not independent aspects of becoming proletarian, but are necessarily intertwined. Stressing one to the neglect of others leads us – at least – away from becoming proletariat, and at worst, into the traps laid by capitalism. Militant unionism that lacks solidarity with “unskilled” or immigrant labour, divides and weakens the trade union struggle, often concentrating the poisons of racism and nationalism. While workers practicing both militancy and solidarity might get a better deal under capitalism, proletarians know that in the long-run, capitalism cannot be negotiated with. And so they build revolutionary alliances that declare capitalism as a common enemy that must be abolished and replaced with new democracies and new economies. Only when militancy, solidarity, and ambition are intertwined does the working-class become the formidable enemy to capitalism that earns the title proletariat.

The historical examples above do not reveal a “homogenous psychological bond” among workers becoming proletariat. The communards of Paris included significant numbers of republicans. Russian revolutionaries included anarchists, syndicalists and “left socialist revolutionaries”. Marxism must admit that not all proletarians are socialists or communists in any acute doctrinal sense.³⁴ Non-Marxist anti-capitalisms such as anarchism and syndicalism remain important revolutionary traditions today. Sharing the same prospects to develop the intertwined militancy, solidarity, and institutional ambition constitutive of becoming proletariat, they are here considered welcome participants in the development of proletarian class consciousness. This does not mean that Marxists should not engage in comradely argument against (certain aspects of) these tendencies and/or organize separately from them. It does mean that the growth of anarchism and syndicalism among workers should not be viewed as objectionable to Marxists, inasmuch as they contribute to the positive development of militancy, solidarity, and ambition among the working-class, and so advance our becoming proletariat together.

III. Becoming Proletariat on Stolen Land

Section I argued that dialectical theories of class consciousness must account for the existence of powerful anti-proletarian counter-processes (e.g. racism, imperialism) that obstruct the development of proletarian class consciousness. Section II argued that part of becoming proletariat, as collective revolutionary aspiration, is forging revolutionary alliances of solidarity with those who share a common enemy in capitalism. This final section applies these claims in the context of workers living in settler colonial states (like Canada, United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel) where settler colonialism presents a formidable and still underestimated obstacle to becoming proletariat. It is argued that we can either be settlers, or we can be proletariat, we cannot be both. To become proletariat on historically stolen land, we must end the settler capitalist state and reject any inheritance of settler territorial land claims. Proletarian institutional ambitions must include not only a new democracy and a new economy, but a new treaty that rejects settler territorial land claims and allows workers on historically stolen land to become proletariat through revolutionary decolonization.³⁵

Settler colonialism as historical-material obstacle to becoming proletariat

We are settlers not because of the fact that we occupy these lands and use resources on them to survive, but because we are citizens of a settler capitalist state. As comrade Nodrada has argued:³⁶

A settler is one who is outside of [Indigenous] 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. 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 practice, one has the full rights of belonging to the settler-colonial nation, and is recognized as such in ideology.

The settler state manages settler relations to stolen land as private property, to Indigenous peoples as colonized, and to suppressed Indigenous sovereignties. In replacement and erasure of Indigenous ways of life, it invites, empowers, enforces, and sustains settler identity. The “good settlers” it cultivates on stolen land have shown their characteristics in history. They are loyal to the settler state, not militant against it. They internalize the poisons of racism, nationalism, and imperialism rather than rejecting them for the antidotes of racial and international solidarity.³⁷ They defer institutionally to settler democracy and pursue reforms therein, lacking ambitions to build something entirely new and better through revolution. Settler beliefs, understandings, and practices, directly contrast with the militancy, radical solidarity, and revolutionary ambition said above to characterize the proletariat as a class-for-itself. So long as we remain settlers we cannot become proletariat. While individual workers or groups thereof might be less loyal, show more solidarity, and be less deferential than “good” settlers, as long as the settler state stands it will continue to enforce, promote, and sway the masses toward a settler identity, (re)producing settler colonialism as a principal obstacle to proletarian class consciousness on stolen land.

Settler colonialism’s material focus is the dispossession, occupation, and exploitation of land,³⁸ colonized to house and grow a settler population, and exploited to fuel settler capitalism. In North America, early settlers provided the forward troops of the settler state, “homesteading” on stolen Indigenous lands granted for free, sold for cheap, or guaranteed after a short-term of labor preferable to a perpetual term in “Old Europe.”³⁹ On the colonial frontier, settlers acted as both forward reconnaissance and as a powerful moral justification of the states’ expansionist aims, under the guise of protecting the settler population from inevitable Indigenous resistance to dispossession and genocide.⁴⁰ As settler colonialism moved to complete the process of the territorial enclosure of a “homeland,” it continued to background and intervene upon working-class organization. The rampant pace of colonial occupation and the promised mobility of wage laborers into landowners often made for both a shortage of laborers in the settler colonies and high wages for many workers, requiring capital and the state to turn to immigrant and slave labor to expand production and profits. Organized labor responded militantly, but it was not interwoven with solidarity and revolutionary ambition. Rather, it was often mixed with the readily available state-approved poisons of racism and nativism. Settler labor organizations often took the easy path of concession and complicity over the hard path of confrontation. Discriminating against Asian and Black workers, petitioning and invoking the racism of the settler state;⁴¹ this easy path was taken instead of the path of the proletariat, the path of radical solidarity and struggle with oppressed and colonized peoples. The poisons were strong enough to coax those who lived on the margins of whiteness to petition for upgraded membership therein, becoming good settlers.⁴² The path of becoming settlers was not pursued as a fully voluntary choice made unanimously by an internally undifferentiated racial formation of whites. Rather, it was the outcome of the coercive imposition of the historical-material structures of settler and racial capitalism that many non-white and marginally-white occupants of stolen land continue to be drawn into participation in. This easy and treacherous path was created by the settler state and maintains today the generational “muck of ages” that tends workers in settler colonized lands towards becoming “good settlers,” precluding their becoming proletariat. In an early and still relevant work of Marxist decolonial theory, J. Sakai summarizes the impact of settler colonialism on class consciousness in North America as follows:⁴³

Class is not like a brass badge or a diploma, which can be carried from Old Europe and hung on a wall, dusty but still intact. Class consciousness lives in the revolutionary struggles of the oppressed – or dies in the poisonous little privileges so eagerly sought by the settler servants of the bourgeoisie.

Settler colonialism is not a historical event located in the past, but an ongoing relation between the settler state, the settler populations it empowers and manages, the Indigenous sovereignties it denies and suppresses, and the land it manages the occupation and exploitation of. The corruptions of class consciousness wrought by settler colonialism have been passed down generationally and refined through the constant oversight and intervention of the settler state and settler capitalist society. Obviously, this includes overt racism and the ongoing justification of settler violence against Indigenous people in defence of settler property. Less obviously, it extends to the more insidious, widespread, and state-sponsored obsession with middle-class home ownership as the modern model of settler citizenship; the historical successor of “homesteading” citizenship of the early period of settler colonial dispossession. Consider, for example, the modern “housing crisis” in many settler states. This is not framed by the state, nor understood by the workers invited to become good settlers, as a crisis in the direct sense of people lacking housing. Rather, it is understood as the dangerous twilight of a settler colonial relation to land and the poisoned inheritance of good settlers since dispossession began: income from property rather than wage labor. Young workers today, described as struggling with “upward mobility” and generational envy of the hoarding of home ownership, are not being offered a social guarantee of the basic human right to housing for all. Instead, the settler-capitalist state frames the housing crisis in such a way as to continue cultivating worker’s desire for the same poisoned inheritance that made past generations of workers become good settlers: promises of non-waged income from a piece of stolen land.

Settler colonialism and its corruption of class consciousness is also maintained by reinforcing settler nationalism. Despite its genocidal history, the settler state is self-understood as redeemable and perfectable through “reconciliation” wherein Indigenous people are offered apologies, cultural representation/recognition, and a slightly more beneficial colonial arrangement. Workers are encouraged to support reconciliation as to remain good settler nationalists, confident in the morally progressive future of the settler state, undermining the revolutionary ambitions that characterize the proletariat as to stabilize the settler colonial project.

Readers might note the positive references above to J. Sakai’s Settlers, which remains shrouded in controversy. While the influence of that work on the analysis developed here cannot be denied, the conceptual tools, strategic trajectory, and tactical proposals argued for here diverge significantly from Sakai, for the following reasons. First, in attempting to provide a relatively comprehensive analysis of the obstacles to class consciousness in North America, Sakai blends the material-historical analysis of settler colonialism with two further processes: imperialism and racism. Since discussions of racism attract immediate controversy in the US, this leads to critiques of Sakai’s work that frame it as primarily about the relation between race and class. Settlers is not read by these critics by its title, but by its sub-title: “The Mythology of the White Proletariat.” Sakai reinforces this flawed critique in a follow-up essay that completes the inversion, “When Race Burns Class: Settlers Revisited.”⁴⁴ Herein, Settlers is instead read as informative primarily regarding the relation between settler colonialism and class consciousness; i.e. between land and class. Second, Sakai writes of a proletariat that is defined in purely objective terms, as the poorest and most exploited class in society. This leads to dubious claims such as the description of African slaves and colonized peoples as “proletariat,”⁴⁵ a title they perhaps neither claim nor seek. This (mis)use of an important concept in Marxism contrasts with the main conceptual contribution of this essay: a dialectical conception of the proletariat in revolutionary becoming. Third, Sakai models the relations between settlers, Indigenous peoples, and various oppressed groups in settler states through the language of oppressor and oppressed nations – originally developed for the analysis of imperialism in Leninism and popular in Maoism. This model is rejected here, as it is doubtful the language of “national” liberation accurately reflects the self-understanding of colonized and racialized peoples inside the settler capitalist state, who do not necessarily orient their struggles against that state in the language or practice of “national” liberation. There is a further concern that in describing such struggles as “national” liberation, we are limiting – not just theoretically but practically – our understanding of them to a particularly European conception of political association and relationship to land, if not imposing this conception onto non-European peoples.⁴⁶ Fourth and finally, while Sakai rightly identifies the strategic necessity of proletarians ending rather than reforming the settler state, that analysis does not stress a new treaty between Indigenous peoples and the proletarian(-in-becoming) to share the land as programmatically central to a proletarian strategy of stabilizing a “viable historical alternative” to settler capitalism on historically stolen land.

Sakai’s valuable historical analysis of the structural and material conditions that drew workers on stolen land into becoming good settlers is paired with dubious concepts of the proletariat, national liberation, revolutionary strategy, and organizational prescription that are assumed rather than argued for.⁴⁷ One can acknowledge Sakai’s service in focusing our attention on settler colonialism as an obstacle to becoming proletariat, while seeking other theoretical avenues regarding how to overcome this obstacle.⁴⁸ Too many take Sakai’s theoretical ensemble as essential to Marxist decolonial theory, rejecting it entirely for the flaws in this one attempt. A new theoretical linkage and practical strategy has been proposed here. To become proletariat – to realize a collective revolutionary aspiration of class consciousness that overcomes the obstacle of settler colonialism – we must commit to revolutionary decolonization, build decolonial alliances with resurgent Indigenous peoples who see capitalism as a common enemy, and add to the communist revolutionary programme the demands to end the settler state and enact a new treaty to share the land. Only in this way, and only in-and-through revolution, can we cease being settlers, and become a people on historically stolen lands who earn a new title in history; who become proletariat.

Against Settler Socialism

Communists must contribute dialectically to this becoming by warning those on the path to become proletariat of a treacherous pitfall, identified in the same spirit as Part III of the Communist Manifesto, and Lenin and Luxemburg’s critique of reformist socialism. This pitfall is settler socialism. Settler socialists think themselves enemies of capitalism, but refuse to confront settler colonialism – in its constitutive and symbiotic relations with capitalism – as principal obstacle to proletarian class consciousness on stolen land. They speak of a revolution that preserves and perfects the settler state, ensuring the continuity of national identity across their revolution. Their revolution aims to change the mode of production, and elements of the political structure as to “empower” workers, but leave intact the settler-territorial land claims, national identities, and with them, the anti-proletarian corruptions of class consciousness offered to and imposed upon workers by the settler states. They speak not of a revolutionary de-colonial alliance, but of hollow “allyship” with Indigenous peoples who will be more benevolently colonized by and administered to by these socialists, who are perhaps even ready to “give” some land back.

Settler socialism is made possible through the corruption of class consciousness wrought by settler colonialism, which has a double-effect. In the first instance outlined above, settler colonialism corrupts the class consciousness of workers’ self-activity and organization (1 above), leading them away from solidarity and shared struggle, toward discrimination and nativism. In the second, it corrupts socialist interventions (3 above) by organizationally blinding them to this corruption of class consciousness, and wedding them to settler nationalism, creating a settler variant of “socialism”. As Estes and Dunbar-Ortiz have noted:⁴⁹

[M]any white-dominated leftist organizations, unions, political clubs, and intellectual circles have historically not taken seriously Indigenous knowledge, movements, and politics. In settler colonies, aspirations for “socialism” frequently elide the presence of Indigenous people and nations or at least the continued plunder of their land. In other words, a [settler] “socialist” society is easier to conceive than a world without settler colonialism. This is a core feature of settler colonialism: not just the elimination of the Native, but also the naturalization of unnatural settler states built on the annexation of Indigenous land and the genocide of Indigenous people.

Communists must identify and firmly reject settler socialism as what it is: a pitfall that slides back onto the easy path already taken; the path of collaboration with the enemy that only thickens and deepens the “muck of ages.” Settler socialism is the folly of pursuing socialism without confronting the enduring obstacle to proletarian class consciousness that is settler colonialism. One must therefore ask, who is its revolutionary agent? It cannot be the proletariat as conceived herein. That proletariat knows that only in developing and interweaving militancy, solidarity, and revolutionary ambition, can they become a class-for-itself capable of self-emancipation from capitalism. That proletariat knows that to truly defeat capitalism, it cannot fight alone, but must struggle in a revolutionary alliance with exploited, oppressed, and colonized peoples of all lands. Settler socialism seeks a socialism without the proletariat, so understood. The proletariat cannot come to be as long as the settler state remains, and we remain settlers under a settler socialist state that claims for itself historically stolen land and continues to occupy and exploit it without emancipatory treaties. Proletarian class consciousness and self-emancipation requires revolutionary decolonization that rejects settler socialism and rejects any inheritance of settler-territorial land claims. The path of the proletariat on stolen land is not to capture the seat of settler power, but to smash it.

A programmatic commitment to revolutionary decolonization is not a pure act of subjective will on the part of those becoming proletariat. It is not a heroic moral commitment they make irrespective of objective historical conditions. The material and ideological processes that have made settler colonialism a historically powerful obstruction to proletarian class consciousness are waning. Most obviously, the relative completion of the settler territorial consolidation of land in most settler states (with the possible exception of Israel) means there is now less land for the settler state to offer “for free” or cheap to would-be settlers as an alternative to wage labour, then occupying a life-world shaped by anti-proletarian class consciousness. Such direct material bribery as practiced by the early settler state to make workers into good settlers, is increasingly less viable. Even its modern form – the promise of middle-class homeownership – is being foreclosed to young workers by the combination of a rentier economy benefiting only the older generations of good settlers, and the subsumption of housing into financial capitalism. The long-run tendency of capitalism to immiserate the working-class and empty out the intermediary classes has returned to the settler states of the imperial core, accelerated by new imperial antagonisms that are disrupting Euro-American economic hegemony and the super-profits that fund the bribery and corruption of class consciousness of “middle-class” workers in the advanced capitalist economies. The false promise of a stable settler capitalist imperialism that can repeatedly turn each new generation of workers into good settlers is being revealed. As the material basis for these obstructions to class consciousness crumble and class antagonisms reveal themselves once again, a programmatic commitment to revolutionary decolonization becomes possible.

As Mészáros stresses, since capitalism is a global system, it must be confronted on that level. Only a revolutionary alliance of exploited, oppressed, and colonized people the world over can defeat it. A revolutionary decolonial alliance on historically stolen lands is required for a revolutionary anti-capitalist alliance the world over. One of the great developments in international solidarity has been through struggles for decolonization over the last century, where oppressed and colonized people of other lands have developed and demonstrated a shared understanding of the suffering of those similarly oppressed and colonized in all lands. The prominence of opposition of South African and Irish people to Israeli apartheid and genocide are historical manifestations of this. Oppressed and colonized people outside of Euro-America will immediately detect the lack of solidarity shown by settler socialism and a disingenuous invitation to an “alliance” with it. They will reject that invitation because they know many Indigenous people will, and in their struggle they see their own. For capitalism to be defeated, the alliance that confronts it must be stabilized at the global scale upon enduring practical commitments that convince all exploited, oppressed, and colonized peoples that the proletariat are reliable and integral allies in struggles against settler colonialism, imperialism, racism, and capitalism.

A programmatic commitment to decolonization as constitutive of a global proletarian class consciousness is therefore not a pure act of will. It is objectively possible and practically necessary. Possible with the historical de-stabilization of settler capitalism as an anti-proletarian obstruction to the development of class consciousness, and necessary to stabilize an enduring revolutionary anti-capitalist alliance the world over.

Overcoming settler colonialism as part of a revolutionary decolonial alliance

To become proletariat, workers on historically stolen land must build a revolutionary decolonial alliance that seeks to end the settler state and found new democracies and new economies on the basis of a new treaty to share the land. How does this position inform Marxist organizational and practical labor, here and now? We must first understand how this position differs from those on offer. The strategy of a revolutionary decolonial alliance can be contrasted with that of the fusion of Indigenous and socialist struggles, and the subsumption of Indigenous struggles under socialism.

Subsumption advocates that Indigenous peoples commit to revolutionary socialist understandings and practices as they have been developed in other lands, at the expense of “traditional” Indigenous ways of resistance. When it is demanded that Indigenous struggles against capitalism be organized and advanced as communist struggles, importing practices historically successful in other lands, this is subsumption. In its most grotesque form, subsumption is openly euro-chauvinist, settler colonialist, and racist, disparaging Indigenous ways of knowing and relations to land as “primitive.”⁵⁰ More commonly, it suggests a basic commonality between communism and pre-colonial Indigenous societies, arguing that communism would entail a revival of such relations acceptable to Indigenous peoples. It rests not only on dubious interpretations of Indigenous history, but on the historical misconception that the proletariat fight capitalism alone, rather than as part of revolutionary anti-capitalist alliances. This misconception drives the need for Indigenous peoples to adopt socialism in order to subsume all resistance to capitalism into a politically one-dimensional revolutionary movement.

Fusion advocates for the dialectical encounter of Indigenous struggle and identity with socialism in which the two are transformed into a unity. José Carlos Mariátegui, for example, stresses the necessity of considering the Peruvian Indigenous people’s position in relation to the Peruvian Marxists programme of agrarian (land) reform. Mariátegui argues Indigenous peoples must be engaged by Marxists by offering reform toward communal property rather than commercialized agriculture.⁵¹ Marx argued in the case of peasant communities of Russia that such property relations are latent in egalitarian aspects of traditionally non-capitalist social relations and economy, and should be elevated through and integrated into a socialist agrarian reform programme.⁵² This position rejected popular developmentalist interpretations of Marxism that stressed the need to move from feudal, first to capitalist, and only then to socialist (i.e. collectivized rather than communal) agricultural modes of production. Modern advocates of fusion progressing Mariátegui’s line of theorizing, notably comrade Nodrada cited above, argue that “decolonization should be understood as the indigenization of settlers” and that:⁵³

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 relation of decolonization to communism.

The strategy of revolutionary decolonial alliance advocated here rejects subsumption and casts serious doubts on fusion. Since settler colonialism’s core material process is the dispossession, occupation, and exploitation of land, a revolutionary decolonial alliance must make central the demand for the literal return of land, enacted through a new treaty. This treaty must recognize Indigenous peoples and land as historically enduring sovereign entities, enabling the historical renewal of Indigenous relations of self-governance with their land and among their kin. These integral elements of the strategy of revolutionary decolonial alliance are grounded in the current realities of Indigenous resistance and resurgence.⁵⁴ In response to settler colonialism’s core processes of dispossession and genocide, many Indigenous peoples have chosen to organize their opposition, not by adopting socialism, but by struggling to maintain and re-connect with Indigenous ways of knowing and relations to land, transformed and/or re-interpreted by new generations of Indigenous peoples. While the idea of fusion proposed in Mariátegui’s “Indo-American socialism,” rightly stresses the dialectical interaction between the proletariat-in-becoming and Indigenous peoples, only a revolutionary decolonial alliance stresses that this relationship does not result in an immediate and harmonious political unity, but must develop at its own historical pace, building trust in revolutionary struggle between two different people who have not yet fully learned from and been transformed by revolutionary relation with one another in history. Based on the analysis presented here, the proletariat have not yet fully formed on this continent due to being knee-deep in the “muck of ages” a thick layer of which is settler colonialism. So too is there much work ongoing among Indigenous peoples in re-discovering, renewing and re-interpreting Indigenous knowledge and practice, and re-building Indigenous sovereignty.

The treaty is the fundamental form of Indigenous political relation on which this alliance can be built.⁵⁵ It is how relations among different Indigenous peoples on these lands were mediated in the pre-colonial era, and how the first wave of settlers related to Indigenous peoples. The settler state would assert itself over these early treaties, and then go on to desecrate that political relation by forcing treacherous treaties under genocidal duress with flagrant violations of Indigenous protocols. Workers becoming proletariat on stolen land seek to earn a new title in history in-and-through a new treaty to share the land. A revolutionary decolonial alliance is the initial form of a new treaty-in-becoming. In struggling together against capitalism through this alliance, we build the trust necessary to enact and maintain a new treaty, while announcing revolutionary decolonization clearly as our strategic goal.

In the lands near the place where this essay is written, there is a Two Row Wampum, or Gaswéñdah, a treaty first made between the Haudenosaunee people and Dutch settlers. A wampum belt with a white background, and two purple lines running horizontally across, it symbolizes two vessels traveling parallel paths in a river. Importantly, this treaty does not propose the fusion of two peoples into one, but of an ongoing relationship of mutual respect with each other and the land. Proletarians-in-becoming bring the following perspective to this treaty and its relational model – a perspective passed down through centuries of bloody struggle on many lands: the two rows cannot be maintained when a beast lurks in the river beneath. The beast we call “capital” arrived long ago as an uninvited guest on these lands and to all treaties on them. In its battles against capital, the proletariat have learned the beast does not respect treaties, human life, or earth-life. It knows only hunger. It feels no remorse. It continues to consume land and labour, yet is never satiated. It feeds, it grows, and it hungers evermore. Because of this, the beast cannot be tamed, nor can it be escaped. It must be confronted, it must be defeated. It has grown such that it casts its shadow over all lands, and can therefore only be defeated by a revolutionary alliance of exploited, oppressed, and colonized peoples the world over. That treaties may again be respected; that labor may be free; that the earth may live, the beast we call capital must die. It is the common enemy of all people who, through a revolutionary anti-capitalist alliance, must defeat this beast such that the Two Rows, and all treaties – past or future, can be respected.

Conclusion

In this magazine, there are important debates unfolding on the political programme of Marxists, specifically in relation to the US Constitution and the demand for, and the form of, socialist democracy.⁵⁶ While affirming the importance of these debates, its various positions all seem vulnerable to the same criticism: they have not sufficiently distinguished themselves from settler socialism. Again, settler socialism plans the inheritance and maintenance of settler territorial land claims and national identity. Talk of remaking the US into either a “democratic republic” or “dictatorship of the proletariat,” while rightly seeing the capitalist state as revolutionary target, leaves settler colonialism in the blindspot. On the line of analysis offered here, a new treaty is needed for proletarians on historically stolen lands to become that very people in history. It is needed to found a new proletarian state; to build new democracies and new economies on land that is not stolen but shared through a new treaty. A new treaty does not “give” land back to Indigenous peoples. It recognizes Indigenous sovereignties as historically enduring political entities with their own legal and economic structures, embedded in relations to lands that the proletariat insists are not theirs to inherit from the settler state as to be in a position to “give” back. It is not enough to respond that the treaty will be the first act of a newly formed socialist state. A new treaty is the formative action of a proletarian democracy. We must imbue Marx’s warning, that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes”⁵⁷ with this decolonial aspect: a proletarian democracy cannot be built on stolen land, for we cannot become proletariat without a new treaty to share the land.

If the contribution to Marxist theories of class consciousness and revolutionary strategy proposed here is compelling to the reader, it brings complications to our struggles that can only be fully resolved in practice. We can begin, as communists, by warding the proletariat-in-becoming against all variants of settler colonialism, including settler socialism as re-packaged poison to proletarian class consciousness. Then we can understand the full scope of the challenges of building an enduring alternative to capitalism on historically stolen land. It has been argued that a revolutionary decolonial alliance is needed here and now to make a new treaty possible, making our becoming proletariat possible. To fully earn that title, we must then do what has long seemed impossible, confront the beast we call capital in revolutionary alliance with exploited, oppressed, and colonized peoples of all lands, and defeat it.

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Roughly, along the lines of the distinction between mental and physical labor.
This principle of self-emancipation – that none are fit to break their chains but those who wear them – applies equally to other forms of structural domination, including colonialism, imperialism, and cis-heteropatriarchy.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 1848, chap. 1, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm.
Ben Solidaridad, “For a Blue-Collar, Proletarian Socialist Movement,” Cosmonaut (blog), March 16, 2023, https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/03/for-a-blue-collar-proletarian-socialist-movement/.
For a review and critique, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New “True” Socialism (Verso Books, 2016).
For a restatement and refinement of the Leninist theory of class consciousness and its dialectical grounding, see recently: Raju J. Das, Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World, Studies in Critical Social Sciences Book Series (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2018), chap. 10.
Robert Mayer, “Lenin, Kautsky and Working-Class Consciousness,” History of European Ideas 18, no. 5 (September 1, 1994): 673–81, https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-6599(94)90421-9.
Das, Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World, 446. Those discussed by Das but not mentioned in what follows include commodity fetishism and racism.
Das, 444.
Das, 480.
Ernest Mandel, “The Leninist Theory of Organisation: Its Relevance for Today,” International Socialist Review 31, no. 9 (1970), https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/196x/leninism/ch02.htm#n10, my emphasis.
Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 1845, chap. 1.D.10, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm#d4.
István Mészáros, “Contingent and Necessary Class Consciousness,” in Aspects of History and Class Consciousness, ed. István Mészáros and T. B. Bottomore (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1971), 100.
Ibid., 100.
Ibid., 109-110, 118.
“The development of class consciousness is a dialectical process [that] requires some kind of organization – whether the constitution of parties, or of some other forms of collective intermediary – structured in accordance with the specific socio-historical conditions that prevail in a particular epoch, with an overall strategic aim of dynamic interventions in the course of social development. … In other words, the ‘spontaneous’ and ‘direct’ development of proletarian class consciousness … is a utopian dream … the question of political organization cannot be bypassed” Ibid., 101.
Ibid., 120. Emphasis in original.
Ibid., 109.
Ibid., 106–7.
Frederick Engels, “On The History of the Communist League,” Sozialdemokrat, 1885, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1885hist.htm.
‘As philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in philosophy.’ “Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right 1844,” accessed March 13, 2024, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm.
Frederick Engels, “Frederick Engels’ Speech at the Grave of Karl Marx,” marxists.org, 1883, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/death/burial.htm.
“All this should be compared with numerous references by Marx and Engels to the example of the British labor movement, showing how industrial ‘property’ leads to attempts ‘to buy the proletariat’ (Briefwechsel, Vol. 1, p. 136). to divert them from the struggle; how this prosperity in general ‘demoralizes the workers’ (Vol. 2, p. 218); how the British proletariat becomes ‘bourgeoisified’ — ‘this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie’ Chartists (1866; Vol. 3, p. 305)” V. I. Lenin, “Karl Marx: V: Tactics of the Class Struggle of the Proletariat,” 1918, para. 4, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/granat/ch05.htm.
Erik Olin Wright, Classes (New York: Verso, 1985), 6–7.
For those interested in the historical use and evolution of the term, see R. B. Rose, “‘Prolétaires’ and ‘Prolétariat’: Evolution of a Concept, 1789-1848,” Australian Journal of French Studies 18, no. 1 (1981).
Avoiding the rejection of the importance or centrality of economic structure and class in relation to revolutionary socialist politics found in some currents of “post-Marxism.”
Such debate is ongoing, involving whose history is important to tell, how it is told, and what is to be concluded from it. While there is no avoiding this debate – and perhaps no concluding it either – this does not mean that practically effective conclusions cannot be drawn from it. What follows is meant only to contribute and relate historical perspectives of the proletariat to theories of class consciousness.
“But, from the vantage point of politics, Blanqui was right: proletarian was not the name of any social group that could be sociologically identified. It is the name of an outcast.” Jacques Rancière, “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization,” October 61 (1992): 61, https://doi.org/10.2307/778785.
This is what is meant by critical reflection on historical examples. The proletariat do not pop into revolutionary being instantaneously, but must, as Marx said, endure a long series of failures, critical reflection on which is constitutive of becoming proletariat. This is part of the shared labor by which we rid ourselves of the “muck of ages”.
See “The Women of the Commune”, in Florian Grams, “A Short History of the Paris Commune,” Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, March 4, 2021, https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/43896/a-short-history-of-the-paris-commune.
“The Paris Communards and Algerian peasants had a common enemy – the French bourgeoisie. They fought this enemy simultaneously, but were unable to combine their forces in united action, thus making it easier for the French bourgeoisie to defeat both the one and the other.” Vladimir Borisovich Lutsky, “Modern History of the Arab Countries,” 1969, https://www.marxists.org/subject/arab-world/lutsky/ch20.htm; See also Niklas Plaetzer, “Decolonizing the ‘Universal Republic’: The Paris Commune and French Empire,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 49, no. 3 (2021): 585–603.
The Communards did excel at forging alliances with layers of the middle classes. See Stathis Kouvelakis, “On the Paris Commune: Part 2,” Verso, 2021, https://www.versobooks.com/en-ca/blogs/news/5042-on-the-paris-commune-part-2.
C. J. Storella et al., eds., “Smychka The Bond between City and Village,” in The Voice of the People (Yale University Press, 2013), 112-151.
On this point, some Leninist theories of class consciousness continue to suffer from the flawed notion that the full development thereof results in doctrinal cohesion to some acute version of Marxism-Leninism.
Multiple treaties are needed for each distinct group of Indigenous peoples on different lands. Hereafter, for simplicity, this new treaty system will be abbreviated in the singular.
Nodrada, “Decolonization and Communism,” Orinoco Tribune (blog), May 19, 2021, https://orinocotribune.com/decolonization-and-communism/.
J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), chap. 4.
This focus on land makes settler colonialism conceptually distinct from racism and racial capitalism, with which it is sometimes conflated. Though they often operate in tandem historically, racialization as a process of social differentiation does not necessarily involve the settler territorialization (i.e. dispossession, occupation, and exploitation) of land.
Bryan Palmer, “Nineteenth-Century Canada and Australia: The Paradoxes of Class Formation,” Labour/Le Travailleur 38 (1996): 18.
A tactic clearly reproduced in the young settler state of Israel.
American Federation of Labour, “Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion: Meat vs. Rice,” 1901, https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/hb658004br/?order=2&brand=oac4; Michael Honey, “Anti-Racism, Black Workers, and Southern Labor Organizing: Historical Notes on a Continuing Struggle.,” Labor Studies Journal 25, no. 1 (March 22, 2000): 10–26.
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (Routledge, 1995).
Sakai, Settlers, 115.
J. Sakai, “When Race Burns Class: Settlers Revisited (An Interview with J. Sakai),” Kersplebedeb (blog), October 28, 2000, https://kersplebedeb.com/posts/raceburn/.
“In the centuries before World War II, the overwhelming mass of the European populations were poor and in misery. They were the proletarian classes, the laborers, poor peasants, and oppressed industrial workers. But in the settler colonies and nations, the lowest classes, the proletarians, were the natives, the conquered, or the imported colonial laborers.” Sakai.
Rowland Keshena Robinson, “Marxism, Coloniality, ‘Man’, & Euromodern Science,” The Spectral Archive (blog), August 28, 2019, https://onkwehonwerising.wordpress.com/2019/08/28/marxism-coloniality-man-euromodern-science/.
“Self-reliance and building mass institutions and movements of a specific national character, under the leadership of a communist party, are absolute necessities for the oppressed.” Sakai, Settlers, 383.
See, alternatively, the Gramscian “settler-order framework” proposed by Ian McKay and adopted by Fred Burrill, “The Settler Order Framework: Rethinking Canadian Working-Class History,” Labour: Journal of Canadian Labour Studies / Le Travail : Revue d’Études Ouvrières Canadiennes 83 (2019): 173–97.
Nick Estes and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “Examining the Wreckage,” Monthly Review (blog), July 1, 2020, https://monthlyreview.org/2020/07/01/examining-the-wreckage/.
Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, “Searching for a Second Harvest,” in Marxism and Native Americans, ed. Ward Churchill (South End Press, 1983), chap. 2.
Juan J. Paz and Miño Cepeda, “The Demonisation of Mariátegui,” Orinoco Tribune (blog), July 9, 2021, para. 6, https://orinocotribune.com/the-demonisation-of-mariategui/.
Ian Angus, “Marx and Engels and Russia’s Peasant Communes,” Monthly Review 74, no. 5 (2022), https://monthlyreview.org/2022/10/01/marx-and-engels-and-russias-peasant-communes/?mc_cid=8b6362fba8&mc_eid=28d21d7648.
Nodrada, “Decolonization and Communism.”
Taiaiake Alfred, Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Leanne Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Pub., 2011).
Aaron Mills, “What Is a Treaty? On Contract and Mutual Aid,” in The Right Relationship: Reimagining the Implementation of Historical Treaties, ed. J. Borrows and M. Coyle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 208–47.
Luke Pickrell, Gil Schaeffer, and Edward Varda, “Marxist Unity Group Debate On The ‘Democratic Republic,’” Cosmonaut (blog), January 10, 2024, https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/01/marxist-unity-group-debate-on-the-democratic-republic/.
Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France,” marxists.org, 1871, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm.