Sure, I’m a Marxist. But I’ve never been able to decide which one of them I like best: Groucho, Harpo, Chico, or Karl.
—American Indian Movement joke, circa 1975
HAU, METAKUYEAYASI. THE GREETING I HAVE JUST GIVEN is A LAKOTA PHRASE meaning, “Hello, my relatives.” Now, I’m not a Lakota, and I’m not particularly fluent in the Lakota language, but I ask those of you who are to bear with me for a moment while I explore the meaning of the greeting because I think it is an important point of departure for our topic: the relationship, real and potential, existing between the marxist tradition on the one hand, and that of indigenous peoples such as American Indians on the other.
The operant words here are “relatives,” “relationship,” and, by minor extension, “relations.” I have come to understand that when Lakota people use the word Metakuyeayasi, they are not simply referring to their mothers and fathers, grandparents, aunts and uncles, ancestors, nieces and nephews, children, grandchildren, cousins, future generations, and all the rest of humankind. Oh, these relatives are certainly included, but things don’t stop there. Also involved is reference to the ground we stand on, the sky above us, the light from the sun and water in the oceans, lakes, rivers, and streams. The plants who populate our environment are included, as are the four-legged creatures around us, those who hop and crawl, the birds who fly, the fish who swim, the insects, the worms. Everything. These are all understood in the Lakota way as being relatives. What is conveyed in this Lakota concept is the notion of the universe as a relational whole, a single interactive organism in which all things, all beings, are active and essential parts; the whole can never be understood without a knowledge of the function and meaning of each of the parts, while the parts cannot be understood other than in the context of the whole.1
This essay began its evolution as a Phyllis Burger Memorial Lecture at Montana State University in March 1988.
The formation of knowledge is, in such a construct, entirely dependent upon the active maintenance of a fully symbiotic, relational—or, more appropriately, interrelational— approach to understanding. This fundamental appreciation of things, the predicate upon which worldview is established, is, I would argue, common not only to the Lakota but to all American Indian cultural systems.2 Further, it seems inherent to indigenous cultures the world over. At least I can say with certainty that I’ve looked in vain for a single concrete example to the contrary.
The ancient Greeks had a term, dialitikos, the idea for which was borrowed from an Egyptian concept, and which, I’m told, the civilization of the Nile had itself appropriated from the people of what is now called Ethiopia, describing such a way of viewing things.3 The Greeks held this to be the superior mode of thinking. In modern parlance, the word at issue has become “dialectics,” popularized in this form by the German posttheological philosopher Friedrich Hegel.4 As has so often happened in the history of European intellectuality, Hegel's notable career spawned a bevy of philosophical groupies. Among the more illustrious, or at least more industrious, of these “Young Hegelians” was a doctoral student named Karl Marx.5
Indeed, Marx was always clear in his student work—much of which can now be read in a volume titled The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844—and forever after that it was the structure of “dialectical reasoning” he’d absorbed from Hegel that formed the fundament of his entire theoretical enterprise.6 He insisted to his dying day that this remained true despite his famous “inversion” of Hegel, that is: the reversal of Hegel's emphasis upon such “mystical” categories as “the spirit” in favor of more “pragmatic” categories like “substance” and “material.”7
Let us be clear at this point. The dialectical theoretical method adopted by Marx stands —at least in principle—in as stark an oppositional contrast, and for all the same reasons, to the predominant and predominating tradition of linear and nonrelational European logic exemplified by Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Feuerbach, and Newton as do indigenous systems of knowledge.8 It follows from this that there should be a solid conceptual intersection between Marx, marxism, and indigenous peoples. Indeed, I myself have suggested such a possibility in an essay collected in my book, From a Native Son.9
At an entirely abstract level, I remain convinced that this is in fact the case. There is, however, a decisive defect in such a thesis in any less rarefied sense. The most lucid articulation of the problem was perhaps offered by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel in their Unorthodox Marxism:
[Marxist] dialecticians have never been able to indicate exactly how they see dialectical relations as different from any of the more complicated combinations of simple cause/effect relations such as co-causation, cumulative causation, or simultaneous determination of a many variable system where no variables are identified as dependent or independent in advance…for orthodox practitioners [of marxian dialectics] there is only the word and a lot of “hand waving” about its importance.10
A substantial case can be made that this confusion within marxism began with Marx himself. Having philosophically accepted and described a conceptual framework which allowed for a holistic and fully relational apprehension of the universe, Marx promptly abandoned it at the level of his applied intellectual practice. His impetus in this regard appears to have been his desire to see his theoretical endeavors used, not simply as a tool of understanding, but as a proactive agent for societal transformation, a matter bound up in his famous dictum that “the purpose of philosophy is not merely to understand history, but to change it.”11
Thus Marx, a priori and without apparent qualms, proceeded to anchor the totality of his elaboration in the presumed primacy of a given relation—that sole entity which can be said to hold the capability of active and conscious pursuit of change, i.e., humanity—over any and all other relations.12 The marxian “dialectic” was thus unbalanced from the outset, skewed as a matter of faith in favor of humans. Such a disequilibrium is, of course, not dialectical at all. It is, however, quite specifically eurocentric in its attributes, springing as it does from the late Roman interpretation of the Judeochristian assertion of “man's” supposed responsibility to “exercise dominion over nature,”13 a tradition which Marx claimed oft, loudly and rather paradoxically, to have “voided” in his rush to materialism.14
All of this must be contrasted to the typical indigenous practice of dialectics, a worldview recognizing the human entity as being merely one relation among the myriad, each of which is entirely dependent upon all others for its continued existence. Far from engendering some sense of “natural” human dominion over other relations, the indigenous view virtually requires a human behavior geared to keeping humanity within nature, maintaining relational balance and integrity—a condition often referred to as “harmony”— rather than attempting to harness and subordinate the universe.15
The crux of this distinction may be discovered in the Judeochristian assertion that “man was created in God's image,” a notion which leads to the elevation of humans as a sort of surrogate deity, (self-)empowered to transform the universe at whim.16 Indigenous tradition, on the other hand, in keeping with its truly dialectical understandings, attributes the inherent ordering of things, not to any given relation, but to another force often described as constituting a “Great Mystery,” far beyond the realm of mere human comprehension.17
We may take this differentiation to a somewhat more tangible level for purposes of clarity. The culmination of European tradition has been a honing in on rationality, the innate characteristic of the human mind lending humanity the capacity to disrupt the order and composition of the universe. Rationality is held by those of European intellectual inclination—marxist and antimarxist alike—to be the most important (“superior”) relation of all; humans, being the only entity possessing it, are thus held ipso facto to be the superior beings of the universe; manifestations of rationality, whether cerebral or physical, are therefore held to be the cardinal signifiers of virtue.18
Within indigenous traditions, meanwhile, rationality is more often viewed as being something of a “curse,” a facet of humanity which must be consistently leashed and controlled in order for it not to generate precisely this disruption.19 The dichotomy between outlooks could not be more pronounced. All of this is emphatically not to suggest that indigenous cultures are, to employ a pet epithet hurled against challengers by the eurosupremacists of American academia, somehow “irrational” in our makeup.20 Rather, it is to observe that, as consummate dialecticians, we have long since developed functional and functioning methods of keeping our own rationality meshed with the rest of the natural order. And this, in my view, is the most rational exercise of all.
In any event, having wholeheartedly accepted the European mainstream's antidialectical premise that the human relation is paramount over all others in what are termed “external relations,” Marx inevitably set out to discover that which occupied the same preeminence among “internal relations” (that is, those relations comprising the nature of the human project itself).21 With perhaps equal inevitability, his inverted hegelianism—which he dubbed “dialectical materialism”22—led him to locate this in the need of humans to consciously transform one aspect of nature into another, a process he designated by the term “production.”23 It is important to note in this regard that Marx focused upon what is arguably the most rationalized, and therefore most unique, characteristic of human behavior, thus establishing a mutually reinforcing interlock between the relation which he advanced as being most important externally, and that to which he assigned the same position internally.24
So interwoven have these two relations become in the marxian mind that today we find marxists utilizing the terms “rationality” and “productivity” almost interchangeably, and with a virtually biblical circularity of reasoning.25 It goes like this: The ability to produce demonstrates human rationality, thereby distinguishing humans as superior to all other external relations, while rationality (left unchecked) leads unerringly to proliferate productivity, thereby establishing the latter as more important than any other a activity among humans (internally). The record, of course, can be played in reverse with equally satisfying results.
From here, Marx was in a position to launch his general theory, laid out in the thousands of pages of his major published works—Introdution to the Critique of Political Economy, and the three volumes of Capital—in which he attempted to explain the full range of implications attendant to what he described as “the relations of production.” Initially, he was preoccupied with applying his concepts temporally, a project he tagged as “historical materialism,” in order to assess and articulate the nature of the development of society through time.26 Here, he theorized that the various relations of society—ways of holding land, kinship structures, systems of governance, spiritual beliefs, and so on— represented, not a unified whole, but a complex of “contradictions” (in varying degrees) to the central, productive relation.27
All history, for Marx, became a stream of conflict within which these contradictions were increasingly “reconciled with”—that is, subordinated to—production. As such reconciliation occurred over time, he argued, various transformations in sociocultural relations correspondingly took place. Hence, he sketched history as a grand “progression,” beginning with the “prehistory” of the “Stone Age” (the most “primitive” level of truly human existence) and “advancing” to the emergent capitalism of his own day.28 “Productive relations,” in such a schema, determine all and everything.
One of Marx's theoretical heirs, the late-twentieth-century French structuralist Louis Althusser, summed up historical materialism quite succinctly when he defined production as the “overdetermined contradiction of all human history,” and observed that from a marxian standpoint society would not, in fact could not exist as a unified whole until the process had worked its way through to culmination, a point at which all other social relations stood properly reconciled to the “productive mission” of humanity.29 In a more critical vein, we might note another summation offered by Albert and Hahnel:
[O]rthodox [marxism] doesn’t stop at downgrading the importance of the creative aspect of human consciousness and the role it plays in historical development. According to the orthodox materialists, of all the different objective material conditions, those having to do with production are always the most critical. Production is the prerequisite to human existence. Productive activity is the basis for all other activity. Therefore, consciousness rests primarily on the nature of objective production relations. Cut to the bone, this is the essence of the orthodox materialist [marxist] argument.30
It is difficult to conceive of a more economistic or deterministic ideological construction than this. Indeed, as then-poststructuralist/now-postmodernist French theoretician Jean Baudrillard pointed out in his book, The Mirror of Production, Marx never so much offered a critique or alternative to the capitalist mode of political economy he claimed to oppose as he completed it, plugging its theoretical loopholes.31 This, in turn, has caused indigenous liberationists such as Russell Means to view marxism not as a potential revolutionary transformation of world capitalism but as a continuation of all of capitalisms worst vices “in a more efficient form.”32
There are numerous aspects of marxian general theory—concepts such as surplus value, alienation, and domination among them—that might be useful to explore at this juncture. It seems to me, however, the most fruitful avenue of pursuit lies in what Marx termed “the labor theory of value.”33 By this, he meant that value can be assigned to anything only by virtue of the quantity and quality of human labor—i.e., productive, transformative effort—put into it. This idea carries with it several interesting subproperties, most strikingly that the natural world holds no intrinsic value of its own. A mountain is worth nothing as a mountain; it only accrues value by being “developed” into its raw productive materials such as ores, or even gravel. It can hold a certain speculative value, and thus be bought and sold, but only with such developmental ends in view. Similarly, a forest holds value only in the sense that it can be converted into a product known as lumber; otherwise, it is merely an obstacle to valuable, productive use of land through agriculture or stock raising, etc. (an interesting commentary on the marxian view of the land itself). Again, other species hold value only in terms of their utility to productive processes (e.g., meat, fur, leather, various body oils, eggs, milk, transportation in some instances, even fertilizer); otherwise they may, indeed must be preempted and supplanted by the more productive use of the habitat by humans.34
The preceding is no doubt an extreme formulation. There have been a number of “mediations” of this particular trajectory by twentieth-century marxian theorists. Still, at base, the difference they offer lies more in the degree of virulence with which they express the thesis than in any essential break with it. All self-professing marxists, in order to be marxists at all, must share in the fundamental premise involved, and this goes for sophisticated phenomenological marxists like Merleau-Ponty,35 existential marxists such as Sartre,36 critical theorists of the Frankfurt School like Adorno and Marcuse,37 as well as Habermas (among other heirs apparent),38 right along with “mechanistic vulgarians” of the leninist persuasion (a term I use to encompass all those who trace their theoretical foundations directly to Lenin: stalinists, maoists, castroites, althusserian structuralists, and so on).39 To put a cap on this particular point, I would offer the observation that the labor theory of value is the underpinning of a perspective which is about as contrary to the indigenous worldview as it is possible to define.40
It goes without saying that there are other implications in this connection, as concerns indigenous cultures and people. Marx's concept of value ties directly to his notion of history, wherein progress is defined in terms of the evolution of production. From this juxtaposition we may discern that agricultural society is viewed as an “advance” over hunting and gathering society, feudalism is an advance over simple agriculture, mercantilism is seen as an advance over feudalism, and capitalism over mercantilism.41 Marx's supposed “revolutionary” content comes from his projection that socialism will “inevitably” be the next advance over capitalism and that it, in turn, will give way to communism.42 The first key is that each advance represents not only a quantitative/ qualitative step “forward” in terms of productivity, but also a corresponding rearrangement of other social relations, with both factors assigned a greater degree of value than their “predecessors.” In other words, agricultural society is seen by marxists as being more valuable than hunting and gathering society, feudalism as more valuable than mere agriculture, and so on.43 The picture should be becoming clear.
Now, there is a second facet. Marx was very straightforward in acknowledging that the sole cultural model upon which he was basing his theses on history and value was his own, that is to say European (or, more accurately, northwestern European) context. He even committed to paper several provisos stipulating that it would be inappropriate and misleading to attempt to apply the principles deriving from his examination of the dominant matrix in Europe to other, noneuropean contexts, each of which he correctly pointed out would have to be understood on its own terms before it could be properly understood in comparison to Europe.44 This said, however, he promptly violated his own professed method in this regard, offering a number of noneuropean examples—of which he admittedly knew little—to illustrate various points he wished to make in his elaboration on the historical development of Europe.
Chinese society, to offer a prominent example, was cast—really mis-cast—by Marx as “Oriental despotism” and/or “Asiatic feudalism,” thus supposedly shedding a certain light on the feudal stage of European history (and vice versa).45 “Red Indian” cultures, about which Marx knew even less than he did about China, became examples of “primitive society,” illustrating what he wanted to say about Europe's Stone Age.46 In this fashion, he universalized what he claimed were the primary ingredients of Germanic history, extending the de facto contention that all cultures are subject to the same essential dynamics and, therefore, follow essentially the same historical progression.47
Insofar as all cultures were identified as corresponding materially to one or another moment in European history, and given that only Europe exhibited a “capitalist mode of production” and social organization—which Marx held to be the “highest form of social advancement” as of the point he was writing48—it follows that all noneuropean cultures could be seen as objectively lagging behind Europe. We are presented here with a sort of “universal Euro yardstick” by which we can measure with considerable precision the relative (“dialectical”) degree of retardation shown by each and every culture on the planet, vis-à-vis Europe.49 Simultaneously, we are able to assign, again with reasonable precision, a relatively (“dialectically”) lesser value to each of these cultures as compared to that of Europe.
We are dealing here with the internal relations of humanity, but in order to understand the import of such thinking we must bear in mind the fate assigned “inferior” (less valuable) external relations—mountains, trees, deer—within the marxian vision. In plainest terms, marxism holds as “an immutable law of history” that all noneuropean cultures must be subsumed in what is now called “Europeanization.”50 It is our inevitable destiny, a matter to be accomplished in the name of progress and “for our own good.” Again, one detects echoes of the Jesuits within Marx's “antispiritualist” construct.51
Those who would reject such an assessment should consider the matter more carefully. Do not such terms as “preindustrial” and “precapitalist” infest the marxian vernacular whenever analysis of noneuropean—that is, “undeveloped,” “backward,” or “primitive”— societies is at hand?52 What possible purpose does the qualifier “pre”—as opposed to, say, “non”—serve in this connection other than to argue that such societies are in the process of becoming capitalist? And is this not simply another way of stating that we are lagging behind those societies which have already become industrialized?53 Or, to take another example, to what end do marxists habitually refer to those societies which have “failed” (refused) to enter a productive progression as being “ahistorical” or “outside of history”? Is this to suggest that such cultures have no history, or is it to say that they have the wrong kind of history, that only a certain (marxian) sort of history can be “real”?54
Again: Do marxists not hold that achieving communism will embody an historical culmination for all humanity?55 Is there another sense in which we can understand the term “world revolution”?56 Did Marx himself not proclaim in no uncertain terms that the attainment of the “capitalist stage of development” is an absolute prerequisite for the social transformation he envisioned when he spoke of “revolution”?57 I suggest that, given the only honest answers to these questions, there really are no other conclusions to be drawn from the corpus of marxist theory than those I’m drawing. The punchline is that marxism as a worldview is not only diametrically opposed to that held by indigenous peoples, it quite literally precludes our right to a continued existence as functioning sociocultural entities. This, I submit, will remain true despite the fact that we may legitimately disagree on the nuance and detail of precisely how it happens to be true.
Up to this point, our discussion has been restricted to the consideration of marxist theory. It is one thing to say that there are problems with a set of ideas, and that those ideas carry unacceptable implications if they were to be put into practice. The “proof,” however, is in the practice, or “praxis” if you follow the marxian conception that theory and practice are a unified whole and must consequently be maintained in a dialectically-reciprocal and interactive state at all times.58 Hence, it is quite another matter to assert that the negative implications of doctrine and ideology have in fact been actualized in “the real world” and are thereby subject to concrete examination. Yet marxism offers us exactly this means of substantiating our theoretical conclusions.
To be fair, when we move into this area we are no longer concerned with the totality of marxism. Rather, we must focus upon that stream which owes a special allegiance to the legacy of Lenin. The reason for this is that all marxist revolutions, beginning with the one in the Soviet Union, have been carried out under the mantle of Lenin's interpretation, expansion, and revision of Marx. This has been true of the revolutionary processes in China, Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, Cambodia, Laos, Mozambique, Angola, and Nicaragua.59 Arguably, it is also true for Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia),60 and it is certainly true for those countries brought into a marxian orbit through “Great Power negotiations” and/or exertions of main force: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Albania, Bulgaria, North Korea, Tibet, and Afghanistan, among them.61
Yugoslavia represents a special case,62 as did Chile during the Allende period,63 but the “deviations” involved seem largely due to capitalist influences rather than to some discernibly marxian subtext. One might go on to say that those self-proclaimed revolutionary marxist formations worldwide which seem capable of effecting a seizure of state power at any point in the foreseeable future—that in Namibia, for example,64 and perhaps those in Columbia and Peru65—are all decisively leninist in orientation. They certainly have disagreements among themselves, but this does not change the nature of their foundations. There have been no nonleninist marxian revolutions to date, nor does it seem likely there will be in the coming decades. Be this as it may, there are again a number of aspects of marxist-leninist postrevolutionary practice which we might consider, e.g., the application of Lenin's concept of “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” centralized state economic planning and the issue of forced labor, the imposition of rigid state parameters upon political discourse of all types, and so forth.66 Each of these holds obvious and direct consequences for the populations involved, including whatever indigenous peoples happen to become encapsulated within one or another (sometimes more than one) revolutionary state. It seems appropriate, nonetheless, that we follow the lead of Albert and Hahnel in “cutting to the bone.” We will therefore take up that aspect of marxist-leninist praxis which has led to indigenous peoples being encompassed by revolutionary states at all. This centers upon what is called the “national question” (or “nationalities question”).67
At issue is “the right to self-determination of all peoples,” a concept codified in international law by the United Nations from 1945 onward,68 but originally espoused by Marx and his colleague, Friedrich Engels, during the London Conference of the First International in 1865.69 In essence, the right to self-determination has come to mean that each people, identifiable as such through the sharing of a common language and cultural understandings, system of governance and social regulation, and a definable territoriality within which to maintain a viable economy, is inherently entitled to decide for itself whether or not and to what extent it wishes to merge itself culturally, politically, territorially, and economically with any other (usually larger) group.70
The right to self-determination thus accords to each people on the planet a bedrock entitlement to (re)establish and/or continue itself as a culturally distinct, territorially and economically autonomous, and politically sovereign entity: as a nation, in other words.71 Correspondingly, no nation holds a legitimate prerogative to preempt the exercise of such rights by another. For these reasons, the right of self-determination has been linked closely with the movement toward global decolonization, and the resultant body of international law.72 All this, to be sure, is very much in line with the stated aspirations of American Indians and other indigenous peoples around the world.73
But marxism's handling of the right to self-determination has not followed the general development of the concept. Having opened the door, Marx and Engels quickly adopted what—superficially, at least—seems to be a very curious posture, arguing that self-determining rights pertained only to some peoples. They were quite strong, for instance, in asserting that the Irish, who were even then waging a serious struggle to rid themselves of their British colonizers, should be supported.74 Similarly, Marx came out in favor of the right of the Poles to break free from the yoke of both Russian and German colonialism.75 On the other hand, Engels argued vociferously that “questions as to the right of independent national existence of those small relics of peoples” such as the Highland Scots (Celts), Welsh, Manxmen, Serbs, Croats, Ruthenes, Slovaks, and Czechs constitute “an absurdity.”76 Marx concurred, and proceeded to openly advocate the imposition of European colonialism upon the “backward peoples” of Africa, Asia, and elsewhere.77
Such positioning may initially seem confusing, even contradictory. Upon closer examination, however, an underlying consistency with Marx's broader and more philosophical pronouncements is revealed. The Irish and Poles had been, over the course of several centuries of English and Russo-German colonization (respectively), sufficiently “advanced” by the experience (i.e., reformed in the image of their conquerors) to be “ready” in Marx's mind to assume control over their own future in conformity to the “iron laws” of historical materialism.78 The other peoples in question, especially the “tribal” peoples of Africa and Asia—and one may safely assume that American Indians fell into the same category—had not yet been comparably “developed.” A continuing dose of colonization—subjugation by superior beings, from superior cultures—was thus prescribed to help us overcome our “problem.”79
A second level of consideration also entered into Marx's and Engels’ calculations in such matters. This concerns the notion of “economies of scale.” Marx held that the larger an “economic unit” became, the more rational and efficient it could be rendered. Conversely, smaller economic units were deemed inefficient by virtue of being “irrationally” duplicative (“redundant”).80 The Irish and Poles were not only populous enough to be considered among Engels’ “great peoples,” but—viewed as economic units— large enough to be worthy of support in their own right, at least during a transitional phase en route to the ultimate achievement of “world communism.” Conversely, indigenous peoples were seen as being not only too “backward,” but too small to warrant the least solidarity in our quest(s) to survive, much less to assert our independence;81 our only real destiny, from a marxist perspective, was to be consigned to what Leon Trotsky would later call “the dustbin of history,” totally and irrevocably subsumed by larger and more efficient economic units.82
The national question thus emerged for marxists as a problem in determining precisely which peoples were entitled to even a transient national existence along the way to the “true internationalism” of global communism, and which should have such rights foreclosed out of hand as a means of expediting the process. This in itself became quite a controversial discussion when marxists faced the issue of adopting tactics with which to wage their own revolutionary struggles, rather than simply tendering or denying endorsement to the struggles of others.83 At that point, things become truly cynical and mercenary.
While marxism has all along been conceptually opposed to the nationalistic aspirations of “marginal” peoples, it has been perceived by many marxists that a certain advantage might accrue to marxian revolutionaries if they were to pretend that things were otherwise. The struggles of even the smallest and least developed nationalities might be counted upon to sap the strength of the capitalist status quo while marxist cadres went about the real business of overthrowing it;84 in certain instances, “national minorities” might even be counted upon to absorb the brunt of the fighting, thus sparing marxism an unnecessary loss of highly trained personnel.85
After the revolution, it was reasoned, the marxist leadership could simply utilize their political acumen to consolidate state power in their own hands and revoke as “unrealistic”— even “counterrevolutionary”—the aspirations to national integrity for which those of the minority nationalities had fought and died.86 Once in power, they could also accomplish the desired abrogation of independent national minority existence either rapidly or more gradually, depending upon the vagaries of what are usually called “objective conditions.” As Walker Connor put it in his magisterial study, The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy, “Grand strategy was…to take precedence over ideological purity and consistency” where the right to self-determination was concerned.87
It is not that all this was agreed upon in anything resembling a harmonious or unanimous fashion. To the contrary, during the period leading up to the Russian Revolution, the national question was the topic of an extremely contentious debate within the Second International. On one side was Rosa Luxemburg and the bulk of all delegates, arguing a “purist” line that the right to self-determination does not exist in and of itself and should thus be renounced by marxism.88 On the other side was a rather smaller group clustered around Lenin. They insisted not only that marxism should view with favor any struggle against the status quo prior to the revolution, but that the International should extend guarantees which might serve to stir national minorities into action.89
Towards this end, Lenin wrote that from the bolshevik perspective all nations have an absolute right to self-determination, including the right to total secession and independence from any marxist revolutionary state.90 He also endorsed, as the official party position on the national question, a formulation put forth by Joseph Stalin:
The right to self-determination means that a nation can arrange its life according to its own will. It has the right to arrange its life on the basis of autonomy. It has the right to enter into federal relations with other nations. It has the right to complete secession. Nations are sovereign and all nations are equal.91
Of course, as Connor points out, “Lenin…made a distinction between the abstract right of self-determination, which is enjoyed by all nations, and the right to exercise that right, which evidently is not.”92 Thus, shortly after the bolshevik attainment of power came the pronouncement that, “The principle of self-determination must be subordinated to the principles of socialism.”93 The result, predictably, was that of the more than 300 distinct nationalities readily observable in what had been the czarist Russian empire, only twenty-eight— consisting primarily of substantial and relatively europeanized population blocks such as the Ukrainians, Armenians, Moldavians, Byelorussians, and so on—were accorded even the gesture of being designated as “republics,” and this only after the matter of secession had been foreclosed.94
The supposed “right to enter into federal relations with other nations” was also immediately circumscribed to mean only with each other and with the central government which, of course, was seated in the former czarist citadel at Moscow. Those, such as the Ukrainians, who persisted in pursuing a broader definition of self-determination were first branded as counterrevolutionary, and then radically undercut through liquidation of their sociocultural and political leadership during the stalinist purges of the 1920s and ’30s.95 There is simply no other way in which to describe the Soviet marxist process of state consolidation other than as the ruthlessly forcible incorporation of all the various peoples conquered by the czars into a single, seamless economic polity. As Marx once completed the capitalist model of political economy, so too did the Bolsheviks complete the unification of the Great Russian empire.96
In China, the practical reality was much the same. During the so-called “Long March” of the mid-1950s, Mao Zedung's army of marxist insurgents traversed nearly the whole of the country. In the midst of this undertaking, they “successfully communicated the party's public position [favoring] self-determination to the minorities they encountered,” virtually all of whom were well known to be yearning for freedom from the domination of the Han empire.97 The marxists gained considerable, perhaps decisive, support as a result of this tactic, but, to quote Connor:
While thus engaged in parlaying its intermittent offers of national independence into necessary support for its cause, the party never fell prey to its own rhetoric but continued to differentiate between its propaganda and its more privately held commitment to maintaining the territorial integrity of the Chinese state.98
As had been the case in the USSR, the immediate wake of the Chinese revolution in 1949 saw marxist language suddenly shift, abandoning terms such as secession and self-determination altogether. Instead, the new Chinese constitution was written to decry “nationalism and national chauvinism,” and “the peoples who, during the revolution, were promised the right of political independence were subsequently reincorporated by force and offered the diminished prospect of regional autonomy.”99 Only Outer Mongolia was accorded the status of existing even in the truncated Soviet sense of being a republic.
In Vietnam and Laos, leaving aside the lowland ethnic Nungs (Chinese), the only peoples holding the requisites of national identity apart from the Vietnamese and Lao themselves are the tribal cultures of the Anamese Cordillera—often referred to as “Montagnards”—such as the Rhadé, Krak, Sedand, Hré, Bru, Bahnar, Je, Ma, and Hmong.100 Insofar as they are neither populous nor “advanced” enough to comprise promising marxian-style economic units, they were never offered so much as the “courtesy” of being lied to before the revolution; national self-determination for the mountain people was never mentioned in Ho Chi Minh's agenda.101 Consequently, the “Yards”—as they were dubbed by U.S. military personnel—formed their own political independence organization called the Front Unifé pour la Liberation des Races Opprimées (Unified Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Peoples) or, acronymically, FULRO during the early 1960s.102
The purpose of FULRO was/is to resist Vietnamese encroachments upon Montagnard national rights. Consequently, U.S. Special Forces troopers were able to utilize the FULRO consortium to good advantage as a highland mobile force interdicting the supply routes and attacking the staging areas of both the National Liberation Front's main force guerrilla units and units of the regular Peoples Army of Vietnam (North Vietnamese Army or “NVA,” in American parlance), both of which were viewed by the Montagnards as threats to their sovereign way of life.103 Much to the surprise of U.S. military advisers, however, beginning in 1964 FULRO also began to use its military training and equipment to fight the troops of the American-backed Saigon régime, whenever they entered the mountains.104
The message was plain enough: The mountain people rejected incorporation into any Vietnamese state, whether “capitalist” or “communist.” In postrevolutionary Vietnam, FULRO continued to exist until at least the late 1980s, and to conduct armed resistance against the imposition of Vietnamese suzerainty within the Montagnards’ traditional homelands. For its part, the Hanoi government has refused to acknowledge either the fact of such resistance or its basis.105 The rather better known example of the Hmong in Laos follows very much the same contours as the struggles of their cousins to the southeast, albeit on a larger scale.106
One would of course like to report that there is at least one exception to the rule, if for no better reason than to establish a model for potential emulation. Right through the 1990s, however, an undeviating consistency has been exhibited by marxist-leninist régimes in every locale where they’ve taken root. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Nicaragua during the 1980s. There, three native peoples—the Miskitos, Sumus, and Ramas—were forced into a protracted armed resistance to being forcibly incorporated into a revolutionary state proclaimed in 1979 after the victory of the country's Sandinista insurgents over a right-wing dictatorship headed by Anastasio Somoza.107
It is important to note that the indigenous nations in question had each and mutually maintained a high degree of insularity and autonomy vis-à-vis Nicaragua's dominant Latino society, and that they had remained economically self-sufficient within their own territories on the Atlantic Coast. Their sole requirement of the Sandinista revolution was that it allow them to continue to do so within their traditional territory, known as Yapti Tasba, which they wished to have declared an “autonomous zone.”108 The response of the régime in Managua was that this would be impossible because allowing the Indians to retain such self-determining prerogatives would create a veritable “state within a state” (i.e., precisely the sort of situation supposedly guaranteed by leninist doctrine). As interior minister Tomas Borgé Martinez put it in 1985, the Sandinistas were “unswervingly dedicated” to the principle that, “There [can be] no whites, blacks, Miskitos, or Creoles. Here there are only revolutionary and counterrevolutionary Nicaraguans, regardless of the color of their skin. The only thing that differentiates us is the attitude we assume” towards the state.109
In substance, it was thereby demanded that the Miskitos, Sumus, and Ramas as such simply cease to exist. To punctuate his point, Borgé sent substantial numbers of troops into Indian territory, ordered the relocation of much of the native population into what in a comparable maneuver in Vietnam the United States had called “strategic hamlets,” imposed blatantly assimilative “education” upon indigenous children, and set about integrating the resources of the Atlantic Coast region into the overall Nicaraguan economy.110 Ironically, it was their own eurosupremacist arrogance in this regard that led to the Sandinistas’ eventual demise. So committed were they to exercising their presumed “right” to usurp and expunge indigenous peoples that even when it became obvious that the resulting conflict was undermining their ability to defend themselves against U.S. aggression, they persisted in trying to enforce their anti-Indian policies.111
The bottom line is that in no marxist-leninist setting have the national rights of any small nations been respected, most especially those of landbased, indigenous (“tribal”) peoples.112 Our very right to exist in a national sense, and usually as distinct cultures as well, has instead been denied as such. Always and everywhere, marxism-leninism has assigned itself a practical priority leading directly to the incorporation, subordination, and dissolution of native societies as such. This is quite revealing, considering that the term “genocide” was coined to describe not only policies leading to the outright physical liquidation of “ethnical, racial, religious or national” aggregates, but also policies designed to bring about the dissolution, destruction, and disappearance of these “identified human groups, as such,” by other means.113 Viewed in this way, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that marxism-leninism is and has always been a genocidal doctrine, wherever indigenous nationalities/cultures are concerned.114
None of what has been said herein should be taken as an apology or defense, direct or implied, of U.S. (or other capitalist) state policies. American Indians, first and foremost, know what the U.S. has done and what it's about. We experienced the meaning of the United States since long before there were marxists around to “explain” it to us. And we’ve continued to experience it in ways which leave little room for confusion on the matter. That's why we seek change. That's why we demand sovereignty and selfdetermination. That's why we cast about for allies and alternatives of the sort marxists have often claimed to be.
In considering any alliance, however, it is necessary—indeed, essential—that we first interrogate it in terms of our own best interests. This is no less true of marxism than of anything else. Thus, we must ask—only fools would not—whether marxism offers the vision of a bona fide alternative to that which capitalism has already imposed upon us. From the answer(s) to this query we can discern whether marxists can really be the sort of allies who would, or even could, actually guarantee us a positive change “come the revolution.” Here, we need to know exactly what is meant when marxist “friends” like Bob Avakian and David Muga assures us, as they have, that the solutions to our present problems lie in the models offered by the USSR, China, Vietnam, and revolutionary Nicaragua.115 And this, it seems to me, is rather painfully evident in what has been discussed above. Marxism, in its present form at least, offers us far worse than nothing. With friends such as these, we will be truly doomed.
So it is. But must it be? I think not. An increasing number of thoughtful marxists have broken with at least the worst of marxian economism, determinism, and human chauvinism. Salient examples such as Albert, Hahnel, and the early Baudrillard have been mentioned or quoted herein. The German Green Movement, involving a number of marxists or former marxists like Rudi Dutschke and Rudolph Bahro, has been in some ways a hopeful phenomenon (albeit, less so in North America).116 All in all, there is sufficient basis to suggest that at least some elements of the marxian tradition are capable of transcending dogma to the extent that they may possess the potential to forge mutually fruitful alliances with American Indians and other indigenous peoples (although, at the point where this becomes true, one has reason to ask whether they may be rightly viewed as marxists any longer).117
The key for us, as Indians, is, I think, to remain both clear and firm in the values and insights of our own traditions. We must hold true to the dialectical understanding embodied in the word Metakuyeayasi and reject anything less as an unbalanced and imperfect view, even a mutilation of reality. We must continue to pursue our traditional vision of a humanity within rather than apart from and above the natural order. We must continue to insist, as a fundamental principle, upon the right of all peoples—each and every one, no matter how small and “primitive”—to freely select the fact and form of their ongoing national existence. Concomitantly, we must reject all contentions by any state that it holds license—for any reason—to dissolve the inherent rights of any other nation.118 Perhaps most important of all, we must choose our friends and allies accordingly. I submit that there's nothing in this game-plan which contradicts any aspect of what we’ve come to describe as “the Indian way.”119
In conclusion, I must say that I believe such an agenda, which I call “indigenist,” can and will attract real friends, real allies, and offer real alternatives to both marxism and capitalism. What will result, in my view, is the emergence of a movement predicated on the principles of what are termed “deep ecology,”120 “soft-path technology,”121 “green anarchism,”122 and global “balkanization.”123 But we are now entering into the topic of a whole different discussion. So, with that, allow me to close.