Anthony Mansueto
One of the most challenging questions facing the many peoples of the United States is understanding properly the complex and enduring phenomenon of racism. Racism subjects much of our population to arbitrary murder and mass incarceration, summary deportation and, superexploitation in sectors of the economy everyone else is able to avoid. Those who escape these fates still suffer poorer health, lower wages, more limited access to the liberal professions, voter suppression, and the continuous erosion of their cultural traditions. And it is racism, together with patriarchy, which the Right mobilizes to undercut the electoral prowess of what would otherwise be an overwhelming liberal, democratic, and popular majority. Unless and until we understand the problem correctly, we will not be able to develop a strategy adequate to the task of vanquishing racism once and for all. And until we vanquish racism, we will make little or no progress on anything else.
One of the principal theories advanced in recent years, which aims to understand the specific character of racism not only in the United States, but also in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, is the Settler Colonialism Thesis. This thesis argues that the problem of racism in these countries is distinct from that in other colonized areas, because rather than being aimed simply at conquering and exploiting indigenous peoples, British Colonialism in these areas aimed instead at actually removing or even annihilating them and replacing them with some mixture of “white” settlers and African slaves.
More recently this thesis has been applied to the case of Israel, which some argue is the product of an attempt on the part of European Jews to displace indigenous Palestinians, even at the cost of genocide. The result has been to sharply divide the popular front against fascism, and to draw a large part of the Left into positions which range from implicitly to explicitly and indeed rabidly antisemitic activity. This antisemitism has, in turn, been leveraged by the Right and in particular by the current regime in Washington to justify attacks on the autonomy of universities and the liberties of the academy.
What makes this situation more difficult is the fact that the Settler Colonialism Thesis is not simply wrong. Rather, we will argue, it is a complex concatenation of important insights, bad history, and a failure of theoretical and political maturity. Indeed, the state of the debate around the Settler Colonialism Thesis is a mark of the theoretical poverty of the Left in the present period, ravaged as it is by the crisis of socialism and the failure of refoundation[1], in an ideological environment still dominated by post-structuralism and deconstruction.[2]
In order to make sense of the debate around the Settler Colonialism Thesis, we need to situate it in the broad context of the debate around the nature of racial and ethnic oppression. We have addressed this question at greater length elsewhere (Mansueto 2016). Here we will summarize and simplify. Theories of racism can be divided into three principal groups:
- Reactionary or racist theories which attempt to legitimate racism as part of the natural and or moral order,
- Liberal theories, which argue that racism is a relic of a bygone era, which can be overcome simply by rigorous guarantees for liberal rights, and
- Revolutionary theories, which argue that racism is written into the structure of our society, and can be overcome only by means of a fundamental reorganization of the social order.
Racist theories are generally either biological or cultural in character. Biological racism argues either that race is real at a biological level, documented by phenotypic or genetic analysis, and either that some races are superior to others or that they are so different in their adaptations for survival and their resulting civilizational patterns as to make it impossible for them to live together as equals in a multiracial society. Today these theories now generally masquerade under the title of Human Biodiversity (Frost 2015, Fuerst 2015), and lack scientific basis. Cultural racism simply skips the biological step in this argument and argues that different “races” are constituted by fundamentally different and incommensurate ideals and that multiculturalism is simply a trick on the part of liberal elites to make their own culture hegemonic. Cultural racism has its roots in Traditionalism,[3] Romanticism,[4] and Hermeneutic Ontology (Heideger 1936/2012).[5] It is represented in the present period by the European New Right (de Benoist 1977, 2000/2016; Faye 1998/2000, Krebs 2012), which favors ethnonationalist particularism, and by Alexandr Dugin (Dugin 2023), who uses it to legitimate Russian imperialism.
Liberal theories regard racism as something left over from earlier forms of society which relied on the exploitation of conquered peoples by means of coercive forms of surplus extraction and which organized labor by assigning social functions on the basis of lineage. The liberal and democratic revolutions and the development of capitalism should have abolished racism along with slavery and legal segregation and discrimination, but this hasn’t happened, making specialized legal interventions necessary. There are a variety of specific arguments as to why capitalism, which ought to favor equal opportunity at the very least, has not led to an end to racism. Some argue that the history of slavery and other coercive forms of surplus extraction have left us with a segmented labor market reinforced by disparities in skill and or capital, making it necessary to engage not only in education to give everyone the skills necessary to earn a living wage, but also resource transfers (whether or not they are called reparations) to enable equal access to capital formation (Wilson 1974). Others point to enduring caste structures –hereditary ethnoreligious stratification—which limit the social roles which are effectively open to people based on their lineage (Wilkerson 2020)[6].
The influence of these liberal theories extends well into the socialist left, though there is also a long history both among social democrats and communists drawn from European origin communities, to dismiss racism as simply a function of the bourgeoisie’s “divide and conquer” strategy.
Revolutionary theories of racism come in two main forms: nationalist theories and theories of racism as a phenomenon sui generis. Nationalist theories derive from the same source as cultural racism, with the fundamental difference that they are directed at the liberation of historically oppressed peoples as opposed to assertions of racial superiority. Here it is important to mention both Marcus Garvey, who developed the idea of a single Pan-African Nation, an idea carried in the United States by a generation of African American leaders with roots in the African Methodist Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches (Wilmore 1998) and José María Vasconcellos (Vasconcellos 1925), who developed the idea of the Raza Cosmica, which united indigenous American, Africa, European, and Asian peoples to form the basis of the new Mexican Nation.
The emerging Communist movement embraced the nation state framework as a way of understanding the problem of racism in the United States. This approach followed naturally from Lenin’s Imperialism (Lenin 1916/1971), which argued that capitalism had become dependent on the export of capital to low technology, low skill, low wage activities (mining and export agriculture) in less developed countries in order to compensate for the declining rate of profit in capital intensive higher technology sectors of the economy, leading to a new round of colonization, and to the inter-imperialist First World War. Indeed, one of Stalin’s relatively few fundamental theoretical interventions was his definition of a nation as a people with a common history, language, culture, and economic life (Stalin1913/1993). More specifically, the Communist International and the Communist Party USA used it as a framework for understanding racism in the United States, arguing for the existence of a Black Nation with the right to self-determination up to and including independence (Haywood 1948). Later, the emerging Chicano Nationalist Movement put forward the claim that a distinctive Chicano Nation, separate from Mexico, was emerging in the North American Southwest (National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference 1969) Communist, mostly Maoist organizations with significant roots in the Chicano movement took up this thesis, most notably the League for Revolutionary Struggle. And Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz (Dunbar Ortiz 1984), drawing on the experience of the American Indian Movement, argued for the existence of a single American Indian Nation, rooted in the shared struggle against colonialism and genocide. Those closer to the Communist Parties of Mexico and the US, such as the Centro de Acción Social Autónoma-Hermanidad General de Trabajadores as well as the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional argued instead for the “socialist reunification of Mexico” under the slogan Somos un pueblo sin fronteras (Movimiento de Liberación Nacional – Mexicano Commission. n.d.). A more moderate version of the nationalist approach to racism was advanced by Robert Blauner (Blauner 1972) and Tomás Almaguer (Almaguer 1975), who distinguish between immigrant and colonized minorities in order to explain the difference between the degrees and forms of oppression suffered, for example, Italian or Polish Americans and African Americans or Chicanos. This approach focused more on local struggles for self-determination, for example community control of schools and police, than on national liberation per se.
Sui generis approaches to racism developed partly because the nationalist theories seemed focused narrowly on aspirations for collective self-determination, neglecting questions of economic development and cultural identity, and partly because national independence in the “Black Belt” South, the very poorest and least developed part of the United States did not seem to many African Americans like much of a liberation. This was especially true as the Great Migration brought many of them to cities in the North, where entirely new opportunities awaited and where racism took new forms. The most important advocate of such an approach was WEB du Bois (du Bois 1897) whose The Conservation of Races, who drew extensively on German Romanticism and the tradition of the Geistwissenschaften (human or spiritual sciences) to argue that races were the product not of biology but of differentiating historical experiences, which he believed had led to the existence of at least eight “spiritual races,” each defined by and seeking different ideas: Slavs, Teutons, English, Latins, Africans, Semites, Hindus, and Mongols. While du Bois was involved in a wide range of reform efforts aimed at improving the conditions of African Americans, his underlying theory tends to imply that diverse racial ideals are ultimately incommensurate with each other and that racism is a permanent and ultimately insuperable problem, a position which could be understood as conciliating that of the European New Right.
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Where does the Settler Colonialism Thesis sit within in this spectrum? The theory derives, it seems, from attempts to differentiate among various types of colonialism. Here the discussion seems to have begun with Kenneth Good (Good 1976) trying to explain the different degrees of industrial development among various African countries, as well as the emergence of apartheid and similar structures, by the amount of European settlement in the country in question. Patrick Wolfe (Wolfe 1999) developed the concept more fully by adding a focus not just on European settlement but also on the removal or extermination of the indigenous population. He thus applies this concept first to Australia and from there it was applied to the United States, Canada, and to a lesser extent New Zealand. Hannah Ardent (Arendt 1951) contributed the insight that Stalinist and NAZI totalitarianism in fact found their methods in the practices of European colonialism, and the discourse around genocide which emerged from the Shoah ultimately became central to the theory. Eventually scholars began applying the theory to the Israeli displacement of Palestinians, and the State of Israel became the principal target of attacks on Settler Colonialism (Veracini 2010, Khalidi 2018).
With respect to our typology, the Settler Colonialism Thesis stands somewhere between the nationalist and sui generis approach to racism. The whole concept of colonialism derives from the paradigm of the national question, and the application of the theory to the Palestinian case certainly concludes to claims of for national independence. On the other hand, advocates of the theory have been less clear regarding its concrete political implications, especially in the countries which it was first developed to understand.
So what are we to make of the thesis itself? We began by noting that the Settler Colonial Thesis is by no means entirely incorrect. Specifically, it captures real differences in forms of colonialism, distinguishing between those focused on exploiting indigenous populations with a relatively modest level of colonial settlement (such as Spanish and Portuguese colonialism) and British colonialism, which focused on removing or exterminating indigenous populations and replacing them with African slaves and British and other European settlers. And this difference is not simply something past; it has enduring resonance in the present. It is the historic cause which explains the present oppression of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and African Americans (who, while not indigenous to the Americas are here because of the effective resistance to exploitation on the part of the indigenous peoples). It is why the historic first peoples of the continent now control almost none it and why African Americans are subjected to hereditary criminalization and mass incarceration, and why they are de facto if not de jure subject to summary execution to any reason and for none.
This said, there are also serious problems with the thesis. First, while there is a good fit for the experience of the first peoples of our continent, and it helps explain why African Americans are here in the first place and why, their usefulness as slaves at an end, they are now deemed expendable, and live under the constant threat of genocide, it does not fully comprehend the situation of the diverse groups of people who identify or who are identified by others as Chicano. Some of these peoples are partly or overwhelmingly indigenous people, but they are not principally those who were annihilated or nearly so, but rather those who were “reduced” to missions and exploited to support Spanish colonization in California and elsewhere. Others are themselves Spanish settlers, some passionately Catholic and others probably conversos fleeing the Inquisition in Mexico and settled in Nuevo Mexico. Some of these became slavers; others intermarried with indigenous slaves or servants (genizaros) (Gutiérrez 1992). Still others settled early on in Tejas and Nuevo Santander, South Texas and the region along the Rio Bravo, or migrated in wave after wave out of a Mexico which was constantly redefining itself. Some supported the Mexican Revolution, itself significantly indigenizing, and others came fleeing it. The case for a distinctive Chicano identity depends on demonstrating that these disparate groups have themselves come together to form a new people, separate from the Mexican Nation, or are meaningfully in the process of doing so. It is not the aim of this paper to pass judgment on that question, beyond suggesting that those who believe in such a project should certainly be free to pursue it, and that those called on to unite in such a project have the right to embrace it, reject it, or register a nuanced, partial dissent. The rest of us may have opinions, and may find it useful, from the vantage point of developing political strategy, to investigate the question, but our principal obligation is to strengthen the alliance between the working classes (peasants, proletariat, and petty bourgeoisie), oppressed peoples, women, and the LGBTQ community to resist fascism and continue what will likely be a centuries long struggle against Capital.
The Settler Colonial Thesis does not, furthermore, fully explain the current situation and experience of African Americans, for which a sort of deep caste theory seems necessary. Here, we need to make reference to both the Protestant Ethic Thesis and what we have elsewhere called the “Lockean Exception.” The Protestant Ethic Thesis, advanced by Max Weber (Weber 1920/1968) argues that Reformed (Calvinist) theology, which regarded productivity and usefulness to society as signs of divine predestination to salvation –and a lack thereof as signs of reprobation—helped catalyze the process of capitalist development. We have argued else where (Mansueto 2016) that it also creates a powerful race related status hierarchy based on the (false) ascription of higher degrees of productivity to some groups than others. John Locke’s political theory nominally excluded slavery, but leaves as an exception those who are convicted of a crime which might legitimately be punished by death, who can then be offered penal servitude in perpetuity as an alternative (Locke 1690/1967). It is no accident that Locke, who was also the author of the Constitution of the Carolina Colonies, clearly regarded the enslavement of Africans there as legitimate, and thus regarded them (and their children) as criminal. Thus, the constitution of African Americans as caste bearing hereditary criminal status.
Second, the difference between Spanish and British colonialism is a result of differences not in the moral character of the two peoples but rather in their processes of capitalist development and nation state formation, as well as the differing social structures of the peoples they conquered. The Spanish state was formed with the support of Catholic peasants, especially in the North, who shared with the monarchy a Catholic identity and who saw the monarchs as their liberators from an oppressive nobility (Anderson 1974, Lope de Vega 1612/1999). The English state was forged with the principal support coming from rural gentry which, after peasant labor became more expensive after the victorious Peasant War of 1380, began running peasants off the land and replacing them with sheep (Anderson 1974, Moore 1966). The indigenous peoples of Mexico were accustomed to exploitation through forced labor at the hands of the Aztec and other empires, and those who survived disease adapted to their new overlords. The indigenous peoples of North America had lived, for the most part, free from systematic exploitation and when Europeans tried to subject them to forced labor they resisted, moved west, or just died, so that the British, in order to realize their colonial dream, “had” to replace them with African slaves.
Third, there is a tendency to apply the concept of “settler colonial” to all peoples of European descent in “settler colonial” countries. But this is not accurate. It is true that there is an underlying structure of settler colonialism into which all immigrants to colonized spaces are inserted, and which affects their further evolution in terms of class, ethnoreligious identity, and political valence. This is a critical field of inquiry, because one of the most powerful ways in which people of European descent can contribute to the struggle against racism is by deconstructing “white” identity and own their own ethnic particularity and their own history of force assimilation. And this depends on understanding how “white” identity was constructed in the first place. But the vast majority of such immigrants were themselves run off the land and were economic refugees at the very least. Many were trafficked and subjected to coercive forms of labor at one or another point in their migration. And this is true not just of immigrants from the most oppressed regions of Southern and Eastern Europe, but also of most settlers even from England, who were victims of the enclosures which were a constitutive element of the process of capitalist development. The creation of a white identity is itself a product of the cultural liquidation of the many peoples who migrated to the Americas and to Oceana and of forced, sometimes violent assimilation to the culture of the conquerors.
Many of these peoples were, furthermore, not only run off their land, but they were themselves subjected to colonization. This is clearly true of people from Sardinia, Sicily, and the Mezzogiorno (Zitara 1971), most if not all Slavs, and most if not all Celts (especially the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish, whose colonization is more recent). And these colonial relationships are ongoing. This is, of course, not settler colonialism (thought there was clearly an attempt at something like genocide and replacement in Ireland and parts of Scotland), and it is different than the experience of those colonized by the formation of the United States, Canada, or Australia. But it adds an additional layer of complexity to the situation. In this sense, most European immigrants, again including those from England, are in a situation much more like that of immigrants from Asia or Africa, than the situation of the actual colonizing gentry and bourgeois elements who undertook the conquest and colonization of North America and Australia.
This latter, group, furthermore, raises another set of questions entirely. How different was and is the situation of Asian immigrants from immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, or even Ireland? Is it a matter of degree or of kind? Surely the Settler Colonialism Thesis does not apply to their situation? And yet Asian immigrants (especially those who might “appear” Muslim) are far more likely than, say, an Italian or a Pole, to be (depending on the precise time period) grabbed off the street and incarcerated as an “enemy combatant” or summarily deported. This is in spite of the fact that the Census Bureau categorizes West Asians, along with North Africans as “White.” Then there is the whole phenomenon of “new superior cultures (Chua and Rebenfeld 2014),” and “model minorities (Freedman 2005, Li and Wang 2008)” which involve both privileges and oppressions of their own. The situation of recent African immigrants is even more complex, with some groups being seen, and sometimes seeing themselves, as fundamentally superior to African Americans –but still, in virtue of their skin color, being subject to summary execution or incarceration. Again, a deep caste theory would seem to be essential fully accounting for this reality.
Finally, we should point out that the Settler Colonial Thesis implies no clear political course of action. Especially in its more radical forms it fully embraces the view that “indigenous” and “European” ways of being are utterly different and utterly incompatible (e.g., Burkhardt 2019), making co-existence and Convivencia effectively impossible –a difficult claim to uphold given the depth of the mestizaje. When I have asked advocates of this thesis what sort of future the envision, they have inevitably pointed towards utopian fiction –Afrofuturism or Indigenous Futurism. These are, I will say, mostly beautiful visions, but they are not a program or a strategy. And if someone were to approach the archeofuturisms of the European New Right without understanding the removal and displacement which would inevitably precede their realization, they might be seduced by them as well.
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This all helps us understand why the application of the Settler Colonial Thesis to the case of Israel is utterly inappropriate. First, the Palestinians are no more indigenous to the Land of Israel than Jews are to Palestine. Indeed, they are almost certainly rather less so. Indigeneity is never absolute. No human group currently living is absolutely indigenous to anyplace. The term is useful in a relative sense to differentiate those who have lived somewhere for thousands or tens of thousands of years from those who conquered them merely hundreds of years ago. Nor are those who are properly called indigenous in this relative sense free from the taint of “restlessness” and the ambition to conquer of which Europeans are accused –and the Jews along with them. The Americas had Empires long before the Europeans arrived, and were in the process of spawning more.
The Biblical narratives telling stories of an “Israelite” Conquest of Canaan are not histories but palace narratives legitimating the formation of the monarchy in Israel two hundred years after its formation as the result of what was overwhelmingly an internal uprising on the part of Canaanite peasants (Gottwald 1979). Both Jews and Palestinians show a foundational genetic substrate inherited from early Neolithic farmers in the Levant, with Jews (especially Ashkenazi and some Sephardic) Jews showing significant European additions and Palestinians showing significant Arab additions. If the Ashkenazi Jews who led the formation of Israel show significant cultural European influence, then it must also be said that Muslim Palestinians show very significant Arabization, a product of Arab conquests. Both peoples have ancient and entirely reasonable claims to live in the land and both profess a similar attachment to the land rooted in their distinctive histories.
Zionism, just like the Palestinian liberation movement, is best understood as national liberation movement, with all the good and bad that entails. It is not at all surprising that the struggles of Jews and Palestinians for liberation were articulated using the language of national liberation, which was the principal language for articulating such claims at the time the two national movements emerged. Many Ashkenazi Jews were also drawn to Territorialism (Avineri 2017) which envisioned a Jewish State in the Pale of Settlement or elsewhere, but such an option did not address the aspirations of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, and would also have involved displacing people with existing and reasonable claims to their land –i.e. the Slavic peoples colonized by the Germans and the Rus. Furthermore, even if one imagines that some other road forward for Jews following the Shoah was practically available and morally preferable (and I don’t think there was), the destruction of the existing state of Israel would be an act of horrific violence, and would almost certainly lead to violence against Jews all over the world. In this sense, while I am reluctant to say that a full embrace of Zionism is obligatory to avoid antisemitism, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic.
This said, we should be clear that recognizing the legitimacy of the State of Israel, and rejecting the application of the Settler Colonial Thesis to the case of Israel, does not imply the legitimacy of current or for that matter historic Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. The displacement of the Palestinian people in the creation of Israel has always been problematic and the currently dominant Revisionist form of Zionism, which has its intellectual roots in the same milieu as historic fascism, must be rejected. And while defending one’s territory against persistent terrorist attacks in not genocidal, current proposals to effectively remove the Palestinians from much or all of their remaining territory would be.
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How, then, do we assimilate the insights of the Settler Colonialism Thesis and act on them in a way which actually serves the cause of justice, while avoiding the mobilization of the thesis in service to antisemitism or to a performative radicalism which ultimately does nothing for historically oppressed peoples?
Part of our answer to this question depends on what we see as the most urgent imperative facing popular and democratic forces in the United States. As I have argued elsewhere, I believe that our principal task in the present period is to resist fascism, understanding both that fascism is inevitably and continuously reproduced by capitalism and that a popular front against fascism necessarily includes elements of the bourgeoisie.
In the United States, I would argue, the most important thing people of European descent can do to fight racism is to deconstruct “white” identity. “White” identity is, fundamentally identification with the project of colonialism and especially British “settler” colonialism, an identification which has been systematically inculcated into European immigrants through the mechanisms of schools, and sometimes Churches, through the destruction of our native languages in favor of the adoption of English, and through the inculcation of national myths –such as the lie that “our” ancestors came over on the Mayflower, something which is not true even of the actual Puritan elites of New England.
How does this answer, at least in part, the legitimate aspirations of the first peoples of the Americas, of those brought here as slaves against their will, and of peoples who are the product of various degrees of mestizaje between our first peoples and Spanish settlers, African slaves, and Asian and other immigrants? One key indication that European immigrant communities have overcome their identification with the settler project would be to support the payment of a permanent quit-rent to our first peoples, as at once a recognition of their pre-eminent claim to all of the land of the Americas and a (very partial) compensation for what was taken from them, and of a similar payment to the descendants of slaves in recognition of their forced labor and the damage done to their communities since then. The revenue to pay the rent would come from a steeply graduated confiscatory wealth tax so that the actual burden on working class people of any ethnicity is negligible. Such a payment is not fundamentally a penalty accepted for the sins of our ancestors, or even compensation for the ways in which we have benefited from sins we ourselves may not have committed, but rather a statement that we reject the settler colonial project utterly and completely, and want to be as little implicated in it as possible, as well as a statement that want to contribute to the rectification of a centuries’ old injustice of world-historical proportions.
At the same time, we must realize that Europe’s “original sin” is not colonialism but rather antisemitism. European colonialism was legitimated by the claim that those who do not hear and accept the Gospel of the Crucified and Risen Christ face eternal damnation –a claim which was mobilized first against the Jewish people. And this claim is written into the warp and woof of Christianity. “I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification were through the law, then Christ died to no purpose (Galatians 2:21).” Much as we might want to deny it, this passage implies that if the Jewish way is valid, then Christianity is unnecessary. Christian faith, at its very core, negates, any other way of being, even when it does not want to.
This dynamic is, to be sure, rather softened and mitigated in the Catholic tradition, which teaches not sola fides, but fides caritas formata, and which, at the Second Vatican Council, in the declaration Nostra Aetate (Vatican II 1965), recognized the permanence of God’s covenant with the Jewish people and God’s work in all of humanity’s great spiritual and civilizational traditions. Thus the victory of Bartolomé de Las Casas over Gines de Sepulveda in the Controversia de Valladolid[7]. But the dynamic is, if anything, accentuated in the Protestant and especially the Reformed tradition, which sees productivity as a sign of divine election, and the perceived lack thereof as a sign of reprobation.
Overcoming racism means saying that the story of conquest and removal, of settlement and slavery is not our story and that we recognize the pre-eminent rights of those against whom those crimes were committed –and are willing to compensate them, even if we did not personally commit the crimes in question. But it also means renouncing religious doctrines which legitimated the settler project, even those doctrines are woven into the very fabric of our own ways of being. It is here that the question of Israel comes to the fore. Just as recognizing the land rights of our first peoples and compensating them and the Africans imported to work that land does not undo centuries of genocide and slavery, establishment of the State of Israel in part of the historic ‘eretz yisrael, does not undo millennia of antisemitism culminating the in Shoah. But it does mark a recognition of that historic crime and it does constitute the State of Israel as a permanent witness both to the great sin of Christendom and to the absolute demand of justice, through consent to which Israel knows its God.
It is a similar religious reckoning, I would argue, that is required if we are to effectively abolish the semi-covert caste system which persists in the United States. Until we break the hegemony of the Protestant Ethic (including its now dominant secular forms which value people based on their productivity), and relinquish the “rights” to American land which make the Lockean Exception necessary, racism and thus capitalism will remain.
The question of how to handle conflicting legitimate claims to the Levant is a different matter altogether, simpler in principle and more difficult in practice. Both the Jewish and the Palestinian peoples have legitimate claims to live in the land. Neither should be regarded as colonizers and something like a two-state solution continues to seem like the most viable option. But getting to this point will likely take a protracted effort to overcome the profound antisemitism which has become endemic in the Palestinian community as well as the ambitions of the Israeli Right to establish an exclusive claim over more of the land than is compatible with a balanced solution to the crisis. The first will require much more than traditional interfaith dialogue. Christians and Muslims everywhere must to come to term with the profound antisemitism embedded in their core doctrines. At the same time we need a renewal of actual Zionist theory, including a re-examination of the relationship between people and land, a revaluing of the diaspora, and a return to some of the themes highlighted by the Spiritual Zionism of thinkers like Ahad Ha’am (Ahad Ha’am 1897/1912).
Zionism is not the adversary of anticolonial movements, but rather their vanguard, even if it is also a movement of human beings constrained by space and time, place and history and thus bound to be in contradiction with some of those with whom they are also, at a deeper level, also in solidary.
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The struggle against racism is one in which many complex histories have become inextricably intertwined with each other, to such a degree that deliberation and negotiation must become our foundational practices. We have not lived each other’s histories and we always have more to learn. I am sure that because of this there are aspects of my analysis which are mistaken, and that it contains many blind spots. I hope that in spite of this it will contribute to the complex and difficult deliberation which must take place if we are to make progress in the struggle against racism, and for a life worthy of humanity.
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[1] Left refoundation describes the attempt on the part of many in the communist movement, especially after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, to reconsider fundamental aspects of revolutionary theory in the light of that experience and others, without losing sight of the ultimate aim of an authentically communist society in which exploitation and the commodification of labor power, as well as racism and patriarchy have been overcome.
[2] Deconstruction, by its very nature, focuses on analyzing the roots of oppression and refuses any attempt to advance positive claims regarding what might constitute just resolutions of historic injustices. While the Settler Colonialism thesis is not deconstructionist per se, it reflects the intellectual style cultivated under the hegemony of deconstruction, focusing on critique rather than program and strategy.
[3] Traditionalism is a complex trend which includes many competing tendencies. The movement emerged out of the resistance to the French Revolution on the part of the nobility, which located the basis of legitimate authority in violence and sacrifice and which argued for the validity of aristocratic privilege based on the superiority demonstrated by the Franks over the earlier Celtic inhabitants of France who they conquered. The movement favored the divine right of kings and argued that religious knowledge was dependent on faith alone, a position ultimately condemned by the First Vatican Council (de Bonald, 1796, 1800; de Maistre 1775-1821/1965). Later forms of Traditionalism focused on a rejection of the ideal of transcending finitude by means of scientific, technological and economic progress in favor of a return to the sophia perennis which constitutes the esoteric core of all of the great religions emerging out of the Axial Age (Guenon 1929/2007; Evola 1934/1995). While many “perennialists” rejected authoritarianism and racism, other elements were drawn to historic Fascism in the middle part of the last century. The European New Right represents a third wave of traditionalism defined in part by a rejection of Christianity altogether in favor of pagan reconstructionism.
[4] German Romanticism was the broader ideological matrix out of which German nationalism and nationalist theory generally emerged in the nineteenth century. Originally these nationality theories were not so much racist as simply focused on defining rigorously a definitive basis for national identity. But often the resulting ideas had an objectively racist valence. Alexander von Humboldt (von Humboldt 1836/1999), for example, argued that language reflects the underlying worldview of a people and that highly inflected languages, such as those of the Indo-European family, are fundamentally superior to others because they make it possible theorize complex relationships more adequately. Ultimately Romantic nationalism fed into both reactionary and revolutionary trends.
[5] Heidegger taught that peoples were defined an encounter with their “god,” i.e. by the advent of an ideal which is distinct and radically incommensurate with the ideals of other peoples, making history (as Weber, who upheld a similar vision, put it), a “war between the Gods.” Heidegger saw Hitler playing this role for Germany and Dugin sees Putin playing it for Russia.
[6] While I have discussed caste theories of racism under the heading of liberal theories, I believe that it is possible to develop a caste theory which is not liberal or at least not merely liberal in the sense of recognizing that the advent of capitalism does not automatically liquidate caste, and that there is in fact a complex and very powerful global caste system which operates, partly hidden, in the present period, with finely divided ethnoreligious communities ranked in terms status and, to varying degrees, associated with specific forms of labor. There is also very significant status struggle among these castes or quasi-castes, just as there has historically been in India. This is an area which requires more research, especially given the salience the thesis has within the African American community.
[7] This was a public disputation over whether or not the indigenous peoples of the Americas were fully human and thus had the same rights as Europeans.
