I was recently in a conversation with a self-described MagaCommunist who held the position that the primary contradiction in the USA was that the financial owning class owned all of the means of production and that the contradictions of settler colonialism were secondary and could only be resolved through a workers’ state.
I realized that I hold the position that settler colonialism is the primary contradiction in the USA, but I also found that I struggled to articulate it effectively. I’m looking for your own thoughts or writings that I can study to learn more on this topic.
I would argue that the primary contradiction in the imperial core is neither monopoly finance capital nor settler colonialism (except perhaps in places like Hawaii and some of the European overseas territories, and of course occupied Palestine where settler colonialism is obviously and by a wide margin the primary contradiction), though both are of course major existing contradictions, but rather imperialism itself.
So long as imperialism continues to loot the rest of the world and use those spoils to keep the imperial core population placated, neither decolonization nor a communist revolution are likely to find fertile ground to grow in. Anti-imperialism needs to be the primary concern of communists as well as non-communist advocates of decolonization in the imperial core.
The good news on this front is that the more the global south develops (which on the whole is currently happening at a rapid pace, barring a few setbacks here and there), the weaker the grip of imperialism becomes and the more other, presently suppressed contradictions begin to come to the forefront in the imperial core. We have been seeing signs of this for a while in the social tensions that have given rise to the new wave of far right movements both in Europe and the US.
its a very complex issue since such a movement would hardly gain any support in the imperial core since anti-imperialism directly hits their living standards, which is also why communist parties in the imperial core are just social imperialist populists, i ultimately think that nothing good will come out of the imperial core and no one should expect anything out of them.
I think if you live in the imperial core adopting Lenin’s revolutionary defeatism is the only correct position, that is ensuring that your country and the broader imperialist camp lose the new cold war against the global south, economically, politically and militarily. This is the only way for the conditions necessary for a real revolution to be created, is for the West to lose and lose decisively in its attempt to keep the global south subjugated and underdeveloped, and thus to lose access to the free resources and wealth that it extracts from its neo-colonial relationship with the global south.
This means opposing any form of sanctions or political meddling in the affairs of other countries, opposing any form of militarism or re-arming, joining the anti-war movement, and standing in solidarity with all (real) enemies of western imperialism regardless of the nature of their social and economic systems.
If there will be a revolutionary movement within the imperial core it will come from undocumented workers and prison labor.
This strikes me as fertile ground. So if the primary contradiction in the USA is imperialism, anti-imperialism would therefore necessarily entail smashing the ready-made apparatus of the state - and specifically that apparatus which serves imperialism: the military, the stock market, the banking systems, the IMF, the WTO, the various treaties, the oil and natural gas frameworks, the telephone and Internet frameworks, the media and IP frameworks, etc.
Is that generally the direction you’re pointing?
Sure. All those things. Anything to weaken the power of imperialism. But don’t discount labor organizing. That also has a beneficial effect as it highlights the contradictions of capitalism, and we as Marxists understand that the declining rate of profit makes it impossible to go back to old concessions that the working class used to get. This heightens the class struggle in a time when there is less and less imperialist plunder to go around (if the global south continues to develop its own productive forces) and more factions are fighting over it.
My point was that if you organized labor, and then seized the state, if you didn’t smash the ready-made apparatus of the state, then you would have a labor aristocratic party holding the reins of an imperialist power and without smashing them, they would maintain the contradictions of imperialism.