THE CAPITALIST SETTLER COLONY KNOWN AS THE USA
Settler colonialism is a type of colonization where a group of people, called settlers, come to a new land and stay there, taking land away from the Indigenous people who already live there. This involves force, violence, and eventually laws that push Native people off their land, replacing them with a colony of one sort or another. Unlike other forms of colonialism, where the colonizers might rule from afar, settlers aim to stay permanently and maintain their own society.
This form of colonization erases the existence of Indigenous communities and the structure of what is their typically more communal society, while trying to transform the land for the settlers’ use and benefit. Settlers claim that they have a right to the land, asserting that it was empty or unclaimed, even though there are already communities living there with their own cultures and ways of life.
For the USA, founding myths such as the “cult of the covenant,” “manifest destiny,” “land of opportunity,” and “Protestant work ethic” collectively forge a story that sustains the settler colony, its white supremacy, and its capitalist engine of exploitation. To start, the “cult of the covenant” is a foundational belief for American settlers. It refers to the Christian belief that says the land was divinely given to European settlers by God in a “manifest destiny.” This is a way to justify genocidal expansion across Native territories, claiming God gave them a mandate to make something better than what the “savages” built.
The supposed “land of opportunity” then presents the USA as a place that was made unique through violent colonization. It became a place where anyone can achieve prosperity and success in what we now call the middle class American Dream. Because of this supposedly equal opportunity, anyone who isn’t achieving economic success is thus an inferior human. This both fosters a story to further justify settler occupation in the name of preserving this unique place for the superior humans who will succeed, while also justifying the domination and even extermination of those who do not.
The “Protestant work ethic” adds even more to this story by integrating capitalist values into what becomes the “ideal” settler identity of being a duty bound, hard worker who’s focused on attaining and retaining that American Dream. This links being a worker with moral worthiness, itself related to the idea of racial superiority, that those who struggle economically are inferior humans who’ve failed to live up to “whiteness.” This whiteness takes on a related dual role, one where to be white is just another way of saying civilized, while civilization itself is supposedly the unique result of inherently industrious white people.
Settler colonists perceive themselves as innocent of historical injustices, despite benefiting from systems of oppression up to and including the present day. This psychological phenomenon allows settler populations to sidestep accountability for not only the historical violence and dispossession of the Indigenous, but the ongoing violence required to sustain the colony. The cross-class mindset of imagined racial sameness creates a false unity that masks the historical and ongoing genocide required to maintain the colony and its idealized settler middle classes.
Rather than solidarity among working classes and the otherwise marginalized, this cross-class mind-set creates an illusion of solidarity across class lines among settlers, suggesting a shared identity based solely on middle class whiteness, rather than class struggle for decolonial socialist revolution. Rather than keeping a colony where everyone competes and struggles to get by, we settlers have the power to fundamentally transform the colony through a revolution that returns the land to the Indigenous, while, at the same time, build a communal society that benefits all those who’ve been left behind.
