Marxism And Native Americans

In a unique format of intellectual challenge and counter-challenge prominent Native Americans and Marxists debate the viability of Marxism and the prevalence of ethnocentric bias in politics, culture, and social theory. The authors examine the status of Western notions of "progress" and "development" in the context of the practical realities faced by American Indians in their ongoing struggle for justice and self-determination. This dialogue offers critical insights into the nature of ecological awareness and dialectics and into the possibility of constructing a social theory that can bridge cultural boundaries.

WINNER OF: Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book from the Caribbean Philosophical Association Canadian Political Science Association’s C.B. MacPherson Prize Studies in Political Economy Book Prize Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term “recognition” shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples’ right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics—one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism. Coulthard demonstrates how a “place-based” modification of Karl Marx’s theory of “primitive accumulation” throws light on Indigenous–state relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. This framework strengthens his exploration of the ways that the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of settler-colonial power. In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization.

In this provocative and famous book, now substantially revised and with much new material, Stanley Aronowitz lays bare the fundamental logical problems in Marxist theory with respect to nature, gender and race relations, the concept of class, and historical time. Aronowitz has written a stunning book offering an approach towards a new way of thinking about these problems, a book which will be addressed by other Marxist scholars and by students of social and cultural theory in many disciplines.

Racism after Apartheid, volume four of the Democratic Marxism series, brings together leading scholars and activists from around the world studying and challenging racism. In eleven thematically rich and conceptually informed chapters, the contributors interrogate the complex nexus of questions surrounding race and relations of oppression as they are played out in the global South and global North. Their work challenges Marxism and anti-racism to take these lived realities seriously and consistently struggle to build human solidarities.

Fox News personality and radio talk show host Levin explains how the dangers he warned against have come to pass"--

Winner of the Working-Class Studies Association C.L.R. James Award Seen as a pioneering figure in the critical study of whiteness, US historian David Roediger has sometimes received criticism, and praise, alleging that he left Marxism behind in order to work on questions of identity. This volume collects his recent and new work implicitly and explicitly challenging such a view. In his historical studies of the intersections of race, settler colonialism, and slavery, in his major essay (with Elizabeth Esch) on race and the management of labor, in his detailing of the origins of critical studies of whiteness within Marxism, and in his reflections on the history of solidarity, Roediger argues that racial division is part of not only of the history of capitalism but also of the logic of capital.

This ground-breaking text explores the intersection between dominant modes of critical educational theory and the socio-political landscape of American Indian education. Grande asserts that, with few exceptions, the matters of Indigenous people and Indian education have been either largely ignored or indiscriminately absorbed within critical theories of education. Furthermore, American Indian scholars and educators have largely resisted engagement with critical educational theory, tending to concentrate instead on the production of historical monographs, ethnographic studies, tribally-centered curricula, and site-based research. Such a focus stems from the fact that most American Indian scholars feel compelled to address the socio-economic urgencies of their own communities, against which engagement in abstract theory appears to be a luxury of the academic elite. While the author acknowledges the dire need for practical-community based research, she maintains that the global encroachment on Indigenous lands, resources, cultures and communities points to the equally urgent need to develop transcendent theories of decolonization and to build broad-based coalitions.

Examining the social and intellectual collision of the American reform tradition with immigrant Marxism during the Reconstruction era, Timothy Messer-Kruse charts the rise and fall of the International Workingman's Association (IWA), the first international socialist organization. He analyzes what attracted American reformers--many of them veterans of antebellum crusades for abolition, women's rights, and other radical causes--to the IWA, how their presence affected the course of the American Left, and why they were ultimately purged from the IWA by their orthodox Marxist comrades. Messer-Kruse explores the ideology and activities of the Yankee Internationalists, tracing the evolution of antebellum American reformers' thinking on the question of wage labor and illuminating the beginnings of a broad labor reform coalition in the early years of Reconstruction. He shows how American reformers' priority of racial and sexual equality clashed with their Marxist partners' strategy of infiltrating trade unions. Ultimately, he argues, Marxist demands for party discipline and ideological unity proved incompatible with the Yankees' native republicanism. With the expulsion of Yankee reformers from the IWA in 1871, American Marxism was divorced from the American reform tradition.