Palestine, June 2006. Photo by Magne Hagesæter.

Debate – a response on settler colonialism

In an ongoing debate about settler colonialism, Sai Englert responds to Jordan Humphreys’ argument that settler populations should be given more due for their potential role in revolutionary struggle, and argues for the centrality of settler colonial theory in Marxism. If we are to overthrow capitalism, we need to engage with what stabilises it. 

Read Sai’s original interview here (Parts 1 and 2), and Humphreys’ response here. 

In December, Jordan Humphreys wrote a response to my recent interview with rs21. In it, he takes issue with my characterisation of class relations within settler colonial polities and with the use of what he calls ‘settler colonial theory’ in general. I am grateful to Humphreys for taking the time to react to my piece and for sharing interesting insights from the history of the Australian labour movement. I do, however, disagree with him – both on the specific and the general. 

If I take the time to develop this disagreement, it is because I think these issues matter if we are to understand – and crucially challenge – capitalist social relations in different parts of the world. These issues are not only crucial within settler colonies themselves – the locus of Humphreys’ political activity – but for international solidarity movements as well. The current genocidal war carried out by Israel against the Palestinian people is a terrifying reminder of their importance. 

This aspect of the debate deserves to be underscored. Humphreys appears to think that the aim of my analysis is to write off the possibility of revolutionary change in settler societies. On the contrary, my aim is to contribute, however modestly, to making sense of the material realities within settler regimes, precisely because I think it is necessary to overthrow them. 

The anti-colonial potential of settler labour?

Humphreys’ primary critique is focussed on my claim that class relations within settler populations are impacted in such a way as to increase the loyalty of all settler classes to the settler state – including its working class. I make this claim on the basis that it is through the state that all settler classes organise the redistribution amongst themselves of the colonial loot accumulated through the dispossession of indigenous populations. Whether through the conquest of land on which their society is built (no roads, houses, state institutions, workplaces, etc. without land), or the access to resources, better jobs, higher wages, and labour conditions, or even through the financing from imperial backers, all settler classes are – at least potentially – given access to sources of wealth which are not the result of their labour. Instead, they are the result of the active and ongoing exclusion, expulsion, and/or murder of the Indigenous population.

As I have repeatedly shown, class struggle within settler societies is therefore also fought over the redistribution of this colonial loot, leading in turn to what I have called settler quietism: the tendency of settler workers to remain loyal to their state and failing to support Indigenous struggles for decolonisation. This tendency has very rarely been broken and it is through the revolutionary struggles of Indigenous peoples that (settler) colonial regimes have been destroyed. This of course poses real strategic questions in settler societies where genocide and mass settlement have led to the considerable outnumbering of the Indigenous population. 

However, as I have also shown repeatedly, minorities of settler workers have joined anti-colonial struggles but they have done so within the context of wider anti-capitalist commitments. The communist party in 1920s Palestine or the revolutionary syndicalist movements in Southern Africa are such examples. The reason is that within the confines of capitalist social relations, settler workers are not awarded a better deal through decolonisation. Indeed, it would mean losing their access to the colonial surplus and therefore a worsening of their standard of living. Only the destruction of a system based on exploitation and the unequal distribution of wealth can undermine their attachment to fighting for a slightly better position within the capitalist order, which settler colonial dispossession offers them. If liberated but capitalist regimes could be achieved by Indigenous struggles in South Africa, Kenya, or Algeria, it is difficult to see how settler colonialism could be destroyed in the US, Canada or Australia without a fundamental break with capitalism. This is both to acknowledge the crucial importance of anti-capitalist and Marxist politics in settler colonial contexts as well as to identify the extraordinary challenges that they are faced with. The late Mike Davis’ study of the history of the labour movement in the US, for example, is a powerful exploration of the continued political consequences of slavery and settler colonialism on the inability to develop radical mass challenges to capitalism in the heart of empire.

Humphreys’ critique of my claims is forceful. ‘Thankfully’, he reassures his readers, ‘there is little evidence … of the dynamics described by Englert’. And: ‘[T]he historical record doesn’t back him up’. This would, no doubt, be good news for socialist and anti-colonial activists everywhere: the barriers faced by their movements in these societies would be considerably easier to overcome. Unfortunately, Humphreys does not provide the promised counter reading. Instead, he describes a series of joint labour struggles between settlers and Indigenous workers over the last hundred years of Australian history. The issue, of course, is that my claim is not about the lack of joint action within given workplaces or industries between these groups of workers. There are many examples one can point to, especially within industries in which settler workers have the upper hand, either numerically or politically. The fact that, as Humphreys himself points to, these struggles took place well after the major genocidal campaigns against Indigenous people had taken place reinforces this question of the balance of forces within the working class in Australia.

The slide in Humphreys argument is visible in how he characterises my argument. Before offering his readers his counter-examples, he correctly quotes me as: ‘There are no truly mass movements of settler workers in support of decolonization’. However, after his examples, he summarises my claim instead as ‘privileged settler working class incapable of showing solidarity with Indigenous people outside of the actions of very small left wing minorities’. Very different claims indeed. It is worth noting also, that even in such examples of limited joint struggle, many of the cases mobilised by Humphreys are of campaigns led by the communist and/or socialist left – the exact groups I identified as most likely to curb the historical trend. 

The disagreement is not anodyne, nor nit-picking about the exact phrasing of an argument. The difference between anti-colonial liberation and greater – or better – integration within the colonial state or economy, is a crucial one for Indigenous populations. The latter model has taken different forms, from (semi-)imposed self-government to more recent liberal moves to recognise past (always only past!) crimes. The end goal remains the same: stabilising the colonial state and avoiding more radical breaks with the status quo. There is a real danger that the struggle for greater inclusion within the structures of the existing colonial state, undermines the movement to destroy them all together. In the words of Jody A. Byrd, writing in the North American context (p.xvii):

[the] cacophony of competing struggles for hegemony within and outside institutions of power, no matter how those struggles might challenge the state through loci of race, class, gender, and sexuality, serves to misdirect and cloud attention from the underlying structures of settler colonialism that made the United States possible as oppressor in the first place.

This is not to dismiss anti-racist struggles or struggles for better wages or working conditions as useless or hopelessly colonial. It is however to point out that the struggle against settler colonialism is a struggle for an exit out of the economic, political, and social relations imposed by the settler state (more on which below) and not a demand for a fairer integration within it. 

This being said, I do want to acknowledge that Humphreys raises an interesting question about temporality, which deserves to be thought through more seriously. He points out that these solidarity actions were possible because they took place after the largest genocidal campaigns against the Indigenous populations  were carried out throughout the 19th century. This meant that by the time the institutions of the Australian labour movement were formed, it was migrant rather than Indigenous workers who were seen as the greatest threat to a ‘white Australia’. While I do not share Humphreys confidence in neatly separating the struggle against the latter from the genocide carried out against the former – settler workers had to defend their historical gains after all – it does nonetheless underline an important change in the balance of power between settler and Indigenous populations.

This raises an interesting question about whether the ability of settler states and ruling classes to resolve internal social tensions through the increased dispossession of the Indigenous population diminishes with the advance of the settler project. Struggles over pipelines, mines, and other natural resources in Australia or North America certainly point to its continued relevance – not only for capital but also for labour, through access to jobs and cheap fuel for example. However, it might be true that they do so in a diminished way compared to the period of conquest, where bigger tracts of land could be redistributed between settlers, on a much larger scale. To say so with any confidence would require closer study.

Any value in ‘settler colonial theory’ more generally?

The argument made by Humphreys is not solely directed against my specific reading of class relations within settler societies. Instead, he raises a more fundamental rejection of what he calls ‘settler colonial theory’. The term is not explained and is used rather loosely: including simultaneously my own work and those that I critique. In fact, Humphreys appears to assume that, by definition, Marxism and the study of settler colonialism are incompatible when he declares:

Rather than using settler colonial theory to unpack these important issues, socialists should draw upon, and build upon, the rich tradition of Marxist writings on these topics to explore the specific interactions between racism and class, oppression and capitalism in any given concrete situation.

The tradition of Marxists declaring one another to be deficient Marxists, or no Marxists at all, is not new and comes with the territory. It does, however, land Humprheys in some troubled waters in this particular case. Turning his attention to the case of Zionism and Palestine, Humphreys writes:

So settler colonial theory has little to offer in terms of an analysis of the class nature of Palestinian society. It is incapable of grappling with the relationship between the different Palestinian classes and political parties and the development of capitalism in the West Bank and Gaza, let alone the broader Middle East. 

Arguments, much like empires, can suffer from overreach. One is left wondering why a socialist activist, involved in solidarity activism with the Palestinian people, is making an argument to minimise the specificities of settler colonial rule in Palestine at the precise moment when the settler regime is conducting a genocidal campaign against the Indigenous Palestinian population, demonstrating in the process these very specificities. What exactly would abandoning an analysis of settler colonialism – so central to the political analyses of the Palestinian national movement, including its Marxist wing, throughout the  20th century – contribute to the urgent work of increasing Israel’s international isolation? 

In fact, it is important to point out  that the  most important analyses of capitalism and class differentiation in Palestine have not rejected settler colonialism as an explanatory framework or set up hard divisions between it and Marxism. On the contrary, they have repeatedly highlighted how both capitalism and the ensuing social relations between the river and the sea are structured by Israel’s settler colonial regime. [1] It is difficult to see how one is to make sense of the emergence of the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian capitalists, or the nature of exploitation (and dispossession) of Palestinians on both sides of (or across) the Green Line, without accounting for ongoing military rule, settler expansion, dispossession, and mass murder of the Palestinian population – i.e settler colonialism as a structural reality. The same difficulty applies to understanding Israeli society without accounting for its settler colonial nature. 

Humphreys’ counter-posing Marxism and ‘settler colonial theory’ is not only a poor engagement with material realities in Palestine, it also points to a wider misunderstanding of what it means to carry out Marxist analysis. In my work, I have repeatedly emphasised the fact that settler colonialism should not be understood as an ideal form, ruled by its own isolated logics, let alone as a discursive practice, primarily expressed textually or as an ideology. Instead settler colonial regimes generate specific strategies of accumulation, specific social relations, and specific forms of domination, which any liberatory project needs to engage with – Marxism included. 

For example, as numerous authors have pointed out, settler colonial regimes are characterised by their need to conquer Indigenous land. This need emerges from the settlement’s role as both an outpost of empire – controlling trade routes and accumulating resources – and as a mechanism to resolve the metropolis’ internal social tensions by exporting its undesirables abroad. The struggle over land in settler colonies  is therefore not a theoretical abstraction. It is a direct outcome of the settler colonial process: to build a new society in a place where other societies already exist, means capturing the Indigenous land, dispossessing its inhabitants, and making it available to the settler population. In doing so, settler regimes develop economic, political, and legal structures which are based on the imposition of new forms of difference over the populations they rule over: settler and Indigenous; those who can dispossess and those who can do the dispossessing. [2] 

The specific ways in which different settler regimes have structured their regimes of difference have led, for example, to the emergence of different forms of racialisation. Despite the critiques I have made of some of Patrick Wolfe’s approaches, his work identifying different forms of racialisation in different times and places across the settler colonial world in Traces of History is a groundbreaking book – and one that Marxists have much to learn from. He points out, for example, how the need to dispossess Indigenous populations in North America or Australia led settlers to racialise them as having ‘weak blood’ – attempting to disappear them and their collective claim to the land through miscegenation. Enslaved African populations in the Americas, on the other hand, were constructed in the exact opposite way – as insoluble – in order to make their continued exploitation (and exclusion from ownership) possible. 

Humphreys is right, therefore, to point out that there are ‘enormous differences’ between settler populations in different historical and geographic settings. But what he misses is that they are different iterations of a specific set of material relations, structured through Indigenous dispossession. It is equally true that workers labour under very different conditions in different parts of the world, with different machines, in different racialised and gendered environments, alongside a wide array of different economic, social, and political realities. To acknowledge this is not to make the category of the worker obsolete. It is to acknowledge a particular material relation – that of capitalist production – which exists in different settings, while also recognising that the work of socialists is to understand the specific ways in which it expresses itself in these different settings. The same could be said about other forms of domination – such as franchise colonialism or imperialism for example. Would any Marxist analysis that refuses to recognise these realities and their material consequences as crucial be taken seriously?     

There are further points that would be worth making about the relevance of settler colonialism to socialist analyses, not least its crucial importance to the emergence of capitalism, through the role settler populations played in accumulating land, enslaving Indigenous populations across the so-called new world, extracting enormous amounts of natural resources, or stabilising global trade routes. Limited space does not allow me to develop these aspects further. The key point that I hope readers will take from this, however, is that the work of Marxists is not to defend an abstracted analysis of capitalism in which idealised workers and bosses confront each other in a world shaped by exploitation alone. 

Unfortunately, while capitalism universalises us through the spread of wage labour across the globe, it also divides us through a multiplicity of imposed differences. If we are to overthrow capitalism and build a different – and better – world, we need to engage with the different forms of domination that stabilise it. 

Notes

[1] See for example: Leila Farsakh (2005), Palestinian Labor Migration to Israel: Labor, Land, and Occupation, London: Routledge; Toufic Haddad (2016), Palestine Ltd: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory, London: I.B. Tauris, and Kareem Rabie (2021), Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank, Durham: Duke University Press; and more recently Adam Hanieh (2023), ‘The Oslo Accords and Palestine’s Political Economy in the Shadow of Regional Turmoil’ in Ian Parker (ed.) (2023), For Palestine: Essays from the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group, Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers.

[2] Brenna Bhandar (2018), Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership, Durham: Duke University Press; Robert Nichols (2020), Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory, Durham: Duke University Press.