“No one is illegal on stolen land”
An appeal to Dallas Goldtooth and his followers to discover relevant questions
Dallas Goldtooth recently posted on Instagram:
No One Is Illegal on Stolen Land
This phrase questions the legitimacy of a settler-colonial state enforcing immigration laws on land it took by force and genocide. It rejects the idea that people lose their human rights for “illegally” crossing arbitrary colonial borders. Especially when those borders were established through the violent displacement of Indigenous peoples.
It reminds us that as a settler-state, the US exists due to colonization, past and ongoing. And lastly, given that many migrants from the global south are of Indigenous blood, the phrase elevates the shared experience of colonized violence.
It’s a form of kinship, recognizing the relationships between each other and how such relationships not only transcend these arbitrary borders BUT often PREDATE THEM.
The notion that the United States of America ought to be seen as a settler state, thereby lacking the legitimacy to regulate its borders, is an idealist notion, based on a selective, superficial reading of human history. Such an idealist claim would have had ideological and political value in the USA in the late 1960s and early 1970s, contributing to the awakening of anti-imperialist consciousness. But in today’s political reality, it is politically immature individualist attention grabbing; it does not advance the construction of a more just world.
In today’s worldwide movement of anti-imperialist states seeking a more just and democratic world order, no one suggests that any of the 193 recognized States of the world community do not have legitimacy as States, or that they do not have the right to regulate movement across their national borders. Indeed, the Cuban Revolutionary Government explicitly calls for a legal, orderly, and safe process of international migration; and it has undertaken negotiations with the US government, seeking agreement on this matter.
To be sure, the spectacular economic ascent of the United States from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the twentieth centuries was based on the violent and deceitful acquisition of vast territory west of the Appalachian Mountains, along with other factors. But that violent territorial acquisition cannot now be undone. The key question today is, where do we go from here?
The European settlement and conquest of North America was part of a larger process of European conquest, colonial domination, and economic peripheralization of the world from 1492 to 1968. Many of the conquered peoples initially responded with violent resistance, including the nomadic horse cultures of the Great Plains of North America in the late 1800s, among whom was the Lakota war leader Crazy Horse, whose personal bravery and exhortations to his warriors during the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn are the basis for his permanent legacy.
But once the European conquest of the world became an established and irreversible fact, resistance to colonialism necessarily took a different form. Some called for a restoration of the pre-conquest reality, particularly in areas where pre-colonial institutions had survived to a certain level. But the great majority among the colonized recognized the practical impossibility of pre-colonial restoration, in spite of its attractiveness psychologically and emotionally.
New leaders for the new stage of colonial resistance emerged. They too became the stuff of legend: Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Sukarno, Nehru, Nasser, Nkrumah, Lumumba, Nyerere, Sandino, Fidel, and Allende, among others, who were anticipated by Toussaint. Their approach was to appropriate structures imposed by colonialism and to transform them. They formed movements that strove to take control of governments imposed by colonialism, including their territorial boundaries (with a few exceptions). In the process, they appropriated Western philosophical concepts of natural rights, declaring that said rights apply fully to the colonized peoples, as an inseparable part of humanity. Their struggles forced the Western colonial powers to concede political independence, thus provoking a transition to a neocolonial world-system directed by the United States, replacing a world of competing European colonial empires.
Upon seeing that neocolonialism did not constitute true independence, the colonized peoples advanced further in their transformation of Western political philosophy. They now declared that natural God-given rights include not only political and civil rights but also socioeconomic rights, and they include the rights of nations to sovereignty, to control of their lands and natural resources, and to development.
In that historic moment of transition from competing colonial empires to a US-directed neocolonial world-system, what truly was necessary was structural transformation toward a just, democratic, post-colonial world-system. Such a transformation was compelled by objective conditions: the world-system had reached and overextended the geographical and ecological limits of the earth, such that there were no longer new peoples and territories to conquer in order to fuel the continued expansion of the capitalist world-economy. Moreover, such a transformation was compelled by global political conditions: the colonized peoples were developing an ideological and economic capacity to resist neocolonialism, thus driving up the costs of Western imperialism.
But Western elites were incapable of discerning the need for a new world order that would respect the sovereignty of nations. Victims of self-induced group ignorance, they developed new forms of imperialism: wars and military occupations based on Cold War ideological pretexts; the imposition of neoliberal economic policies, justified by free-market ideology; the launching of new wars of aggression, justified by a so-called war on terrorism; and multidimensional unconventional wars, based on the supposed authoritarianism of targeted States. The new imperialist policies, implemented when imperialism no longer had a positive function, deepened the structural crisis of the world-system and the incapacity of global elites to rectify its contradictions.
The decadence of the neocolonial world-system has given rise, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, to a new stage of anti-colonial resistance. Fidel and Chávez were exceptional leaders in forging this new stage, and they soon were joined by China’s Xi Jinping. China, Vietnam, and Cuba have reconceptualized the theory and practice of socialism, focusing on State direction of the economy in accordance with a national economic plan, which includes space in determined economic sectors for domestic and foreign capital; while maintaining and deepening structures of people’s democracy, as an alternative to bourgeois representative democracy. Said movement for socialist construction from the Global East and South is joined with a larger anti-imperialist struggle of States of the Global South for a more just, democratic, and sustainable multipolar world order, which includes the establishment of regional and international associations to promote mutually beneficial trade among nations, seeking to nullify the unequal exchange inherent in neocolonial structures.
The current movements for socialist construction and for a post-colonial world order are in harmony with Marx’s concept of dialectical materialism, which envisions the unfolding of a Hegelian dialectic in the material world, thus discerning meaning and purpose in human history. Applied to European colonial domination and its resolution, dialectical materialism sees the force of European domination (thesis), which gives rise to anti-colonial resistance (antithesis), which is resolved through the cooperative construction of a just, sustainable, post-colonial world order, driven by the moral and political force of the colonized but including the cooperation and the advanced technology of the colonizer (synthesis).
Dialectical materialism sees a positive consequence of the colonial process. Colonial domination contributed to the economic development of the colonizer, which facilitated great advances in productivity and technology. Its great defect was that it promoted the underdevelopment of the colonized, resulting in a structural inequality in the distribution of goods and services as well as the incapacity of the colonized to constitute itself as a subject in its own development. The rectification of this defect is what has driven the resistance of the colonized in the stage of antithesis. The resolution, now unfolding in the real world in the stage of synthesis, involves the appropriation of the world system’s financial resources and technological developments as the common possession of humanity for the common good of all, implemented through cooperation between colonizer and colonized. In this way, the colonial process ultimately leads to great advances in science and technology, equally and justly distributed, thus making possible a new age of peace and prosperity.
I now turn to the question of the dialectical relation between conquest and development in pre-modern history.