In 1882, Engels took up the subject of the English settler colonies in a letter to Karl Kautsky, writing:
As I see it, the colonies proper, i.e., the countries occupied by European settlers, such as Canada, the Cape [South Africa], Australia, will all become independent; on the other hand, countries that are merely ruled [by colonial powers] and are inhabited by natives, such as India, Algeria and the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish possessions, will have to be temporarily taken over by the proletariat and guided as rapidly as possible towards independence. How this process will develop is difficult to say. India may, indeed very probably will, start a revolution…. The same thing could also happen elsewhere, say in Algeria and Egypt, and would certainly suit us [that is, the socialist struggle in Europe] best.[19]
Imperialism and Settler Colonialism
Lenin quoted in 1916 from Engels’s 1882 letter to Kautsky, including the reference to “colonies proper,” and clearly agreed with Engels’s analysis.[20] But the Comintern was slow to take up the question of settler colonialism. This was only to occur at the Second Congress on the National and Colonial Questions in 1928, in the “Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies,” which was meant to provide a critique of the entire “imperialist world system,” of which settler colonialism was considered to be a key part. A sharp distinction was drawn between settler colonies and other colonies. As the Comintern document stated:
In regard to the colonial countries it is necessary to distinguish between those colonies of the capitalist countries which have served them as colonising regions for their surplus population, and which in this way have become a continuation of their capitalist system (Australia, Canada, etc.), and those colonies which are exploited by the imperialists primarily as markets for their commodities, as sources of raw material and as spheres for the export of capital. This distinction has not only a historic but also a great economic and political significance.
The colonies of the first type on the basis of their general development become “Dominions,” that is, members of the given imperialist system, with equal, or nearly equal, rights. In them, capitalist development reproduces among the immigrant white population the class structure of the metropolis, at the same time that the native population, was for the most part, exterminated. There cannot be there any talk of the [externally based] colonial regime in the form that it shows itself in the colonies of the second type.
Between these two types is to be found a transitional type (in various forms) where, alongside the numerous native population, there exists a very considerable population of white colonists (South Africa, New Zealand, Algiers, etc.). The bourgeoisie, which has come from the metropolis, in essence represents in these countries (emigrant colonies) nothing else than a colonial “prolongation” of the bourgeoisie of the metropolis.[21]
The Comintern went on to conclude that,
The metropolis is interested to a certain extent in the strengthening of its capitalist subsidiary in the colonies, in particular when this subsidiary of imperialism is successful in enslaving the original native population or even in completely destroying it. On the other hand, the competition between various imperialist systems for influence in the semi-independent countries [with large settler populations] can lead also to their breaking off from the metropolis.[22]
What emerged in the analysis of the Comintern by 1928, therefore, building on the earlier work of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, was a conception of settler colonialism as an integral part of a general theory of the imperialist world system. In the view of the Comintern, race, which was now no longer seen primarily in biological terms, but was increasingly viewed through the lens of cultural resistance—as in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois—was brought into the argument more explicitly with the concept of “whiteness,” emphasizing that these were “white” settler colonies.[23] The Comintern declaration on settler colonialism was concurrent with the first Palestinian treatments of the subject in the 1920s and ’30s.[24]
Also in the 1920s, Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui wrote of the Spanish “practice of exterminating the Indigenous population and the destruction of their institutions.… The Spanish colonizers,” he noted, “introduced to Peru a depopulation scheme.” This was, however, followed by the “enslavement” and then “assimilation of the Indians,” moving away from the exterminism of pure settler colonialism as the demand for labor became the dominant consideration. Here the primary objective of colonization, as Mariátegui recognized, had shifted from the expropriation of the land of Indigenous populations, and thus their erasure, to an emphasis on the exploitation of their labor power.[25]
The Comintern was dissolved by the Soviet Union in 1943 at a critical moment in the Second World War as a way of demonstrating that the defeat of Nazi Germany came before all else. The notion of settler colonialism, however, was carried over into dependency theory after the Second World War by the Marxist economist Paul A. Baran, then a professor at Stanford University. Baran had been born in Tsarist Russia and received his economics training in the Soviet Union, Germany, and the United States. He linked the Comintern doctrine on settler colonialism to the question of development and underdevelopment.
Writing in 1957, in The Political Economy of Growth, Baran distinguished “between the impact of Western Europe’s entrance into North America (and Australia and New Zealand) on one side, and the ‘opening up’ by Western capitalism of Asia, Africa, or Eastern Europe,” on the other. In the former case, Western Europeans “settled” as permanent residents, after eliminating the original inhabitants, arriving with “capitalism in their bones,” and establishing a society that was “from the outset capitalist in structure.”[26]
However, the situation was different with respect to Asia and Africa:
Where climate and the natural environment were such as possibly to invite Western European settlers, they were faced with established societies with rich and ancient cultures, still pre-capitalist or in the embryonic state of capitalist development. Where the existing social organizations were primitive and tribal, the general conditions and in particular the climate were such as to preclude any mass settlement of Western European arrivals. Consequently, in both cases the Western European visitors rapidly determined to extract the largest possible gains from the host countries and to take their loot home.[27]
In this way, Baran clearly contrasted the two types of colonialism, linking each to the regime of capitalist accumulation. While European white settler colonies in North America and Australasia extirpated the original inhabitants and expropriated the land, laying the ground for internal accumulation, the wider European colonial plundering of ancient and rich societies, as in the cases of India, Java, and Egypt, fed the Industrial Revolution in England (and elsewhere in Western Europe), providing it with much of the original capital for development. In the process, preexisting civilizations and cultures were disarticulated. Their communal and collective social relations, as Rosa Luxemburg emphasized, were necessarily “annihilated” by capitalism.[28]
In dependency theory from the start, white settler colonies thus stood as an exception within colonialism as a whole. Baran noted but did not analyze the role of slavery in “the primary accumulation of capital” and the development of settler colonialism. For Marx, the transatlantic slave trade was the “pedestal” on which both the accumulation of capital in the plantation South of the United States and the British cotton industry at the heart of the Industrial Revolution were to rest.[29]
In the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, settler colonialism theory became a major focus within Marxism due to struggles then occurring in Africa and Palestine. A key figure in the analysis of settler colonialism was Frantz Fanon. Originally from the French colony of Martinique, Fanon fought with the French Free Forces in the Second World War, studied psychiatry in France, and eventually joined the National Liberation Front of the Algerian Revolution. He was the author most notably of Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Influenced by both G. W. F. Hegel and Marx, Fanon applied Hegel’s master-slave dialectic to the colonizer-colonized relation in the Algerian context, accounting for the logic of violence characterizing settler colonialism and exploring the continuing search for recognition on the part of the Indigenous Algerians.[30] Critical considerations of settler colonialism were also inspired by the revolt of the Land and Freedom Army in Kenya against white settlers and plantation owners between 1952 and 1960, which led to the death in combat or execution of upwards of ten thousand Africans.[31]
In 1965, the Palestinian-Syrian scholar Fayez A. Sayegh wrote a pamphlet, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, published by the Palestine Liberation Organization, arguing that “Zionist colonialism” was “essentially incompatible with the continued existence of the ‘native population’ in the coveted country,” and had as its goal the creation of a “settler community.”[32] Two years later, in the midst of the Arab-Israeli War, French Marxist Maxime Rodinson, whose parents had both perished in Auschwitz, published his landmark work, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? Rodinson commenced by stating that “The accusation that Israel is a colonialist phenomenon is advanced by an almost unanimous Arab intelligentsia, whether on the right or the left. It is one case where Marxist theorizing has come forward with the clearest response to the requirements of ‘implicit ideology’ of the Third World and has been widely adopted.” He saw settler colonialism as linked to “the worldwide system of imperialism” and opposed to “indigenous liberation movements.” For Rodinson, Zionism thus represented “colonialism in the [classical] Greek sense,” that is, in the sense of the Athenian cleruchy, which eliminated/removed the native populations and replaced them with settlers. Settler colonialism directed at the extermination and displacement of the Indigenous peoples/nations, he indicated, had also occurred in colonial Ireland and Tasmania. Given this underlying logic, “It is possible that war is the only way out of the situation created by Zionism. I leave it to others to find cause for rejoicing in this.” Israel, Rodinson added, was not simply a settler-colonial country, but participated in imperialist exploitation and expansion abroad.[33]
Arghiri Emmanuel, the pioneering Greek Marxist economist and theorist of unequal exchange, had worked in commerce in the Belgian Congo in what seems to have been his family textile firm in the late 1930s and again in the late ’40s before relocating to France in 1958. In his time in Congo, he had encountered the white settler community there, part of which was Greek.[34] In 1969, he published his classic work Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade. In that work, Emmanuel addressed the issue of settler colonialism or “colonialism of settlement.” Here he made a distinction between, on the one hand, England’s four main “colonies of settlement”—the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which had introduced a policy of exterminism against the Indigenous population—and, on the other, the fifth such settlement, namely South Africa, where the native population had not been subjected to exterminism to the same extent. In South Africa, the Indigenous Africans were “relegated to the ghettos of apartheid,” allowing for the superexploitation of their labor by a substantial white minority.[35]
In Emmanuel’s theory of unequal exchange, wages were treated as an independent variable, based on Marx’s notion of their historically determined character. Viewed from this standpoint, Emmanuel argued that in the first four colonies of settlement, the high wages of the white workers who constituted the majority of the population had promoted rapid capital accumulation. However, in South Africa, the fifth settler colony, the wages of the majority-Black population were abysmally low, with the result being a “semideveloped” condition. Emmanuel criticized dependency theorist Andre Gunder Frank for explaining the development of the British white settler colonies primarily in culturalist terms. Rather, it was the high wages of the white settlers that promoted development.[36]
This argument was developed further in Emmanuel’s “White-Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism,” published in New Left Review in 1972. Here he dealt with the frequent conflict that arose between settler colonists and the imperial powers that had given rise to them, since white settler states emerged as rivals of European colonial states, no longer subjected as easily to colonial exploitation. This dialectic led to struggles with the metropoles, most of them unsuccessful, by settlers attempting to create independent white colonial states. Here Emmanuel drew on his own experiences in the Belgian Congo. However, he put this whole dynamic in the context of the history of settler colonialism more broadly, as in Ireland and Israel/Palestine.[37]
Other Marxist theorists were to enter into the analysis of settler colonialism at this time, particularly with respect to Africa, relating it to dependency theory. In 1972, shortly after the publication of Emmanuel’s “White Settler Colonialism” article, Egyptian French Marxist economist Samir Amin discussed “settler colonization” in his article on “Underdevelopment and Dependence of Black Africa—Origins and Contemporary Forms,” mainly with respect to the failed attempts at settler colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa. Amin distinguished settler colonialism from what he called “Africa of the colonial trade economy,” relying on monopolies of trade, the colonial import-export house, and the mobilization of workers through labor reserves. Later, Amin was to write about settler colonialism in Israel, which he saw as similar to the way in which the “Red Indians” in North America were “hunted and exterminated,” but which was to be viewed in Israel’s case as intrinsically related to a wider monopoly capitalist/imperialist trajectory led by the United States aimed at global domination.[38]
For Marxist theory throughout this period, the concept of settler colonialism was viewed as crucial in defining the development of colonialism and imperialism as a whole. In 1974, writing for the Encyclopedia Britannica, Harry Magdoff underscored that colonialism took
two forms, or some combination of the two: (1) the removal of the indigenous peoples by killing them off or forcing them into specially reserved areas, thus providing room for settlers from Western Europe who then developed the agriculture and industry of these lands under the social system imported from the mother countries; or (2) the conquest of the indigenous peoples and the transformation of their existing societies to suit the changing needs of the more powerful militarily and technically advanced nations.[39]
A breakthrough in the Marxian analysis of settler colonialism occurred with the publication of the Australian historian Kenneth Good’s “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation” in The Journal of Modern African Studies in 1976. Good drew on Marx’s notion of “so-called primitive accumulation” and on dependency theory to provide a broader, more integrated perspective on settler colonialism in its various forms. Looking at Africa, he discussed “settler states” and what he termed “colon societies,” where exterminism and settlement were “particularly heavy.” Such colon societies included “Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Cape Colony in South Africa” Much of his focus was on the colonies of settlement in Africa that, for one reason or another, did not conform to the full logic of exterminism/elimination, but which were ruled by dominant minorities of white settlers, as in Algeria, Kenya, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and South Africa. In these colonies, the object was the control of African labor as well as land, leading to apartheid-style states. Like Emmanuel, Good was primarily concerned with the complex, contradictory relation of the reactionary colons to the external colonial metropole.[40]
In 1983, J. Sakai, associated with the Black Liberation Army in the United States, wrote Settlers: The Myth of the White Proletariat.[41] Sakai’s work has often been dismissed as ultraleft in its interpretation, given its extreme position that there is effectively no such thing as a progressive white working class in the context of settler colonialism in the United States, thereby extending Lenin’s labor aristocracy notion to the entire “white proletariat.” Nevertheless, some of the insights provided in Sakai’s work connecting settler colonialism and racial capitalism were significant, and Settlers was referenced by such important Marxists thinkers on capitalism and race as David Roediger in his Wages of Whiteness and David Gilbert in No Surrender.[42]
Settler Colonialism as an Academic Paradigm
Dunbar-Ortiz’s landmark 1992 article on “Aboriginal People and Imperialism in the Western Hemisphere” explored the massive die-down in the early centuries following the European arrival. She described the historical connections between “colonialism and exterminism,” focusing on the U.S. context.[43] However, in the 1980s and ’90s, Marxist investigations into settler colonialism were less evident, due to the general retreat from imperialism theory on the part of much of the Western Left in the period.[44] There was also the problem of how to integrate settler colonialism’s effects on Indigenous populations into the understanding of imperialism in general, since the latter was directed much more at the Global North’s exploitation of the Global South than at settler colonial relations internalized in parts of the Global North.
This changed with the introduction of a definite settler colonialism paradigm in the universities internationally, evolving out of postcolonial studies. Settler colonialism as an academic field had its genesis in 1999 with Wolfe’s Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. Its formal structure was derived from two premises introduced by Wolfe: (1) settler colonialism represented a “logic of elimination,” encompassing at one and the same time annihilation, removal, and assimilation; and (2) settler colonialism was a “structure rather than an event.”[45] The first premise recognized that settler colonialism was directed at the expropriation of the land, while Indigenous peoples who were attached to the land were seen as entirely expendable. The second premise underscored that settler colonialism was a realized structure in the present, not simply confined to the past, and had taken on a logic rooted in a permanent settler occupation.
Methodologically, Wolfe’s treatment was Weberian rather than Marxist. Settler colonialism was presented as an ideal type that excluded all but a few cases.[46] The logic of elimination was seen as only really viable when it was historically realized in an inviolable structure. In countries where the logic of settler colonialism had been introduced, but had not been fully realized, this was not characterized as settler colonialism by Wolfe. Indeed, any move toward the exploitation of the labor of the Indigenous population, rather than their elimination from the land, disqualified a country from being considered settler colonialist. According to this definition, Algeria was not a settler colonial society any more than Kenya, South Africa, or Rhodesia. As Wolfe put it, “in contradiction to the kind of colonial formation that [Amilcar] Cabral or Fanon confronted, settler colonies were not primarily established to extract surplus value from indigenous labour.”[47] Likewise, Latin America, due to the sheer complexity of its “hybrid” ethnic composition, along with its employment of Indigenous labor, was seen by Wolfe as outside the logic of settler colonialism.[48]
Wolfe’s reliance on a Weberian methodological individualism resulted in his tracing of settler colonialism to the type of the settler. While there was such a thing as a settler colonial state, this was secondary to the ideal type of the settler.[49] Settler colonialism became its own abstract logic, entirely separated from other forms of colonialism and from imperialism. This one-sided, idealist methodology has been central to the development of settler colonialism as an academic study, removing it from the Marxist tradition (and from Indigenous traditions) from which the concept had arisen.[50]
Wolfe, by the time that he introduced his settler colonial model, had already established himself as a distinguished figure on the non-Marxist/anti-Marxist left. In 1997, two years before the publication of his seminal text on settler colonialism, he published an article entitled “History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory” for the American Historical Review, which was remarkable in the sheer number of misconceptions it promoted and in the depth of its polemic against Marxism. According to Wolfe, “the definitional space of imperialism [in left discourse] becomes a vague, consensual gestalt.” Marx was a pro-colonialist/pro-imperialist and Eurocentric thinker who saw colonialism as a “Malthusian” struggle of existence; Lenin, was part of the “post-Marxian” debate on imperialism” that began with social liberal John Hobson and that led to positions diametrically opposite to those of Marx; dependency theory turned Marxism “on its head”; world-systems theory was opposed to orthodox Marxism on imperialism, as was Emmanuel’s unequal exchange theory. Finally, “a notorious color blindness” suffused Marxism as a whole, which was principally characterized by economic determinism. In writing a history of imperialism theory, Wolfe remarkably neglected to discuss Lenin’s analysis at all, beyond a few offhand negative comments. He ended his article with a reference to settler colonialism, which he failed to relate to its theoretical origins, but approached in terms of postcolonial theory, claiming that it offered “discursive distinctions which survive the de-territorialization of imperialism.” It therefore could be seen as constituting the place to “start” if imperialism were to be resisted in the present.[51]
In contrast to Marx, with his two types of settler colonialism, and distinct from most subsequent Marxist theorists, Wolfe promoted a notion of settler colonialism that was so dependent on a pure “logic of elimination,” emanating from settler farmers, that he approached plantation slavery in the southern part of the antebellum United States as simply the negative proof of the existence of settler colonialism in the northern part. “Black people in the plantation South were racialized as slaves,” whose purpose in racial capitalism was to carry out plantation labor, thus distinguishing them from Native Americans due to the purely eliminatory logic imposed on the latter. The distinction, although a sharp one in some ways, relied on a notion of settler colonialism as constituting an ideal type associated with a specific form of social action carried out by settlers. As a result, the real complexity of colonialism/imperialism, of which settler colonialism is simply a part, was lost. Wolfe saw the removal of Indigenous labor from the antebellum South as a precondition for the mixing of “the Red man’s land…with Black labor.” But after that event, settler colonialism as a structure no longer applied directly to the U.S. South. Native Americans, Wolfe argued, were subject to genocide, and Black people to slavery. With respect to African-Americans, he wrote, “the genocidal tribunal is the wrong court.”[52]
Wolfe’s approach also tended to leave Africa out of the picture. According to Robin D. G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose research focuses on critical thought and movements associated with the African Diaspora, “By not incorporating more of the globe in his study, Wolfe’s particular formulation of settler colonialism delimits more than it reveals.” By excluding Africa, which did not fit into his pure eliminatory logic, Wolfe “presumes that indigenous people exist only in the Americas and Australasia…. Consequently, settler colonialism on the African continent falls out of Wolfe’s purview…. The exclusion of southern Africa and similar social formations from the definition of settler colonialism…obscures its global and transnational character.” In Africa, according to Kelley’s cogent formulation, “the European colonists wanted land and the labor, but not the people—that is to say, they sought to eliminate stable communities and their cultures of resistance.”[53]
As Sai Englert, author of Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, observed in a critique of Wolfe, the “sharp distinction between settler colonialism” and other forms of colonialism “is difficult to square with reality. On the one hand, elimination and genocide are a reality across the colonial world by means of war, famine, forced or enslaved labour, and mass murder. On the other hand, many settler colonial regimes were based primarily on the exploitation of the Indigenous populations.”[54]
Wolfe’s academic paradigm of settler colonialism following his death in 2016 was most influentially carried forward by Veracini, author of a wide array of works on the subject and the founding editor of the journal Settler Colonial Studies. Veracini, in a contradictory fashion, sought to adhere to Wolfe’s restrictive definition of settler colonialism, while at the same time giving it a more global and all-encompassing significance. He did this by separating “settler colonialism” entirely from “colonialism” and in effect subsuming the latter in the former. Thus, settler colonialism became the measuring stick for judging colonialism generally. As Veracini wrote in his Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, “This book is a reflection on settler colonialism as distinct from colonialism…. I propose to see…as analytically distinct, colonialism with settlers and settler colonialism.” Key to Veracini’s method was the postulate that settler colonialism was not a subtype of colonialism, but a separate entity, “antithetical” to colonialism. The notion of imperialism, as opposed to mere references to “imperial expansion,” disappeared almost altogether in his analysis. Figures like Emmanuel received dismissive treatment.[55]
In a confused and contradictory series of transpositions, the concept of settler colonialism metamorphosed in the work of Veracini into an all-encompassing eliminatory logic. Wolfe had seen the classical-liberal notion of primitive accumulation—a concept that, in its bourgeois “nursery tale” form, was subjected to a harsh critique by Marx—as being “inseparable from the inception of settler colonialism,” essentially equating the two concepts.[56] Prior to this, Marxist geographer David Harvey had transposed the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historical concept of original or primitive accumulation into a suprahistorical spatial notion of “accumulation by dispossession.” Going beyond both Wolfe and Harvey, Veracini proceeded to transpose Harvey’s neologism into the cognate “accumulation without reproduction,” standing for the “eliminatory logic” of settler colonialism. Accumulation without reproduction was then seen as applying to all forms of eliminatory and predatory logic, with the result that all instances of world oppression, wherever direct economic exploitation was not concerned, including issues such as climate change, could be “most productively approached within a settler-colonial studies paradigm.”[57]
In this way, not only colonialism, imperial expansion, and racial capitalism, but also the global ecological crisis, ecological debt, and the financialization of the globe, in Veracini’s expanded conception, all fell under the settler colonial paradigm, representing a dominant logic of globalized elimination. Veracini has laid great emphasis on the fact that the United States as the hegemonic power in the world today is to be seen primarily as a settler colonialist, rather than as an imperialist, power. Not surprisingly, the concept of “imperialism” was absent from his Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview.[58]
The theoretical distinction between a Marxist analysis of imperialism/colonialism with settler colonialism as one of its forms, and the new academic paradigm in which settler colonialism is seen as its own discrete, self-determining phenomenon rooted in the type of the settler, could not be more different. This can be perceived in the way thinkers like Wolfe and Veracini approached the Israeli state’s violent occupation of Palestine. Wolfe went so far as to criticize Rodinson’s classic interpretation of Israeli settler colonialism on the basis that, for the latter, this was a European (and North American) imperialist project, while, for Wolfe himself, settler colonialism was defined at all times by the role of autonomous settlers disconnected from the metropole. Rodinson’s argument, Wolfe claimed, did not explain why the Israeli project is specifically “a settler-colonial one.” But such a view relied once again on the abstraction of the settler as a distinct ideal type, giving rise to settler colonialism separated off from other social categories, thereby running counter to a holistic historical inquiry. In this view, the imperial metropoles, whatever role they had in the beginning—and, in Wolfe’s argument, Israel was unique in that it was constituted by “diffuse metropoles”—are, by definition, no longer directly implicated in what the autonomous settler colonies choose to do. Indeed, in some non-Marxist analyses, the metropoles are now seen as the helpless victims of the settler colonies, simply locked into a common cultural history from which there is no escape. Lost here is the reality that Israel is, for Washington, a garrison colony within the larger U.S./NATO-based strategy of global imperialist domination.[59]
For Veracini, as for Wolfe, in writing on Palestine, the emphasis is on the absolute autonomy of settler colonies, which are then seen as completely self-determining. Israel’s occupation of Palestine is a case in point. This meant that the whole question of the imperialist world system’s role in the Israeli-Palestine conflict is largely denied. To be sure, Veracini has indicated that the potential remained for a reestablishment of a settler colony’s dependence on the core imperial powers (a point specifically directed at Israel) that could lead to its external “recolonization.” But this is seen as unlikely.[60]
Within what has become in the mainstream settler colonial paradigm, therefore, the approach to Israel’s occupation of Palestine is worlds away from that of historical materialism. Rather than relying on a very restrictive logic, Marxist analysis seeks to place the reality of Israeli settler colonialism in a wider and more dynamic historical perspective that grasps the complex and changing dialectical relations of capitalism, class, and imperialism/militarism.
Here it is important to note Israel/Palestine is demographically unique in the history of settler colonialism, since rather than either a definite majority or a powerful minority of colonizers emerging, there is a rough equality in numbers overall. Over seven million Israelis live in present-day Israel and the West Bank in 2022, and some seven million Palestinians live in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Israel, and East Jerusalem. Given the significantly higher birth rates of Palestinians, this is viewed by Israel as a demographic threat to its logic as a Zionist settler colonial state. Tel Aviv therefore has enhanced its efforts to seize complete control of the entire region of Israel/Palestine (referred to by the Israeli right as “Greater Israel”), adopting an ever more aggressive strategy of exterminism and imperialism.[61] This strategy is fully supported, even urged on, by Washington, in its goal of absolute imperial domination of the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of South Asia—the region of the United States Central Command.
Israel’s average annual military spending as a share of GDP from 1960 to 2022 is 12 percent. After shrinking officially to around 4–5 percent in recent years, it is now again on the rise. It has the second-highest military spending per capita in the world (after Qatar) and possesses not only military superiority in the Middle East region but also an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, and biological).[62] Its war machine is supported by massive aid from the United States, which provides it with the most advanced weapons in existence. NATO has given Israel the designation of a “major non-NATO ally,” recognizing its position as a key part of the U.S.-European imperialist bloc.[63] In the United Nations, it is a member of the Western European and Other Group (WEOG) within the official regional groupings. The “Other” stands for the main settler colonial nations: the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and formerly apartheid South Africa.[64]
For Max Ajl, a senior researcher at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, Israel, while a “settler society” and tied into a logic of exterminism, has to be seen in a larger context of the imperialism/militarism of the Global North. “The question of Palestine,” he writes, “is not merely a question of national [or settler] oppression, but poses Israel’s uniqueness: a condensation of Western colonial and imperial power, a world-wide symbol of Western perfidy, a state which physically cleaves Africa and Asia, a merchant and mercenary of global counter-insurgence, all melded in a manticore of death and destruction.”[65] If Israel can be viewed as a pure settler-exterminist state, it is also a global garrison state, tied to the entire system of world domination rooted in monopoly capitalism/imperialism in which the United States is the hegemonic power.
Wasi’chu
The rise of the American Indian Movement in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s led to strong critiques of the reality of settler colonialism. An extraordinary work in this context was Wasi’chu: The Continuing Indian Wars by Bruce Johansen and Roberto Maestas. Wasi’chu is a Lakota word that refers not to white man or settler but to a logic, a state of mind, and a system. Literally, it means “takes the fat” or “greedy person,” appropriating not just what is needed for life, but also what properly belongs to the whole community. “Within the modern Indian movement,” it “has come to mean those corporations and their individuals, with their government accomplices, which continue to covet Indian lives, land, and resources for public profit.” The term was famously used by Black Elk in Black Elk Speaks, based on interviews in the early 1930s, in which he emphasized the Wasi’chu’s unrelenting desire for gold. As Johansen and Maestas explained, Wasi’chu is “a human condition based on inhumanity, racism, and exploitation. It is a sickness, a seemingly incurable and contagious disease which begot the ever-advancing society of the West.” This observation became, in the work of these authors, the basis of a searing account of settler colonialism in North America, not simply geared to the past but to the present.[66]
“Wasichu,” Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker elaborates in her Living by the Word,
was a term used by the Oglala Sioux to designate the white man, but it had no reference to the color of skin. It means: He who takes the fat. It is possible to be white and not a Wasichu and a Wasichu and not white…. The Wasichu speaks, in all his U.S. history books, of “opening up virgin lands.” Yet there were people living here on “Turtle Island,” as the Indians called it, for thousands of years….
We must absolutely reject the way of the Wasichu that we are so disastrously traveling, the way that respects most (above nature, obviously above life itself, above even the spirit of the universe) the “metal that makes men crazy”.… Many of us are afraid to abandon the way of the Wasichu because we have become addicted to his way of death. The Wasichu has promised us so many good things, and has actually delivered several. But “progress,” once claimed by the present chief of the Wasichus to be their “most important product,” has meant hunger, misery, enslavement, unemployment, and worse to millions of people on the globe.[67]
Wasi’chu, as the Indigenous understood it, was the personification of what we know as capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, a system of greed, exploitation, and expropriation of human beings and the land.[68] The Lakota people clearly understood this system of greed as one that had no limits and that was the enemy of communal existence and reverence for the earth. It is this more profound critique of capitalism/imperialism as a system dominated by the Wasi’chu that seizes “the fat,” (the surplus that is the inheritance of humanity as a whole) that we most need today. As The Red Nation’s The Red Deal states, the choice today is “decolonization or extinction,” that is, “ending the occupation” and destruction of the earth by imperialist “accumulation-based societies,” so as to “build what sustains us.”[69]
Notes
Key foundational works in this paradigm include Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London: Cassell, 1999); Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409; Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 866–905; David Lloyd and Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonial Logics and the Neoliberal Regime,” Settler Colonial Studies 6, no. 2 (May 2015): 109–18; Lorenzo Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024); Lorenzo Veracini, “Containment, Elimination, Endogeneity: Settler Colonialism in the Global Present,” Rethinking Marxism 31, no. 1 (April 2019): 118–40. Marxian-oriented critical perspectives can be found in Jack Davies, “The World Turned Outside In: Settler Colonial Studies and Political Economy,” Historical Materialism 31, no. 2 (June 2023): 197–235; and Sai Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction (London: Pluto, 2022).
Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 387–88; Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 2; Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, 51, 54–56; Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, 4–11; Veracini, “Containment, Elimination, Endogeneity,” 121; Davies, “The World Turned Outside In,” 207.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (Boston: Beacon, 2021), 18; R. W. Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960).
Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, 39–40; Lorenzo Veracini, “Introduction: Settler Colonialism as a Distinct Mode of Domination” in The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism, Edward Cavanaugh and Lorenzo Veracini, eds. (London: Routledge, 2017), 3; Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, 29–30; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Marx and the Indigenous,” Monthly Review 71, no. 9 (February 2020): 3.
John Bellamy Foster, Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx (New York: Monthly Review Press, forthcoming 2025).
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 917; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. 46, 322; V. I. Lenin, “The Discussion on Social-Determination Summed Up,” July 1916, section 8, Marxists Internet Archive, marxists.org.
“Colony (n.),” Online Etymology Dictionary, etymonline.com. As G. E. M. de Ste. Croix states, “The Latin word coloni…had originally been used in the sense of ‘farmer’ or ‘settler.'” G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 1981), 159.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “exterminate” comes from the Latin for “to drive beyond boundaries.” From the sixteenth century onward, it meant “to drive forth (a person or thing), from, of, out of, the boundaries or limits of a (place, community, region, state, etc.); to drive away, banish, put to flight.” However, by the seventeenth century it had also taken on the additional meaning of “to destroy utterly, put an end to (persons or animals); not only to root out, extirpate (species, races, populations).” Oxford English Dictionary, compact edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 938.
Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value: Part II (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 301–3; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 917.
Marx, Theories of Surplus Value: Part II, 301–3; John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Brett Clark, “Marx and Slavery,” Monthly Review 72, no. 3 (July–August 2020): 98.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 915–17, emphasis added; William Howitt, Colonization and Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives by the Europeans in All Their Colonies (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1838), 348.
Howitt, Colonization and Christianity, 346–49, 378–79, 403–5.
Howitt, Colonization and Christianity, 414.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 266.
Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, 66, 193, 216, 283, 303, 366, 372; John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 72–75; Dunbar-Ortiz, Not “A Nation of Immigrants,” 36–46, 126.
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 18, 60–70, 212–13.
Kenneth Good, “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation,” Journal of Modern African Studies 14, no. 4 (December 1976): 599.
Karl Marx, “Excerpts from M. M. Kovalevsky,” appendix to Lawrence Krader, ed., The Asiatic Mode of Production (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum and Co., 1974), 400, 406–7, 411–12; Foster, Clark, and Holleman, “Marx and the Indigenous,” 11–12.
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 46, 322. Translation altered slightly to change “actual colonies” to “colonies proper,” in accordance with the translation of Engels’s letter in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, n.d.), vol. 22, 352.
Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 22, 352.
Communist International (Comintern), Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies (1928), in Theses and Resolutions of the VI. World Congress of the Communist Internationalvol. 8, no. 88, International Press Correspondence, no. 84, sections 10, 12 (extra paragraph indent created beginning with “Between”); Oleksa Drachewych, “Settler Colonialism and the Communist International,” in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope, eds. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021): 2418–28. Lenin’s recognition of Engels’s position on “colonialism proper” and the Comintern’s detailed treatment of settler colonialism demonstrate that Veracini’s uninformed claim that “Lenin and twentieth century Marxism…conflated colonialism and settler colonial forms” was simply false. It is further falsified, as we shall see, by numerous explicit twentieth-century Marxist treatments of settler colonialism. Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, 39.
Comintern, Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies, 12–13.
W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt Brace and Howe, 1920), 29–42.
Jennifer Schuessler, “What Is Settler Colonialism?,” New York Times, January 22, 2024.
José Carlos Mariátegui, José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology, Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker, eds. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 74–76.
Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957), 141.
Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 142.
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1951), 370.
Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 139–42, 153; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 925.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 93; Simin Fadee, Global Marxism: Decolonization and Revolutionary Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024), 132–52. In the work of Glen Sean Coulthard, Fanon’s emphasis on the colonial dialectic of recognition is combined with Marx’s critique of “so-called primitive accumulation” to generate one of the most powerful theoretical analyses of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance up to the present. See Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
Donald L. Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).
Fayez A. Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Beirut: Palestine Liberation Organization, 1965), 1–5.
Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial Settler State (New York: Monad Press, 1973), 27–33, 89–96. Rodinson’s monograph was first published during the 1967 Israeli-Arab War in Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal, Le Temps Modernes.
Jairus Banaji, “Arghiri Emmanuel (1911–2001),” Historical Materialism (blog), n.d.
Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 37–71, 124–25, 370–71.
Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange, 363–64.
Arghiri Emmanuel, “White-Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism,” New Left Review 1/73 (May–June 1972), 39–40, 43–44, 47; Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange 124–25, 337, 363, 370–71.
Samir Amin, “Underdevelopment and Dependence in Black Africa—Origins and Contemporary Forms,” Journal of Modern African Studies 10, no. 4 (December 1972): 519–22; Samir Amin, The Reawakening of the Arab World (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 182–89.
Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 19–20.
Good, “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation.”
J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat (Chicago: Morningstar Press, 1989).
David Gilbert, No Surrender: Writings from an Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner (Montreal: Abraham Gullen Press, 2004), 5–59; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), 184.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “Aboriginal People and Imperialism in the Western Hemisphere,” Monthly Review 44, no. 4 (September 1992): 9.
On the retreat from imperialism theory on much of the left, see John Bellamy Foster, “The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left,” Monthly Review 76, no. 6 (November 2024): 15–19.
Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 2, 27, 40–43; Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 387, 402.
Wolfe, “Land, Labor and Difference,” 868; Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, 16.
Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 1, 167.
Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, 54. On the relation of Latin America to settler colonialism, see Richard Gott, “Latin America as a White Settler Society,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 26, no. 2 (April 2007): 269–89.
Wolfe, Traces of History, 28.
David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 137–82. The concept of accumulation by dispossession is contradictory in Marx’s terms, since accumulation by definition is not dispossession or expropriation, but rather is rooted in exploitation. Marx was strongly critical of the notion of “primitive accumulation” or “original accumulation,” as presented by classical-liberal economists like Adam Smith, and preferred the term “original expropriation,” or simply expropriation. See Ian Angus, The War Against the Commons (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), 204–9.
Wolfe, “History and Imperialism,” 389–93, 397, 403–7, 418–20.
Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 388, 392, 403–4; Wolfe, “Land, Labor and Difference,” 868.
Robin D. G. Kelley, “The Rest of Us: Rethinking Settler and Native,” American Quarterly 69, no. 2 (June 2017): 268–69.
Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, 15. For an indication of this complexity see Gerald Horne, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020).
Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, 4–12; Lorenzo Veracini, “Israel-Palestine through a Settler-Colonial Studies Lens,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21, no. 4 (2019): 572.
Lloyd and Wolfe, “Settler Colonial Logics and the Neoliberal Regime,” 8; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 874; Davies, “The World Turned Outside In,” 217. On the history of the classical-liberal conception of original, or primitive, accumulation prior to Marx, see Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
Veracini, “Containment, Elimination, Endogeneity,” 119, 122–28; Veracini, “Israel-Palestine Through a Settler-Colonial Studies Lens,” 579–80; Nicholas A. Brown, “The Logic of Settler Accumulation in a Landscape of Perpetual Vanishing,” Settler Colonial Studies 4, no. 1 (2014): 3–5; Davies, “The World Turned Outside In,” 214; Harvey, The New Imperialism, 137–82.
Veracini, “Containment, Elimination, Endogeneity,” 122–8; Davies, “The World Turned Outside In,” 214.
Wolfe, Traces of History, 234–37; Veracini, “Israel-Palestine through a Settler-Colonial Studies Lens,” 570; Joseph Massad, “Israel and the West: ‘Shared Values’ of Racism and Settler Colonialism,” Middle East Eye, June 13, 2019; Jordan Humphreys, “Palestine and the Classless Politics of Settler Colonial Theory,” Marxist Left Review, June 13, 2024.
Lorenzo Veracini, Israel and Settler Society (London: Pluto, 2006), 97. It is notable that Veracini, like Wolfe, fails to recognize the significance of Rodinson’s Israel: A Colonial Settler State, stating that it was published in “the 1970s” (the time when the English edition came out), even though it appeared in French in the midst of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and had an enormous influence at the time, instilling throughout the world increased awareness of Israeli settler colonialism.
Claudia de Martino and Ruth Hanau Santini, “Israel: A Demographic Ticking Bomb in Today’s One-State Reality,” Aspenia Online, July 10, 2023.
Varun Jain, “Interactive: Comparing Military Spend around the World,” Visual Capitalist, June 4, 2023; “Israel: Military Spending, Percent of GDP,” Global Economy, theglobaleconomy.com; U.S. Congressional Research Service, Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons and Missiles: Status and Trends (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, February 20, 2008), 16.
Thomas Trask and Jacob Olidort, “The Case for Upgrading Israel’s ‘Major Non-NATO Ally’ Status,” Jewish Institute for National Security of America, November 6, 2023.
Craig Mokhiber, “WEOG: The UN’s Settler-Colonial Bloc,” Foreign Policy in Focus, September 4, 2024, fpif.org.
Max Ajl, “Palestine’s Great Flood, Part I,” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 13, no. 1 (March 2024): 62–88; Esther Farmer, Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, and Sarah Sills, A Land with a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021).
Bruce Johansen and Roberto Maestas, Wasi’chu: The Continuing Indian Wars (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 5, 11, 16, 18; Black Elk and John G. Neihard, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (New York: William Morrow, 1932), 7–9.
Alice Walker, Living by the Word: Selected Writings 1973–1987 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 144–49.
Wasi’chu, as understood here, is essentially a materialist perspective, where a generalized human nature characteristic of certain groups of social actors is seen as a reflection of an underlying logic or system. In Marx’s terms, the capitalist is presented as a personification of capital. This is in contrast to a Weberian style ideal type, rooted in methodological individualism, where social structures are interpreted in terms of a type of social action with subjective meaning traceable to a type of methodological individual. Thus, from that perspective, it is the methodological individual of the settler who is at the root of settler type meanings/actions and is the basis of colonialism/settlerism. The ideal type of the settler constitutes, rather than is constituted, and is not itself the product of an ensemble of social relations. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 ,92.
The Red Nation, The Red Deal (New York: Common Notions, 2021), 7, 13, 135–37; Veracini, “Israel-Palestine Through a Settler-Colonial Studies Lens,” 570–71.
