When the first issue of Material was released, an upsurge of Palestinian resistance against Israeli colonialism in Gaza, as well as the unrestrained expansion of genocidal violence against the Palestinian people began. We are now over half a year into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and these still unfolding events should serve as a reminder that settler-colonialism is not an historical archaism but an ongoing problematic, embedded in the global articulation of capitalism. Patrick Wolfe famously stated that colonial conquest is “a structure not an event.”1 But so too is it not an event that simply preceded the dawn of capitalism, because it is a structure retained within the historical development of capitalism, affecting and overlapping with its imperialist and neo-colonialist aspects.
Hence, a critical understanding of capitalism as both a mode of production and a world system requires a reflection on the fact that some of the most powerful imperialist states (e.g., the US, Canada and Australia) are also settler-colonial formations. As Israel’s soldiers ethnically cleanse Gaza so as to prosecute the most recent historical settler-colonial project, established in 1948, they do so with economic and political support provided by the US and Canada, as well as Germany, France, and Italy, with weapons and ammunition manufactured by their colonial elder siblings. So in this ethnic cleansing of Gaza there is the resonance of the colonial genocides in the Americas that are not merely past events, but are inherent to the very structure of imperialist states. Is it any wonder that the biggest defenders of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza are the same people who consistently deny colonial genocide in the Americas?2 And there are also the echoes of the so-called “post-colonies” where once victorious decolonial movements were subjected to neo-colonial imperialism.
But against all of this violent occupation and parasitism there has always been resistance. Struggles for national self-determination, struggles against imperialism and neo-colonialism, continue to persist. If history is determined by class struggle, then part of this determination is the struggles against colonialism and imperialism that have been part of global class struggle since the “rosy dawn” of capitalism. Thus, this second issue of Material is concerned with the notion of colonialism and national liberation in the current phase of imperialism.
With this context in mind, we have assembled an issue of Material that aims to provide useful analysis for this problematic of colonialism and national liberation. First, we have an article by one of our editors, J. Moufawad-Paul, exploring the ideology of settler-capitalist formations, followed by an essay by Alexandra Lepine focusing on the ideology of constructed settler victimhood. In March of this year, we had the fortune to engage in an in-depth interview with the West Bank scholar and activist Abdaljawad Omar about the current conjuncture in Palestine, which appears next. Then K. Murali, who is on our editorial board, provides an update of his article on neo-colonialism. Owain Rhys Phillips’s article about the Republican socialist struggle in Ireland, in which he formulates a critique of the compradorification of Sinn Féin, follows. Our From the Archives text this issue comes from discussions about colonialism and national self-determination that were essential to the Second Congress of the Third International. And finally, we have the conclusion of T. Derbent’s article on “Lenin and War” that was initiated with our first issue.
Interspersed in these pages we have the poetry of Hasan Hüseyin Korkmazgil, the fiction prose of Benjanun Sriduangkaew, and the art of Taysir Batniji. . . . Because even in the midst of this horror show, where colonial genocide is accompanying ecocide, there still remains an aesthetic hope of the future, just as there remains resistance.
In terms of Material as a larger project, we are happy to announce that we launched our website in March: materialjournal.net. On it, you can access previous issues either as full, downloadable PDFs, or by text or image, as well as also reader responses to published articles. If you would like to submit a response for review, please see Submissions, located at the end of the journal or on the website.
D. Jin
J. Moufawad-Paul
M. Van Herzeele
- Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1998), 2. Although this well-known statement that “the colonizers come to stay––invasion is a structure not an event” first appeared in this 1998 book, it is better known from Wolfe’s 2006 essay “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.”
- In Canada, “journalists” such as Barbara and Jonathan Kay have consistently written opinion editorials denying residential school genocide while also defending Israel’s war on Gaza.