J. Moufawad-Paul: The Immanent Garrison: Settlerism as Institutionalized Ideology

¹As social distancing measures in the COVID-19 pandemic became normalized throughout the world in the spring of 2020, within the US and Canada a significant number of reactionaries began to launch protests against the quarantine. Demanding that their countries “reopen for business,” these protesters evinced a hodgepodge of right-wing political positions. From Trump supporters to conspiracy theory libertarians, to fascist militia types, to extreme Evangelicals, they complained about “big government,” that coronavirus was a deep state conspiracy, that the government did not have the right to decide what their bodies could or could not do (i.e., a “my body my choice” argument made by the same groups of people with a history of pushing anti-abortion laws). Largely united by their overwhelming whiteness, left social media quickly called them the “Flu Klux Klan”—an appropriate moniker not only considering their politics (those who were not outright white supremacists embraced implicit racist assumptions) but because these protests, unlike the equally reactionary protests throughout Europe, were paradigmatic of the settlerism that generated the KKK.
When members of these protests armed themselves and marched on government buildings, as they did in Michigan at the end of April 2020, this was not simply a racist inversion of armed Black Panthers entering the California State Capitol in 1967; it was a manifestation of a rationality that is foundational to settler-capitalist social formations.² Whereas the historical Black Panther event of 1967 was met with resistance and horror by the repressive state apparatus, the white militias marching into Michigan government buildings in 2020 registered little to no resistance. In the contemporary context, where settler-capitalist police forces murder black people with impunity—as they would with George Floyd later in the pandemic—or where in Standing Rock and Wet’suwet’en violent states of emergency are declared against anti-colonial land defense, it might seem surprising that armed protesters marching on government buildings were greeted with tolerance. A common-sense interpretation of this tolerance suggested, at the time, that it had to do with “white privilege,” and yet this notion is both imprecise and insufficient. The fact that armed white militia reactionaries were allowed entrance to government buildings without igniting the state of emergency measures that would later be leveled at the rebellions responding to George Floyd’s execution indicates that something more materially meaningful than “privilege” was happening. And after the Biden election, when the same demographic stormed the Capitol, there was a similar tolerance (while the so-called “insurrectionists” were later charged, the police did not storm the Capitol and have them violently arrested), just as there has been a tolerance for anti-vaxers (whose composition is largely white settler) whose demonstrations eventually targeted hospitals and doctors. There was also the Kyle Rittenhouse trial where a white vigilante who traveled to a different state to shoot “rioters” in the Black Lives Matter protest was treated as a victim whereas the people he had shot and murdered were prohibited from being called victims by order of the judge, and Rittenhouse was eventually acquitted on all counts.
Indeed, what this tolerance of armed white militias and white vigilantes revealed was the settlerism that largely characterizes settler-capitalism. That is, the ideology of the colonial garrison that is foundational to settler-capitalism and, because it is foundational, has become institutionalized in every settler-capitalist formation. Legal police forces are reticent to repress these “Flu Klux Klanners” because the former emerged as a “legitimate” (legally normative) repressive state apparatus from the same colonial roots. What we are witnessing, then, is a confrontation of the legal settler-capitalist state with its paramilitary double, the latter being that which has always supported and in fact generated the basis of the settler-colonial repressive apparatus. Hence, the confrontation between legally sanctioned state forces and reactionary militia is just a confrontation between the settler-capitalist state and its garrison paramilitary—a non-antagonistic contradiction between predatory siblings.
As we shall discuss below, this relationship between the formal repressive state apparatus and the informal settler militia has existed since the initial conquest, when settler enclaves functioned as the frontline for colonial warfare. Indeed, as the most recent settler-capitalist formation of Israel demonstrates, due its proximity to the genocidal foundational event of its conquest (the Nakba), the relationship between the formal Israeli military and the settlers in its frontier spaces (Gaza and the West Bank) mirror those between the fledgling US military and the settlers in the frontiers of the westward push. Just as the early US settlers would initiate violent encounters with Indigenous nations, causing the latter to fight back, which was then used as an excuse to call in the army to clear the land, today’s Israel settlers do the same in their frontier spaces—as the IOF’s (Israeli Occupying Forces) response on October 7 2023 demonstrated. Larger than the formal and informal violent settler forces, however, is the consciousness they share with their colonial societies as a whole, which legitimates their relationship. We can call this consciousness settlerism.
Settlerism is the institutionalized ideology of the colonial garrison. I do not mean ideology in the simple sense of ideas organized into a coherent ethos, or in the pejorative sense of “false ideas.” Rather, I am referring to the Marxist concept of ideology developed by philosophers such as Gramsci and Althusser that is concerned with analyzing how ruling class ideas become part of a “common sense” hegemony and thus part of state apparatuses. Ideology not only emerges from material facts as a class-based way of accounting for or justifying these facts, but also becomes what Marx and Engels called “a self-determining concept” that exhibits a material force.³ For example, the liberal capitalist ideology that humans are naturally selfish and competitive individuals is not only a conceptual structuring of similar ideas (as can be found in the work of philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and others), but is also formalized in legal, political, and economic structures which socialize persons into individual rights bearers, free laborers competing with other free laborers, etc. On the one hand, the notion that humans are essentially competitive and selfish comes from the apprehension of a “war of all against all” during the long and violent transition to capitalism. On the other hand, it takes on a new material force in how institutions are structured and citizens socialized.
Thus settlerism as institutionalized garrison ideology and culture has both a material origin and a material force. Every settler-colonial project begins by sending its settlers into spaces where these settlers are “surrounded” by the original inhabitants. Although it is the case that settlers were indeed surrounded by the people whose lands they were invading, they also imagined themselves as besieged, inverting “the role of aggressor so that colonialism is made to look like self-defence.”⁴ Settler-colonies in the midst of “Indian Country” imagined they were “surrounded forts” and thus “the false image is what emerges when a critique of militarized life is predicated on the forgetting of the life that surrounds it.”⁵ That is, settler-colonies established themselves as garrisons with the intention of conquest, treated the populations surrounding these initial colonial enclaves as hostile to conquest (because, obviously the surrounding populations would not want to be conquered and decimated), and thus generated a militarized life premised on dehumanizing the colonized.
As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz puts it in regards to the colonization of the regions that would become the USA:

In the beginning, Anglo settlers organized irregular units to brutally attack and destroy unarmed Indigenous women, children, and old people using unlimited violence in unrelenting attacks. During nearly two centuries of British colonization, generations of settlers, mostly farmers, gained experience as “Indian fighters” outside any organized military institution.⁶

Throughout An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States Dunbar-Ortiz charts the ways in which the early settlers functioned as an armed garrison, where every settler man, woman, and child was encouraged to arm themselves to attack the surrounding Indigenous population. Settler-colonialism always begins, in the US and elsewhere, as a paramilitary confrontation between the garrison and the surround. When these settler-colonial formations achieved hegemony, eventually transforming into settler-capitalist formations, this garrison ideology became institutionalized. Not only did it result in official colonial police/military forces (such as the RCMP, the FBI, or the IDF⁷), laws that were brought into being to recognize the especial importance of settler militias remained. Such forces not only policed colonized populations, but this policing was key to the reproduction of capitalism within these formations since, as Glen Sean Coulthard has established, the development and reproduction of capitalism within settler-capitalist societies is also dependent on an ongoing “primitive accumulation” that requires the maintenance of settler-colonialism. Hence, “capitalism continues to play a core role in dispossessing [the colonized] of [their] lands and self-determining authority.”⁸
In fact, when we look at the most recent example of settler-capitalism—the state of Israel which was established in 1948—we can see the elements of the garrison and surround that marked the conquest of the Americas and other remaining settler-capitalist formations unfolding in real time. The settlements, deemed illegal by the UN, that have been established in “the occupied territories” of the West Bank and Gaza, are populated by the most reactionary, armed settlers who think of themselves as frontiers-people surrounded by hostile barbarians, and thus function as a para-military population. But even though they chose to settle in these spaces so as to expand the lebensraum of “Eretz Israel,”⁹ they still conceptualize themselves as besieged heroes and victims, ciphers of the only civilization that matters. When Hamas and other resistance groups attacked the settlements in Gaza in October 2023, their supporters immediately treated them as victims—”inverting the role of aggressor” as Moten and Harney noted above—by treating the colonized Palestinian population as an aggressive surround. Immediately, the Israeli military revealed its support of its paramilitary settlement wing by murdering and bombing into submission an entire civilian population. What the genocidal war upon Gaza at the end of 2023 resembles, though, is the material relationship that is foundational to every settler-capitalist formation: the ethnic cleansing carried out by the formal colonial armies and police has always followed the paramilitary garrison incursions. In the case of settler-capitalist formations that are hundreds of years old, this relationship has become an immanent practice.
Hence, in the context of settler-capitalist formations that are hundreds of years old, armed white militias manifesting now are not an exceptional manifestation; they are in fact part of the settlerism that is essential to these social formations and that generated the very police and military that function to reproduce these states’ repressive apparatus. When white settlers arm themselves to defend their settler states and march into government buildings, the reason they are tolerated is because they are part of the same garrison ethos that led to the formation of settler-capitalist repressive apparatuses in the first place. The colonial garrison that is inherent to settler-capitalist societies (both for the reproduction/maintenance of colonial and capitalist relations) is merely confronting itself.
In order to understand the aforementioned reactionary manifestations as generated by the institutionalized ideology of the garrison, I will examine and discuss a general conception of settlerism. After examining this concept, I will investigate how the immanence of settlerism permits liberal and “progressive” expressions that, though different in form, are ultimately not in an antagonistic contradiction with these explicit and reactionary manifestations of the garrison. The overall point is to understand how settlerist ideology functions as a powerful “self-determining concept” that not only permits these insurgent moments of fascism, but that galvanizes liberal ideology (itself a buttress of everyday capitalism) and can undermine egalitarian anti-capitalist movements. To pursue liberation in a settler-capitalist context requires not only the confrontation with capitalism and its “common sense” ideology but also the confrontation with settler-colonial ideology. In these contexts, without the overthrow of the immanent colonial garrison there can be no overthrow of capitalism.
To speak of the institutionalization of garrison culture and to examine how the expression of this immanent garrison is the voice of settlerism, is to recognize that the originary event of colonialism is also an ongoing process. In their introduction to a special issue of Social Text Jodi Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy write:

We ask instead, how the terms of academic and political debate today would be transformed if an understanding of colonization as ongoing and the lived experience of colonialism as a condition of possibility were prioritized and considered as something that critical analysis had an enduring responsibility to address.¹⁰

An investigation of settlerism, or the ideological institutionalization of garrison culture, is one way of examining how colonialism persists as a living process.

A Basic Conception of Settlerism

Settlerism is a term that was popularized at the end of the 1970s by J. Sakai in his underground classic, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat. This book has been a somewhat controversial text in radical and activist circles due to its thesis that the working classes of settler-colonial societies—that is, the working classes who are valorized as the “official” sector of labor by colonial society—are not the actual “proletariat” in the Marxian sense but, rather, “parasitic, dependent upon the super-exploitation of oppressed peoples.”¹¹ By tracing the history of the US labor movement, Sakai argues that colonial chauvinism has always affected the working class of settler society—this society being an “occupation garrison”¹²—in such a way that, because it is able to possess a certain level of real or perceived assets due to the material fact of settler-colonialism, it has a material investment in colonialism and the capitalist exploitation that was built on these colonial foundations. In such a context, Sakai claims that

the mass of the lower middle classes, the huge labor aristocracy, and most workers are fused together by a common national way of life and a common ideology as oppressors. [They] share a way of life that apes the bourgeoisie. . . . The real world of desperate toil, the world of the proletarians who own nothing but their labor power, is looked down upon with contempt and fear by the Euro-Amerikans.¹³

Settlerism, then, also forms the social consciousness that develops from this colonial social being: an identification with settler society and its values; a refusal to recognize the necessity of anti-colonial struggle; a spontaneous patriotism that is summoned whenever one’s social standing as settler is threatened; a habitual failure of large segments of the settler working class to possess the radical potential that working class movements in social formations that are not also defined by settler-colonialism have historically demonstrated. “Settlers are not,” writes Sakai, “waiting passively for ‘the Movement’ to come organize them—the point is that they already have many movements, causes, and organizations of their own. That’s the problem.”¹⁴
During the Columbus Epoch of imperialism, when the most powerful European nation-states were dividing the globe among each other, settlerism was always explicit: the garrison mentality of the settler-state, tied directly to a pride in the colonizer’s distant motherland, existed on the surface of social relations. Colonizers saw themselves as part of a “civilized” frontier pushing itself into a “savage” hinterland. After the event of secession—where the US and other colonies seceded from their motherlands without ending colonialism—and eventually following the decolonization movements that broke the back of that period of imperialism, the settler-colonialism that persisted, notably in some of the most powerful capitalist nations, mutated. As colonial relations were sublimated, the settlerism became insidious; the garrison was institutionalized in such a way that hegemonic consent to its totalization became normative.¹⁵ Settler-capitalist formations are the garrison as a social whole where its institutionalization often takes on a sublimated form, lurking beneath liberal discourse.
(Although the most recent settler-colonial venture of Israel repeated, rapidly and violently, the hundreds of years of colonial history that these older settler formations normalized, it still found inclusion in the settlerist project by a process of normalization. After the Nakba of 1948, it adapted itself to a sublimated form of colonialism where it carried out an apartheid violence, described in Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim, designed primarily to debilitate.¹⁶ Such a violence was part of the normalization of the immanent garrison. But since Israel is still a young colonial power, this kind of normalization was not enough; it mutated into an explicit moment of colonial genocidal war in October 2023. But even this mutation, due to the hegemony of settler-colonial powers, was treated as normal by the imperialist state of affairs.)
This normalization of the society-as-garrison is significant because it signals the ways in which settler-capitalist formations are able to obscure the class warfare of the mode of production by an appeal to a larger settler project, as was the case since conquest. For example, class hatred could be redirected in the colonial frontier: the poor and exploited colonizers could be made to focus on the racial Other as an enemy rather than the wealthy colonizers, and the doctrines of racial hierarchy, religious right, and European superiority were useful in the construction of a class collaborationist garrison society. Every colonizer, regardless of their status in the class hierarchy, could be united against Indigenous and enslaved populations. They could even materially benefit from it. Dunbar-Ortiz speaks of a “cross-class mind-set” as “the first instance of class leveling based on imagined racial sameness—the origin of white supremacy, the essential ideology of colonial projects in America and Africa.”¹⁷ Hence, while being the ideology that “buys off” the white working class (in W .E. B. Du Bois’s sense of the “psychological wage” where white workers “were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white”),¹⁸ settlerism also cuts across social strata, ideologically uniting settlers in the garrison. Before, during, and after the American War of Independence, for example, the settler-separatists were united, regardless of their social class, in the desire to found a white nation. (The same sensibility could be found in Canada, Australia, and later Apartheid South Africa and Israel, among other places.) They were a unified colonial garrison that saw the internal class hierarchies as less important than the establishment of colonial hegemony. Settlerist ideology emanates from this basis; it is the unifying ethos of a disparate group of colonizers who were forced to see themselves as a garrison society against the Indigenous and subjugated African surround. In this sense what would come to be known as “whiteness” would also signify “the right to title, sovereignty, ownership.”¹⁹
Therefore, when we speak of settler-colonialism now (particularly settler-capitalism) we need to also speak of the consciousness it elicits. This consciousness is produced by being in a settler-colonial social formation—the dominant way of seeing the world according to the concrete fact of settler-colonialism—that is similar to the period in which settler-colonialism was the dominant form of imperialist expansion but is marked by the break from that period: the transformation of the motherland-colony relationship, the emergence of powerful capitalist states that are the product of that period and that maintain “internal” colonies.²⁰
In nation-states such as the US and Canada there is an immanent garrison culture that haunts the social formation. At times this garrison culture is marked by its absence, by the refusal to recognize that these social formations maintain internal colonies, as if colonialism happened in the past, a regrettable calamity, rather than being an ongoing process. At other times, when colonized peoples in these territories resist eradication, everything that defined this garrison mentality in the previous period of colonialism erupts. The contradictions sharpen: settler towns bordering colonized reserves are suddenly filled with white supremacists; liberal subjects who, just days before these resistant events, were pleasant neighbors become committed garrison subjects. During the 1990 Oka Crisis in Québec, the settlers burned Mohawk effigies and lined up on the highway to throw rocks at the children and elders of their Iroquois neighbors.²¹
A more liberal settlerism, no less pernicious, is often demonstrated by the mainstream media covering these events. Although I will examine the liberal expression of settlerism in the next section, a few things need to be said about it here, in relation to the notion of the settlerist “cross-class alliance.” In the case of the Oka Crisis, for example, the conflict was coded according to ethnocentric categories where the savage/civilized paradigm was maintained in an apparently sober manner: the Mohawk resistance to settler incursion, we were told, was the result of an Oka golf course expanding unto a native “burial ground.” Such language codes the event according to settlerist values, informing viewers that this event, while lamentable, is based on some misunderstanding between capitalist modernity and pre-capitalist primitivism. Burial grounds, after all, are territories that are vaguely neolithic, similar to an archaeological dig. But when you go to Kahnesatake, when you observe this “burial ground” you will witness a cemetery that is identical to any other village cemetery. The buried dead of the colonized, the monuments of mourning central to all societies, are denied even when their “burial grounds” are identical to settler cemeteries. Colonial existence is immediately archaeological. Hence, the Oka event was already scripted according to settlerist logic: a clash between a civilizing frontier and a pre-modern hinterland—between the garrison and the surround.
The sublimation of actually existing colonialism is such that, due to the fact that the colony has become its own motherland, the settlers have come to see themselves as the natives. The surviving Indigenous peoples are treated as fossils, nations destined for the dustbin of history, who have surrendered the land to its proper owners—just as Tamenund, at the end James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, prophesies that the land of his people will properly belong to the colonizer: “[t]he pale-faces are masters of the earth, and the time of the red-men has not yet come again.”²² Again, garrison culture is marked by its supposed absence: if there is no settler, because the settler has become the native, then there is no garrison. In The Transit of Empire, for example, Jodi Byrd discusses

well-established colonialist discourses that figure the emergent United States as “American,” a crucible of naming transformations that ultimately serves to supplant indigenous peoples with settlers and figures colonialists as the “natives” of the land, all the while erasing American Indians from consciousness in the process.²³

But when colonized subjects reassert their existence, settlerism reemerges in force; its subjects are greatly unsettled by the fact that they must admit their colonizing status, that there are nations that still challenge colonial business as usual. After all,

[w]hy should the settler garrison let the “Indians” live inside the walls of the fort? There is an arrogance but at the same time an underlying feeling of being threatened and besieged by “those people”—which occasionally breaks out in collective hysteria.²⁴

Settler Subjectivities

Settlerism possesses two general articulations that are ultimately unified by their fidelity to the normative status of settler-colonialism: 1. reactionary and conservative; 2. liberal and progressive. Both categorical expressions of settlerism have their own internal variations but, on the whole, generate different settler-subjects. Or, more accurately, these two general categories generate different styles of settler subjectivity because, just as the bourgeoisie becomes monolithic in times of capitalist crisis, in times of colonial crisis (which overlaps, in settler-capitalist societies, with capitalist crisis), settlerism also approaches homogeneity. Indeed, during the particular colonial crisis that erupted in Gaza in October 2023, both the liberal and conservative wings of Israeli society––both the pro- and anti-Netanyahu populations––were overwhelmingly in agreement with the genocidal war.
Since ideology is a “self-determining concept” that exerts a material force, it generates subject positions. We are socialized from birth to see the world through the prisms of numerous (and often conflicting) ideologies, the most powerful of which are those connected to what Althusser has called “ideological state apparatuses.”²⁵ Numerous anti-colonial scholars have discussed the way in which the divided world of colonialism has generated particular subjectivities. But I want to examine how settlerism generates subjects that participate in an immanent garrison of settler-colonial maintenance. As noted earlier, what makes these subject positions compelling is that there are material benefits in being a settler in a settler-colonial social context. “This is not surprising,” writes Sandy Grande, “since the construction of the settler state has, at every stage, relied on identity and cultural politics for its reconsolidation.”²⁶
The reactionary variant of settlerism is its baseline expression and what has been largely described so far: the unapologetic acceptance of colonialism, the consciousness that was normative in the period of imperialism in which settler-colonies were established. The subject who understands themselves as a settler and is not ashamed to explicitly defend the colonial order exhibits the most honest manifestation of settlerism. Such an understanding lurks under the surface of a given colonial order, erupting whenever the colonized disrupt the day-to-day existence of the average settler. The aforementioned “Flu Klux Klanners” are an example of this expression. But so too are the conservative politicians who consistently demand fidelity to “family values” as they worry about the surround—ideologically distorted as “black on black violence,” attacks on Christian morality, immigrant “pollution” of the social fabric—while also proclaiming that it is necessary to let the poor die and to ignore climate science as they build pipelines through Indigenous land. The white militia member, the clearest expression of the settler garrison, is ideologically united with the establishment conservative in a very simple sense; they both openly celebrate colonialism, they both openly embrace reactionary values. The fact that the wealthy political conservative is part of the very political hegemony that the small-time reactionary would otherwise dismiss as “big government” seems to means nothing to the latter. The open commitment to white supremacy unites them in the “cross-class alliance” that has typified settler-colonialism.²⁷
The second and more “progressive” expression of settlerism—the hallmark of sublimated colonialism—is typified by the settler who is ashamed, to some extent, by the colonial past but is unwilling to interrogate how this past determines a colonial present. Sometimes this kind of settlerism devolves into the first type when the “progressive” settler’s status is challenged, but mostly it permits a daily denial of the persistence of colonialism through an affirmation of ancestral sins. In this sense, writes Jodi Byrd, “Indians are lamentable, but not grievable. . . [t]he lamentable is pitiable, but not remediable. It is past and regrettable.”²⁸ By recognizing that a crime was enacted in the past while simultaneously maintaining that the present is not affected by this past, an “enlightened” settlerism can assuage its guilty colonial conscience by repressing the conscious apprehension of a colonial present.²⁹ “People often feel guilty about their ancestors killing all those Indians years ago,” writes Vine Deloria Jr., “But. . . [j]ust the last two decades have seen a more devious but hardly less successful war waged against Indian communities.”³⁰ Although Deloria Jr. wrote those words in 1969, the persistence of settler-colonialism means they still hold true: colonialism is not

a temporarily situated experience which occurred at some relatively fixed period in history but [is that] which unfortunately continues to have negative consequences for [colonized] communities in the present.³¹

This second expression of settlerism is most commonly expressed as a liberal politics, coextensive with liberal conceptions of capitalism and imperialism, and is thus quite comfortable with settler-capitalism. But there are also “progressive” expressions of settlerism that are not explicitly liberal and manifest within ostensibly anti-capitalist spaces. There is, for example, a fetishism of Indigenous culture where progressive settlers recognize land claims as a performance rite, where Indigenous representatives are invited to perform, and where the conception of the “decolonial” is merely about recognizing the equal status of native culture. Since this kind of cultural fetishism is largely the expression of colonial guilt, and usually lacks a formal political program, it is hard to pin down beyond the level of affect. More pernicious, however, are anti-capitalist organizations and individuals who think that the national self-determination of the colonized is either inessential to the struggle against settler-capitalist formations or that such struggles should be commanded by settler-led organizations, refusing to admit that a strata of the working class benefits from, and/or has a consciousness determined by, settler-colonialism. What unites this entire expression, liberals and would-be anti-capitalists, is a cosmetic appraisal of the colonial past and its relationship to the colonial present, along with the fact that moments of anti-colonial revolt demanding sovereignty are seen as worrisome. At the end of the day, every settler whose subjectivity has not broken from settlerism remains part of the garrison.

Liberal Settlerism: the Hamilton paradigm

When Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton was released in 2015 it was immediately embraced by liberal progressives. Despite the fact that it concerned the settler separatist Alexander Hamilton and was about the American War of Independence led by colonizing slaveowners, the musical was hailed as “transgressive” and “progressive” by various pundits. Despite the middling hip-hop, extravagant production values, and clever race-flipping of the cast, Hamilton in fact demonstrates how settlerism is more than a manifestation of the garrison in situations of conflict and emergency. Settlerism is also the normalization and sublimation of colonialism.
Hamilton largely functions to justify one of the key founding myths of US settler-colonialism: that the American War of Independence was a valuable “revolution” that contributed to the progress of humanity. This myth is often referenced by well-meaning liberals in opposition to contemporary imperialist interventions or local anti-people legislation. Such a narrative laments current practices of the US nation-state by encouraging a return to the values of “the founding fathers.” Since reactionaries also encourage a return to these values, and thus understand them in a different manner (“Make America Great Again”), Hamilton is an ideological locus that codes the founding event of the nation according to a pseudo-progressive narrative. Hamilton might veil itself in transgressive and progressive clothing (hip-hop, racially detourned protagonists) but this is less important than the political line it preserves: the justification of the colonial foundation of what would become the most predatory nation in human history.
Whereas the US founding myth of rebellion against British dominance appears to be the justification of revolutionary values in the face of colonial hegemony, the truth is that the American War of Independence was less a world historical revolution and more of a settler-colonial secession designed to operationalize values that were more reactionary than those imposed by the motherland. Indeed, Gerald Horne argues that this event was a counterrevolution seeking to prolong slavery and was thus resisted by the stolen and enslaved black population.³² Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz points out the ways in which this so-called revolution was simultaneously an unfolding of colonial genocide, concluding that “[t]hroughout the war between separatist settlers and the forces of the monarchy, armed settlers waged total war against Indigenous people, largely realizing their objectives.”³³ These objectives were the annihilation of Indigenous nations within the territory of the original colonies followed by, upon achieving independence, an exterminatory westward expansion.
Since the US neo-colonial project is often justified according to the values of “freedom” that were supposedly realized in its foundation, thus centering it as an exceptional state, we should treat appeals to this founding myth as noxious self-justifications that ignore the oppressive and genocidal logic of settler-colonialism. There is a reason US schools teach that the American War of Independence was the basis of global liberty and equality despite the fact that this is far from the truth. Such a discourse is designed to justify the right to imperialist intervention. Indeed, Canadian liberal imperialist apologist Michael Ignatieff argues that the US has the right to “spread” the notion of liberty proclaimed in its War of Independence to the rest of the world through imperialist intervention. Writing of Hamilton’s political rival, Thomas Jefferson, Ignatieff asserts:

Think about the explosive force of Jefferson’s self-evident truth. First white working men, then women, then blacks, then the disabled, then gay Americans—all have used his words to demand that the withheld promise be delivered to them. Without Jefferson, no Lincoln, no Emancipation Proclamation. Without the slave-owning Jefferson, no Martin Luther King Jr. And the dream of white and black citizens together reaching the Promised Land. . . .Jefferson’s words have had the same explosive force abroad.³⁴

Despite the fact that Jefferson and Hamilton were political rivals, the above passage could easily be rewritten with Hamilton as the subject. The point is that the American War of Independence is given an exceptional status that represents a progressive unfolding of freedom for everyone everywhere. Those who choose to lionize Jefferson instead of Hamilton, or vice versa, are united on this presumption: the progressive singularity of the US secession from its former motherland. We should pause to marvel at the sheer hubris of Ignatieff’s proclamation—his assumption, without any historical rigor, that a racist plantation colony’s secession was responsible for generating every struggle against oppression and exploitation. In order to accept it we would need to delete all of the anti-colonial rebellions leading up to the US Civil War: the narratives of Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Sitting Bull, Tecumseh, and others would have to be dismissed or severely revised. As for the rest of the world, the values of the American War of Independence did not carry much “explosive force,” as Ignatieff suggests. Revolutionary movements that referenced European revolutions placed themselves in the tradition of the French Revolution (as C. L. R. James discusses in The Black Jacobins in regards to Haiti), and then later the Paris Commune, and there is little to no reference of the American War of Independence.
And yet, what Ignatieff writes is precisely what is taught in the US and even in Canada—which sees itself united with but different from the US settler project—and this is a hallmark of settlerist ideological education: the proclamation of the garrison’s establishment as the foundation of an unfolding freedom. Such an education justifies the garrison, sanctioning its right to annihilate the surround and establish its civilization. Beyond the legitimization of a violent settlerist ethos, Ignatieff’s understanding of history is particularly sterile, representing the kind of utopian thinking that is often projected upon Marxism: without horrendous colonial and racist violence, without imperialism, we would not have freedom; the unfolding of this freedom, initiated and maintained by imperialism, will naturally lead to more progressive thinkers and the progressive flourishing of human rights—all of which are somehow conceived as the property of, because they were supposedly originated by colonial and imperialist conquest. Ignatieff makes the imperialism of modernity the origin of every meaningful value.
Thus, if the horrendous imperialist event of the United States of America is conceived as the generator of every progressive value (despite the fact that such values were in fact constructed against this event and other imperialist events), cultural productions such as Hamilton, even when they code themselves as progressive/transgressive, function to celebrate and valorize the foundational myth of America. Settlerism is such that even progressive language can be used to normalize settler-colonialism. The dominant signifier of US secession incorporates dissent within the project of the colonial nation. The notion that the American War of Independence was a revolution for all people, when in fact it was the establishment of a garrison nation by genociders and slavers, is a core myth for US liberals that is celebrated also by liberal colonial ideologues in Canada and other settler-capitalist formations, all of which have their own liberal colonial myths used to normalize and cleanse their equally horrendous foundation.³⁵
Hamilton demonstrates that discourses of visibility and diversity can function to enshrine settlerism. By re-staging the reactionary foundation of a settler-capitalist formation as one where white supremacists are played by a largely Black cast, by coding colonialism with music and fashion lifted from Black American culture, we are asked to imagine this event as universal since it is being told in a “diverse” manner. Again, the notion of “white privilege” does not cut deep enough; it is not able to slice down to the colonial tumor. Recasting a foundational colonial event as one that can be cleansed of its depredations by inviting the colonized to play the agents of this event in fact renders invisible the resistance to the violent and predatory circumstances that generated this colonial mythology, along with the lives and experiences of thousands upon thousands of people who resisted.
My overall point is that settler-colonial social formations generate a particular and powerful ideological apparatus that, like all ruling ideas of the ruling classes, becomes the mirror of values for even those whose people have experienced a history of oppression due to the existence of said social formations. Settlerism is so prevalent as a complex of ideologies that in those nations that retain internal colonies and thus cannot escape a normative racism, its various discourses have become as invisible as the air we breathe. We can thus celebrate the founding events of settler-capitalism divorced from the concrete historical mechanisms of occupation, genocide, slavery, and all of the horrors required to establish nation-states such as the US, Canada, and other remaining settler-capitalisms. Hamilton is a paradigm example of how perniciously sublimated settlerism has become: we are exhorted to appreciate an event that was synonymous with genocide and slavery simply because a group of slave-owning rapists are being played by the very people they owned, abused, and slaughtered.
As I have argued elsewhere, remaining settler-colonial social formations propagate a “sublimated colonialism” where the concrete colonial division of colonizer-colonized is obscured behind a curtain that descended when colonies delinked from the motherland. Colonialism is reconceived as something that happened in the past, colonial separatists are sanctified as anti-colonialists, and the ongoing oppression and exploitation of subject peoples are pushed under the surface of social relations.³⁶
In this sense, the garrison has become total and, thus, codes even liberal and progressive norms. While on the surface it seems as if reactionary white militias and the liberal fans of Hamilton are not identical, this is only an epiphenomenal difference. As Fanon has pointed out, liberal

[c]ampaigns of deintoxification [that appeal] to the sense of humanity, to love, to respect for the supreme values [fail to recognize that any country] that lives, draws its substance from the exploitation of other peoples, makes those peoples inferior. Race prejudice applied to those peoples is normal.³⁷

Hence, “[t]he racist in a culture with racism is therefore normal. He has achieved a perfect harmony of economic relations and ideology.”³⁸
There is thus little difference between the liberal who wants to “detoxify” society by trying to paper over its colonial foundations and treat “racism as a mental quirk”³⁹ and the explicit racist reactionary whose actions are in “harmony” with settler-capitalist social relations. Both are united under the logic of the garrison, though the latter’s behavior is considerably more gauche. Moreover, liberalism has a long history of sanitizing colonialism since it emerged from within the crucible of Empire. Classical liberal philosophers such as Locke and Mill in fact celebrated colonialism, treating it as a civilizing mission. While such a celebration might seem, today, to belong to the speeches of reactionaries, contemporary liberal consciousness happily accepts the narrative of colonialism’s civilizing mission. After all, we are always presented with situations where, when anti-colonial resistance emerges, the colonial “harmony of economic relations and ideology” also emerges and the differences between liberals and reactionaries melts away as the garrison manifests. Again, we are witnessing this in Israeli civil society’s response to the war in Gaza (both liberal and reactionary citizens are blocking food and medical aid from reaching the besieged population), but this is not exclusive to Israeli society. The Kahnesatake resistance to Oka’s incursion in 1990, for example, resulted in an explosion of settler settlement where liberals and reactionaries united in burning Mohawk effigies and throwing rocks at elder and children non-combatants. When the foundation of a settler-colonial social formation is inescapable, its central myths—which include the myths of liberalism—become terribly compelling.

“Left-wing” Settlerism

Settlerism thrives in settler-colonial formations because there are material benefits in being a settler. Hence, returning to Sakai’s claim that the fact of colonialism has negatively affected the working class movements in settler-colonial formations, it is important to note that the contradiction between capital and labor that defines capitalism cannot be separated from the contradiction between colonizer and colonized. Working-class struggles against capitalism are often deformed by settlerism:

There is a distinct and exceptional . . . way of life that materially and ideologically fuses together the settler masses—shopkeeper, trade unionist, and school teacher alike. The general command of bourgeois ideology over these settler communities is reinforced by the mobilization of tens of millions [of settlers] into special reactionary organizations. Those . . . who are immigrated or heavily exploited are not only still commanded by loyalty to “their” Empire, but are submerged and disconnected among the far larger, heavily privileged mass of their fellow citizens. These “white poor” are truly lost; the abandoned remnants of the old class struggle existing without direction inside Babylon.⁴⁰

Settlerism, then, is not something that is limited to reactionary trends; it is not simply the result of an ideology aimed at the most socially backwards elements of colonial society. Settlerism is normative in settler-colonial contexts, a ruling idea of the ruling classes that exerts a “material force,” and thus extends its discursive power to would-be progressives. If one is socialized within a settler-colonial social formation—if one grows to political consciousness in a world that is still partially determined by the contradiction between colonizer and colonized—then one must encounter the shibboleth of settler consciousness. That is, it is entirely normative to think about the world according to settler-colonial categories if one is born into such a world. Indeed, it is common sense.
Sandy Grande has examined, for example, how Occupy Wall Street’s slogan in 2011, “We are the 99%,” functioned discursively to reify a settler subjectivity by soliciting the kind of “protestor-subject” that could “legitimate [colonial] business as usual” by obscuring the deeper questions of colonialism and white supremacy behind a monolithic 99%.⁴¹ For within this 99% exists a large portion of the garrison that, despite focusing on the depredations of the ultra-rich 1%, is also composed of the police, military, labor aristocracy, and a whole swathe of people whose positions and livelihood are either dependent on, or directly concerned with maintaining settler-capitalism. Since the politics and sensibility of Occupy Wall Street is paradigmatic of the kind of left-wing “movementism” in the imperialist metropoles that became normative at the end of the 1990s, Grande’s reading provides a diagnosis of a common trend that is symptomatic among the broad left in settler-capitalist societies.⁴²
Hence, among the anti-capitalist left in settler-capitalist societies, it is quite common to encounter individuals and groups who believe that the self-determination of Indigenous nations either splits the working-class movement (which is abstractly conceived as a united whole rather than something that is already split according to sites of oppression), or is akin to fascist “blood and soil” ideologies. In fact, this “progressive” rejection of national self-determination goes a long way back in the history of communist and socialist movements.⁴³ In 1916, writing against the view that the right of self-determination and political secession of oppressed nations would “split” the working-class movement, Lenin argued that “no nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.”⁴⁴ In 1920, during the Second Congress of the Third International, this debate emerged again, and again the right of oppressed nations to pursue self-determination was upheld as the correct line. But even still, the French Communist Party refused to recognize the anti-colonial struggles of the nations France had colonized (i.e., its rejection of the Algerian Revolution), leading to its castigation by revolutionaries such as Frantz Fanon, among others. In 1928 in Peru, José Carlos Mariátegui wrote his Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality to argue for the self-determination of the Peruvian Indian against the colonial line infecting the movement. In 1971 in Turkey, Ibrahim Kaypakkaya was forced to defend Kurdish national self-determination against the dominant Turkish communist line that chauvinistically refused to recognized a Kurdish nation:

the imperialists’ . . . blatant disregard for [oppressed nations’] right of self-determination will be legitimized by the argument that “they do not constitute a nation.” In the same way, in multinational states, all manner of oppression and tyranny of the dominant nation towards the subject nations is legitimized.⁴⁵

The above examples are iconic but not exhaustive. The point, here, is that the “progressive” left in settler-colonial contexts are often overtaken by the ideology of settlerism—even when their own revolutionary history has told them that such settlerism should be rejected—because it is materially compelling. No matter how many times revolutionary movements and thinkers have restated the necessity of an anti-colonial ethos, settlerism is such that it deletes and forgets this history. Instead, we find elements of the left in settler-colonial contexts repeating variants of the same chauvinist arguments that were already countered by the revolutionaries mentioned above as well as many others. Moreover, there is the oft-repeated “common sense” adage that peoples, cultures, nations are both created and destroyed throughout the long march of history as a regrettable aspect of human “progress.” Although it is the case that, historically, nations have emerged and have vanished, this is is conflated with an ethical ought very quickly, and settlerism thrives in the gap between is and ought. For, if we were to think beyond this truism, we could be led to an ethics beyond settlerism: why should we accept the reality given to us by predatory social relations to date; should we not fight for something better? If these oppressed nations still exist—if they are still struggling for self-determination and if settler-capitalism thrives on their immiseration—then to support their struggles is to oppose settler-capitalism.
In any case, the manifestation of reactionary settlerism is not an aberration. As Fanon reminds us, in settler-colonial contexts, “it is these racists who, in opposition to their country as a whole, are logically consistent.”⁴⁶ The garrison is the default point of reference. To be clear, I am not arguing that everyone with a white settler background is essentially or biologically racist, unable to break from settlerism and white supremacy.⁴⁷ Such a perspective would indeed be similar to what proud racist settlers argue in their appeal to ethno-states and the imagined “inherent” genetic difference between races and cultures. The problem is ideological, not biological. As Marx put it once, “social existence determines [social] consciousness.”⁴⁸
Hence, settlerism is not only an ideology bound to the consciousness of those who occupy, in various degrees, the position of settler in a settler-colonial formation—though such a social consciousness will be logically consistent with their social being, and thus more compelling. Due to the historical process that has enshrined settler-colonial formations as nations, and all of the narratives and mythologies that have become part of the way in which these nations reproduce themselves as nations, settlerism possesses an immanent dimension. If we live in social formations that are settler-capitalist then, just as we need to be aware of how capitalist ideology is compelling to the masses of people who live and toil under capitalism, we need to also be aware of how settlerist ideology is equally as compelling. Just as the average person under capitalism is subjectivized by values that teach them to pursue their liberation through individual competition and private property, so too is the average person within a settler-colonial context taught to pursue their freedom by abiding by the maintenance of colonial power. Simply because an ideology is common sense, however, does not mean it is insurmountable. Under the hegemony of contemporary capitalism it is common sense to believe that there is no alternative to the current state of affairs, that capitalism is “the end of history,” and yet these norms have always been troubled by resistance. Thus, while settler-colonial values, just like bourgeois values, are compelling because they are hegemonic, they can still be rejected as the latter has been rejected by innumerable anti-systemic movements. But those who reject them first, and with the most commitment, will be the exploited and oppressed who have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Conclusion

When the riots swept across the US in the wake of the execution of George Floyd, the garrison’s subsequent manifestation was stark. Not only did the police, as a repressive apparatus of settler-capitalism, reveal themselves to be the professionalized arm of the garrison, but the unity between them and paramilitary settlerist groups and individuals was a reminder of the same unity that defined colonial conquest and slavery. As Patrick Wolfe wrote in Traces of History, “settler invasion typically combines a shifting balance of official and unofficial strategies, initially to seize Native territory and subsequently to consolidate its expropriation.”⁴⁹
The reason why the police tolerated armed white militias earlier in the epidemic, and yet cracked down upon protesters angry about the targeting and murder of black persons, became patently evident: these informal militias were friends of the police; there is a circuit of shared membership between them, and thus the official and unofficial wings of the armed garrison could cohere to pacify a recalcitrant population. As statues commemorating slavers and genociders were targeted by the rioters, paramilitary settlerist groups worked with the police to defend these sites, demonstrating that they cared more about inanimate monuments to slavery and colonialism than the contemporary inheritors of these legacies. Meanwhile, liberal politicians and journalists exhorted the rioters to be peaceful, reasserted the old counter-insurgency adage that violent protesters were bad agents and spread rumors about “outside agitators.” There was no meaningful liberal condemnation of the police actions, only the same calls for reform intended to disarticulate and drown out the more radical criticisms of the police (encapsulated in slogans such as “defund,” “abolish,” etc.). Or when they were not drowned out, transformed into toothless academic/cultural terms following a similar fate as “decolonize” and “decolonial”.⁵⁰
In these times, where we can observe the garrison manifesting as armed settlers demanding a return to open white supremacy—and where settler-capitalist states sometimes respond in agreement, as Israel is doing with Gaza—the liberal and progressive expressions of settlerism function as seemingly rational alternatives to the supposed irrationality of reactionary and conservative settlerism. We must understand, however, that we are not observing behavior that is deeply irrational (though it may have irrational aspects, such as its denial of history and science) but behavior that is logically entailed by the material processes of settler-capitalism. The liberal and progressive alternatives are merely ways to channel our energy into a variety of different movements that, while decidedly less despicable than movements that are openly racist and/or fascistic, are not interested in breaking from the garrison but re-inscribing a formally kinder and gentler version. After all, liberal responses to all rebellions against the state of affairs treat the demands of the oppressed masses as equally if not more “irrational” than open reactionary predation: how could anyone, liberal ideologues proclaim with shock and horror, believe the capitalist carceral state is unnecessary, that pipelines are a problem, that the boundaries of a bantustan⁵¹ should be breached, that settler violence should be confronted with anti-colonial violence? For the settlerist imaginary, a world without the armed manifestation of the garrison is inconceivable. Just as Hamilton cleansed a particular settler-colonial history by coding the masters of the garrison and plantation as the victims, thus justifying settler-capitalism as a “progressive” historical, inevitability, so too do the liberal and progressive variants of settlerism require that the institutionalized garrison and plantation be accepted as normative—that it can be sanitized and humanized.
Such sanitization and humanization is represented by the Biden campaign and electoral victory. In contradistinction from the irrationality of the white nationalists marching on governmental buildings and denying the pandemic, the settler-capitalist formation of the US now has a government that will return the US to some form of neoliberal business as usual. Indeed, the Democratic Party’s propaganda throughout the 2020 US election was that “Trumpism” was an aberration and that Biden and Harris would return the country to “normal.”⁵² As we know, both Biden and Harris had nothing but disdain for the revolts and slogans regarding police and prison abolition put forward by the descendants of the stolen and colonized. Back to normal merely means back to another sublimated form of the garrison; the recent and violent manifestations were not deviations or irrational breaks from this “normal” but logically generated by the social structure. Settler-colonialism will always generate settlerism; the immanent garrison is waiting to violently manifest.
As long as settler-colonial social relations remain in place, no amount of “campaigns of deintoxification” (which is how the Biden-Harris campaign saw themselves vis-à-vis “Trumpism”) will prevent the more reactionary expressions of settlerism from reappearing unless the liberals and progressives are prepared to complete the genocide of the settler-colonial project themselves, since the colonized will always seek to reestablish their national sovereignty as long as they exist as colonized. Indeed, liberal and progressive variants of settlerism have been forced to engage in genocidal programs, regardless of their humanistic principles, when faced with the fact of colonial unrest. Recently, Israel launched a genocidal war upon Gaza, openly proclaiming its desire to cleanse the space of Palestinian life because it understands, due to its closer proximity to its colonial establishment, that the colonized will never stop resisting until they have been ethnically cleansed. Otherwise, in the settler-capitalist formations that have veiled themselves in humanitarian illusions after centuries of their initial conquests, genocidal programs proceed in a different manner. Hence, in Canada, Trudeau Sr.’s “White Paper” that was intended to destroy Indigenous communities by forcing cultural integration in a manner that was similar to the residential schools. Or, also in Canada, the “60s Scoop,” supported by the official social democratic Party (the NDP), where the children of the colonized were removed from Indigenous families and placed with settler adoptive/foster families. Genocide is monstrous and even its “kinder and gentler” forms, where outright massacre is replaced with programs designed to culturally kill the native through European “civilizing” measures, should be treated as heinous.
Wolfe has noted that, in contrast to the European colonies in Africa and Asia where native populations were used as a cheap work force, the settler-colonial formations that persist are “not primarily established to extract surplus value from indigenous labour.”⁵³ This is largely because, as I have argued elsewhere (as has Wolfe), the settler-colonial formations that remain have been concerned with replacing the native population, transforming the settlers into the new natives, and merging the motherland with the colony. With the US, Canada, and Australia we witness how colonial relations are pushed under “successive waves of secessionist ideology”⁵⁴ since the advent of these nation-states as nation-states required that the colony become its own motherland with some form of manifest destiny. And since the settler state of Israel emerged after this period, it immediately began with the notion of full conquest and replacement, establishing its own colonial motherland at the outset rather than becoming such a social formation through secession. As Wolfe puts it, such

[s]ettler colonies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies. The split tensing reflects a determinate feature of settler colonization. The colonizers come to stay—invasion is a structure not an event.⁵⁵

Such a structure in the older settler-capitalist formations is the immanentization of the garrison that is no longer surrounded—at least not structurally or ideologically—but it is the content of settlerist epistemology. To know the settler-colonial reality from the viewpoint of the settler is to know it through the lens of the immanent garrison.
Moreover, due to the prevalence of settler-capitalist formations (US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel) in the imperialist camp, it is important to understand how their existence influences international relations. The shared settler-colonial identity generates a shared international duty: after all, if any of these nation-states were to denounce the colonial violence of another, it would mean that they would also have to denounce their own colonial depredations. Hence, when the ICJ ruled that the South Africa’s charge that Israel was guilty of genocide was credible and certain (though weak) provisional measures were ordered (including allowing humanitarian aid to reach the citizens of Gaza), every settler-capitalist formation almost immediately pulled funding from UNRWA following baseless Israeli assertions that some UNRWA employees were involved in the October 7 attacks. Canada and the US were already the most vociferous in providing military funding for Israel’s war machine. This is not because the “Israeli lobby” possesses a conspiratorial power to puppet the decisions of these imperialist states, but because there is a shared settler-colonial identity: the Israeli lobby is more like a settler-colonial ambassador to its older colonizer siblings. Why would these settler-capitalist states prevent an ally from doing precisely what they had already done—and what they are still doing—to those Indigenous populations they had conquered, in order to become the imperialist states they currently are?
Beyond this immediate relationship between settler-capitalist formations, is the relationship shared with the majority of the imperialist camp that possesses a settler-colonial past. Most of the Western Europe states gained economic and political power through their colonial adventures and are largely sympathetic with their imperialist cousins who, because of these adventures, remain settler-colonial formations. If we take the colonial genocide in Gaza being a test case, the distance from the days of direct colonialism leads to an uneven sympathy: the UK and Germany are the most vociferous in their support of colonial violence,⁵⁶ with France being a little less so (Macron flirted with the “ceasefire” demand), and other states (such as Spain and Belgium) choosing to distance themselves from open colonial attrition. The same thing happened with Apartheid South Africa: the imperialist camp as a whole supported it until it became untenable, the last hold-outs of support being its fellow settler-capitalists.
In the past, anti-systemic movements needed to develop a counterhegemony that would incorporate workers, many of whom were hypnotized by the ideologies produced by bourgeois power. The strength of such movements was the result of an understanding of the gap between what Lenin called “trade union consciousness” and “revolutionary consciousness”;⁵⁷ the trick was to build a movement united in theory and practice that could bridge this gap. But in settler-capitalist contexts, which are determined by colonial ideology as well as capitalist ideology, the gap between settlerism and anti-colonialism needs to be comprehended, rather than downplayed. And, a movement aimed at the annihilation of settler-capitalism rather than the annihilation of the colonized will receive its strength if, and only if, an anti-capitalist movement is also capable of: 1. understanding settlerism and its material basis in the settler-capitalist nation-state; 2. organizing in relationship to the leadership of the most revolutionary factions of the colonized, so as to; 3. develop the means to break from settlerism and pursue an anti-colonial program alongside an anti-capitalist program.
Without comprehending the prevalence of settlerism or developing the means to break from it, all movements in settler-capitalist formations that seek to challenge capitalism will fail, no matter how working-class, feminist, or abstractly anti-racist their points of unity might be. As previously discussed, the composition of the working-class is conditioned by settlerism. Moreover, (settler) women also participated in the settler-colonial project, were part of the original garrisons, and in the US formation where the settler garrison also generated the plantation, settler women profited greatly from slavery as well.⁵⁸ An anti-systemic movement cannot be meaningfully anti-racist in a social context where settler-colonialism thrives, and the ideology that sustains it is left unchallenged, since racism draws its vitality from the persistence of settler-colonial social relations. Racism is not, as aforementioned in regards to Fanon, merely a psychological “quirk,” but in fact draws its vitality from the material facts of settler-colonialism and imperialism.
More importantly, however, is the fact that the struggles of the colonized for self-determination and sovereignty threaten settler-capitalism, since the capitalism in such formations is largely intertwined with settler-colonialism. Decolonization is anathema to the settler-capitalist formation since it threatens to break-up its hegemony. Simultaneously, settler-capitalism is such that a racial hierarchy has been constituted within its working-class. Those workers who have “nothing left to lose but their chains” are largely not the white workers but the masses who are immiserated by settler-colonialism and imperialism: the latter form a potential “hard core” of the proletariat upon which a parasitical settler labor aristocracy draws its sustenance and justifies its “cross class” alliance with the bourgeoisie. As such, this strata constitutes the conscious elements of the “surround” that continues to threaten the immanent garrison, the basis of a subject that can truly threaten the settler-capitalist state of affairs.

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a University of Connecticut political theory workshop in December 2023. Special thanks to August Shipman, Justin Theodra, and the other participants who provided feedback.
2. The term settler-capitalism has been used by myself and other radical academics (such as, for example, Tyler Shipley’s usage in Canada In The World) for capitalist states that came into being as “capitalist” through settler-colonial conquest and still function, despite being capitalist formations, as settler-colonies. As Shipley puts it, settler-capitalist formations are those where “colonialism runs through [their] entire history. . . [which is] driven by one fundamental material goal—the destruction of Indigenous political economic practices and their displacement by capitalism” [Shipley, Canada In The World (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing), 1]. I have referred to this kind of maintenance of settler-colonialism elsewhere as sublimated colonialism, since it pushes the colonial foundation of these capitalist formations under the surface while still maintaining key aspects of settler-colonial ideology. Nation-states such as the US, Canada, Australia, and Israel are iconic representations of this settler-capitalism. The US and Canada are perhaps the most globally significant representations of settler-capitalism because they both unify their internal colonial apparatus with capitalism and worldwide imperialism.
3. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998), 70.
4. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013), 17.
5. Harney and Moten, 17.
6. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 58.
7. (RCMP) Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Canada), (FBI) Federal Bureau of Investigation (US), (IDF) Israeli Defense Forces (Israel).
8. Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 176.
9. Lebensraum was the notion of German National expansionism that was a central ideology for Nazi expansionism. Eretz Israel is a similar concept which seeks to expand Israel so that it claims the territory held by Ancient Israel. New Yorker article The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers (www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-extreme-ambitions-of-west-bank-settlers) is an exposé of what these settlers think, particularly their unabashed paramilitary ambitions.
10. Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy, ‘Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities,’ Social Text, Issue 135 (June 2018): 7.
11. J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2014), 9.
12. Sakai, 141.
13. Sakai, 346.
14. Sakai, 356.
15. This is a brief summation of an ideological process I discussed in my paper Sublimated Colonialism (2013).
16. Jasbir Puar, The Right To Maim (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
17. Dunbar-Ortiz, 37.
18. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 573.
19. Devin Zane Shaw, Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020), 167.
20. I have placed “internal” in scare quotes because of Jodi Byrd’s work in troubling this discourse. “The ‘internal,’ however,” she writes, “reifies colonized indigenous peoples as ‘minorities within’ countries such as New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and the United States” [Byrd, The Transit of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 135]. Considering that colonized nations were in fact considered to be foreign nations at the time of colonial contact/conquest, treating them as “internal” to colonial hegemony tends to delete the fact that aspirations for national self-determination demand an externality to colonial power.
21. See, for example, Alanis Obomsawin’s masterful documentaries: Kahnesatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993) and Rocks at Whiskey Trench (2000). In both of these films Indigenous subjects speak of how people they once counted as neighbors suddenly turned on them, sometimes in the most violently racist manner.
22. James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1854), 260.
23. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 142. This pernicious “nativism” (i.e., a reactionary settlerist identification with the land taken through conquest) has been analyzed thoroughly by other scholars, so I will not repeat what has been adequately established by their excellent work. See, for example, Aileen Moreton Robinson’s The White Possessive (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2015) which, in its identification of whiteness with possession, examines the ways in which this “nativist” possession function. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has also described this tendency in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Here it is also worth noting the “pretendian” phenomenon—a phenomenon that in the past two years has gained a lot of attention—where white scholars have masqueraded as Indigenous. In this sense there has been a white possessiveness regarding Indigenous identity itself, the grossest iteration of nativism. Algonquin scholar Veldon Coburn has spoken a lot about this problematic.
24. Sakai, 353.
25. Since this is not a paper on the theory of ideology and the subject, I won’t go into much detail about the debates around this conception of ideology and subject formation. I will note, however, that although I agree partly with the way in which Althusser develops, following Gramsci, the conception of ideology, I disagree with the almost totalizing sense of ideological subject formation that results from his treatment of this problematic in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (Louis Althusser, On The Reproduction of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2014), 232–272). That is, for Althusser there is the sense that there can be no subject outside of interpellation, thus lending itself to interpretation where persons are programmed as subjects by the structure, the latter of which almost becomes a metaphysical principle. This problematic of the subject and its relationship to ideology forms the basis of a book project in which I’m currently enmeshed.
26. Sandy Grande, “Accumulation of the Primitive: the limits of liberalism and the politics of Occupy Wallstreet,” Settler Colonial Studies 3:3–4 (2013): 373.
27. Far Right movements are “system-loyal” when the settlerist cross-class alliance is stable, they are “insurrectionary” when it is not. (Shaw, 177–178)
28. Byrd, The Transit of Empire, 38.
29. The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is a good example of the guilty colonial conscience. Commissioned by the Liberal government under Justin Trudeau, it was intended to bring about reconciliation between Canadian society as a whole and its colonized First Nations. In fact, the Trudeau government has not tired of speaking about “reconciliation” with and “recognition” of “Canada’s First Peoples.” Although the TRC produced a document demonstrating all of the harms enacted on the Indigenous populations of Canada, especially including those that continued to affect and structure colonized life in Canada—the legacy of Residential Schools, the ongoing reality of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Children (MMIW)—the Commission, rather than what the Commission recommended, was enough for liberal Canadians to feel good about themselves. Hence the convention of recognizing the harms but not doing anything to rectify them became a normal way of assuaging the guilty colonial conscience. Reactionaries, on the other hand, simply dismissed the TRC and denied genocide.
30. Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 54.
31. Coulthard, 125.
32. See Gerald Horne’s The Counter-Revolution of 1776 (2014).
33. Dunbar-Ortiz, 75–76.
34. Michael Ignatieff, “Who Are Americans To Think That Freedom Is Theirs To Spread?” (www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/magazine/who-are-americans-to-think-that-freedom-is-theirs-to-spread.html).
35. As an aside, there is a curious liberal convention amongst these nation-states when it comes to the matter of genocide. Although most of them have signed onto the UN’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, they do not see their own colonial pasts as being guilty of the same crime. Rather they treat the Nazi Holocaust (and occasionally the Armenian Genocide) as the paradigm example and thus treat themselves as exempt. They conveniently ignore the fact that, as Césaire noted, “they tolerated [genocide] before it was inflicted on them [meaning Europeans;] they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples” (Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 36). Israel is clearly doing the same, but more directly, when it invokes the memory of the Holocaust as it carries out the multiple ethnic cleansings that comprise the genocide in Gaza. And its settler-capitalist allies are again shutting their eyes and legitimizing it because it is again being “applied only to non-European peoples.”
36. J. Moufawad-Paul, “Sublimated Colonialism: The Persistence of Actually Existing Settler-Colonialism,” Philosophy Study 3:3 (2013), 197.
37. Frantz Fanon, Towards the African Revolution (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 40–41.
38. Fanon, 40.
39. Fanon, 38.
40. Sakai, 340–341.
41. Grande, 373.
42. In my first book, The Communist Necessity (2014/2020), I examined the “movementist” phenomenon that reached its apotheosis in Occupy Wall Street and its misleading slogan of “the 99%.”
43. Since I am describing a common tendency based on a common subject position, the list of examples of individuals and organizations expressing some form of this type of settlerism is endless. Sakai’s Settlers attempts to provide a history of the dominant labor movement in the US in which settlerism was expressed and prevented unity, as did Du Bois earlier with Black Reconstruction, and perhaps similar historiographies should be written for Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Israel. It is the case, however, that the mainstream communist parties in these countries are all committed to the continuation of these countries as socialist rather than any form of decolonization. The Communist Party of Canada, for example, maintains a notion of a socialist Canada in which rights for Indigenous nations is not self-determination but is instead treated as a problem of civil rights and integration (i.e., a more “left” version of Canada’s current “reconciliation” discourse that Coulthard and others have thoroughly critiqued). The Democratic Socialists of America have often pointed to “progressive” elements in the American War of Independence and a sense of patriotism with the notion of a more humane US. The list goes on.
44. V. I. Lenin, On the National and Colonial Questions (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1975), 10.
45. Ibrahim Kaypakkaya, On the National Question (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2020), 24. As an aside, it is worth noting that both Mariátegui and Kaypakkaya were responsible for generating revolutionary struggles in their respective social contexts: Mariátegui’s intervention would lead, four decades later, to the refoundation of the Communist Party of Peru as the “party of Mariátegui,” the so-called Sendero Luminoso, that would initiate a people’s war in 1980; Kaypakkaya himself founded a revolutionary organization in 1972, the Communist Party of Turkey/Marxist-Leninist, the activities of which led to his capture and execution in 1973.
46. Fanon, 40.
47. Nor am I arguing that non-white persons cannot be affected by settlerism or, in some cases, even embrace pro-colonial ideology. While in some senses it might make theoretical sense to demarcate arrivants (i.e., refugees, migrants, etc.) from settlers, it is also the case that some of these arrivants may adopt colonial ideology because it is “common sense.” We also know that, historically, members of the colonized have adopted pro-colonial ideology and become collaborators and/or compradors. Moreover, colonialism is such that—while its modern and persistent version has coincided with the construction of race and the valorization of white supremacy—it also possesses a higher level of complexity. We know, for example, that Ireland was colonized by the UK but that Irish immigrants, when moving to the much more vicious settler-colonial formations of the US, Canada, and Australia, were brought into the colonizing fold. We also know that Jewish Europeans were racialized and that this racialization led to the Holocaust, but this does not mean that the establishment of the State of Israel on Palestinian land was not a violent act of settler-colonialism that has generated the same garrison ideology amongst Israeli Jews. But these are larger questions. I am simply interested in the ideology of settlerism that structures subjectivity in settler-colonial formations.
48. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1904), 11–12.
49. Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History (London: Verso, 2016), 41.
50. As Steven Salaita writes about the number of “decolonial” academics who were incapable of speaking against the genocide in Gaza: “Western academe was completely unprepared for the material demands of decolonization despite its popularity as a professional brand. Many among the intellectual class, including scholars of Fanon like Adam Shatz and Lewis Gordon, either disavow or diminish anticolonial resistance or ignore it altogether. Academe is where resistance goes for processing and beautification after it has been completed” (stevesalaita.com/scrolling-through-genocide/).
51. The bantustans, or “black homelands,” were those areas in Apartheid South Africa where the Black population was only permitted to live.
52. On Necrocapitalism, a collectively written project that began as a serialization during the pandemic and became a book in 2021, states that at the beginning of the 2020 US elections, “[t]he use of Trumpism. . . severs these far-right tendencies from their roots in American history, indeed recent history. . . . Democrats become able to treat the far-right as the fault of the Republicans, rather than as predicated on the conditions of American power that Democratic politicians have for decades tolerated, abetted, or supported” (M. I. Asma, On Necrocapitalism (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2021), 274.).
53. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London: Cassell, 1999), 1.
54. Moufawad-Paul, 202.
55. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 2.
56. While the UK’s support possesses clear historical roots in colonial/imperialist internationalism (i.e., the UK eventually helped the Zionist movement establish the modern state of Israel, won over by the arguments of key Zionist ideologues, such as Theodor Herzl, who proposed that Israel would be a bulwark of European colonialism in the Middle East), Germany’s unequivocal support appears to possess a different origin. As many German governments and their ideologues have proclaimed, Germany’s support of Israel is the result of its supposed shame of its Nazi past and the Holocaust. Thus, its unequivocal support of Israel is treated as some kind of atonement. But this is largely propaganda, though propaganda with a long history, that is belied by a number of historical facts. Most critically, West Germany (which won the Cold War and is thus the precedent of the contemporary Germany nation-state) was never concerned with de-Nazifying, and in fact incorporated numerous high-ranking Nazis into its political apparatus: so much for atonement. These former Nazis had no problem cozying up to Israel alongside the Federal Republic of Germany of the Cold War era due to common imperialist interests.
57. From Lenin’s 1902 classic What Is to Be Done?
58. See, for example, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers’ masterful historiography They Were Her Property (2019) that examines, in great detail, the ways in which settler women in the US were able to establish a predatory economic and social empowerment during the plantation era.