Settler-Colonialism Is Not “The Primary Contradiction”

In the wake of the CPUSA’s 2024 National Convention, a curious but wildly frustrating discourse has spread like wildfire among American Marxists: what is the “primary contradiction” in America? The question was spurred by the incumbent NC’s refusal to publish, let alone to allow the convention to vote on, a proposal to amend the party program. Specifically, the proposal, which was submitted by the Austin chapter, stated that the party program should be amended to name settler-colonialism as the “primary contradiction in the USA.” This proposal, and its rejection by the NC, leaves us with two vexing problems that require intervention. One is the CPUSA’s settler-chauvinism: it’s clear that a certain strata of the rank-and-file and leadership alike really want to say that there is no longer any settler relationship, that the national question is moot, and that a national redistribution of land would be unnecessary. The other is this philistine notion of “primary contradiction,” on which basis the party was, regretfully, justified in rejecting this proposed amendment.

The contemporary “Marxist-Leninist” catchword “primary contradiction” derives from a misreading of or failure to read Mao’s famous essay On Contradiction. To briefly recapitulate, in Mao’s scheme, a principal (not primary) contradiction stands out from all other contradictions, deemed secondary and subordinate, because the former alone plays a determining role in the development of the complex process at hand. This last clause is key: the term “principal contradiction” only expresses a relationship between the set of contradictions within a given process. That is to say, this term has no meaning and is incoherent without a referent and a context, that is, without identifying the subjects in contradiction and the process within which their contradiction has formed and is developing. There is, in other words, no such thing as a universal, fixed, or just-so hierarchy of contradictions, and to say “so and so is the primary contradiction” is hopelessly nonsensical. What makes one contradiction the principal one with respect to another is that it determines or conditions the other, like dependent and independent variables in mathematics. To suggest that there is one universal, singular, primary contradiction is therefore to suggest that all other contradictions are being determined by this particular one, that all society can be described by a sort of “theory of everything” that boils down to one single variable. One hopes that, in a paper directed at fellow Marxists, refutation of such a notion is superfluous.

To give a considerably contrived but highly concrete example, we could ask: what is the principal contradiction that allows a car to move itself? Well, we might first look at the wheels and notice that without the friction between the road and the tires that the wheels of the car would slip instead of roll; that it is the friction that converts the rotational motion of the wheels into the linear motion of the vehicle. Yet, it isn’t the friction that rotates the tires, and the friction only operates to move the car so long as the tires are already rotating; therefore whatever is moving the tires is determining the “contradiction” of the friction between the road and the tires rather than vice versa. So we keep looking: what rotates the wheels? That would be the rotation of the driveshaft. But what, then, rotates the driveshaft? Of course, that would be the engine, in which the linear motion of the pistons is converted into the rotational motion of the driveshaft. We could further observe that the quality of the piston being “negated” is the direction of its motion: here moving up, and then there moving down, and that over the course of the cycle, though the piston returns to its original location, there are “side effects” beyond its own motion – some of the linear kinetic energy is transformed into rotational kinetic energy. In a word, the negation of the negation of the piston drives the driveshaft. But what, now, drives the motion of the piston? That would be the expansion and compression of gas. And finally, what drives this expansion of gas? That would be the combustion of gasoline – and here we finally found our principal contradiction, since the only thing that determines the combustibility of gasoline, its ability to convert chemical potential energy into thermal energy, is its own internal qualities. For the car to move forward, the energy stored in the gasoline is converted to heat, the heat is converted into the linear motion of the piston, which in turn is converted into the rotational motion of the driveshaft and thereupon transferred to the wheels, and finally, through friction, back into linear motion of the whole car. 

But note that although the entire process is principally driven by the gasoline — none of the subsequent parts would be active without it — the car would nevertheless fail to operate without the friction, the driveshaft, or the engine. Likewise, it isn’t the gasoline that determines, for example, the force of friction between the road and tire; it only conditions whether that force (kinetic, rolling friction) is active (as opposed to static friction). Furthermore, it is only while the gasoline is already combusting that it can act as the principal contradiction, because it can’t initiate its own ignition; hence, the principal contradiction, through the process of ignition, would transfer from the spark plug to the gasoline. And, lastly, crucially, this principal contradiction only explains how the car moves (and, furthermore, how it moves itself under usual conditions of driving — e.g. not free-falling or being pushed, air-lifted, etc). There are, after all, other systems that facilitate driving, such as turn signals, breaks, windshield wipers, etc, that are independent from the operation of the combustion engine. Hence if we had instead asked, “what is the principal contradiction of a car?” clearly this would be a nonsense question: since we have taken as our subject not a definite process, but an abstraction, it is not possible to speak of contradictions, let alone to identify a certain, principal one.

Moving away from analogy, the point is this: to say that one contradiction with respect to all others within a given process is principal or fundamental doesn’t mean that all others are irrelevant or inoperative. The phrase “settler-colonialism is the primary contradiction” is therefore incoherent on three separate grounds. Firstly because there is no such thing as a “primary” contradiction or any such hierarchy of contradictions to begin with. Secondly, because settler-colonialism isn’t a contradiction at all — no more than e.g. capitalism or cars are. These are historical formations which, when viewed as complex processes in development, contain contradictions, and each contradiction, in turn, contains aspects. The contradiction between labor and capital is a contradiction of capitalism; the contradiction between oppressor and oppressed nations, and between imperialist powers vying with each other to redivide the world, are contradictions of imperialism. So the formulation of this hypothesis is doubly fraught. This is not to defend the opportunist CPUSA leadership: Notably, if you listen to Joe Sims’ commentary on this question, it is clearly not on these bases that he took issue with the proposal. Rather, over the course of a vague and insubstantial diatribe, he calls into question the very concept of a labor aristocracy and of racially or nationally privileged sections of the working class within the American system of white supremacy. Which is to say, although the proposal was rightly rejected, it was rejected for wrong reasons  — very troubling reasons indeed.

Thirdly, and more in the spirit of the defeated proposal, it’s also wrong because, indeed, the relationship between settlers and the Indigenous peoples isn’t the contradiction principally or fundamentally determining the development of the class struggle in contemporary American society. In previous eras it certainly was, given that capital could not have developed as it did on this continent without having first seized the land, without the genocide and collective dispossession of the Indigenous peoples — not to mention the enslavement of Africans. But if one looks at what drove the dispossession of the Indigenous peoples then and now, we find two distinctly different economic motivations. In the colonial period, mercantilist colonizers dispossessed the natives for the extraction of raw materials (sugar, tobacco, gold, silver, etc) to send back to the homeland — as in the case of the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the Dutch — or, in the case of the English settlers who would go on to declare their independence, to form their own more-or-less independent homesteads on which to subsist. The newly-American settlers would go on to continue dispossessing the natives independently from — though certainly encouraged by — the local colonial states to form the basis of their own, personal livelihoods. Today, in our modern, industrial, monopoly-capitalist society, dispossession of the Indigenous nations, continued aggressions against their territorial sovereignty, is instead driven by independent corporations — highly concentrated capitals — pursuing private profit by seeking resources (water, fish, lumber, uranium, etc) to use in production or seeking, for example, the shortest route for a pipeline. A settler proletarian might benefit from this indirectly by way of the reduced price of oil, by their position in the division of labor, or by legal privileges that make him or her a first-class citizen, but their own dominant mode of economic activity, themselves separated from the means of production and subsistence, doesn’t involve direct participation in stealing land, let alone subsisting on a homestead built on such stolen land. All of this is to say: would American capitalism still operate today if the Indigenous nations liberated themselves, if they seceded and were able to defend their sovereignty? In this case, it’s clear that it would, since these resources could be found elsewhere even if at a greater cost. Conversely, could the Indigenous nations remain colonized if the American state was abolished in a socialist revolution and replaced (in some, if not all, of its former territory) with a plurinational dictatorship of the proletariat? I’m certainly inclined to think not — not unless, for example, a third-party imperial power like Canada succeeded in re-colonizing the American territories afterwards.

Based on this vulgarization of Mao’s theory, both proponents and opponents of the original proposal have taken for granted that the colonial and national questions could only be important — that settler-colonialism could only still exist and be active — if it is this so-called “primary contradiction.” Yet any basic observation of the facts will show that the land is still occupied and that the Indigenous nations are still subject to national oppression and dispossession. It is readily apparent that international class solidarity can only exist when the workers of the oppressing nations are willing to forfeit their privileges in solidarity with their oppressed siblings. It is, moreover, readily agreed that land constitutes both the first condition of production, in any mode or form, and of human life generally, and that a nation oppressed can not be liberated without liberating its land from foreign rule. All of this is true regardless of any notion of primacy or principality. That colonialism generally matured capital into its modern form and that capital presently drives continued colonialism only really goes to show that relations of colonial oppression still exist. Which is to say that, principal or not, the national and colonial questions are certainly among the most important and decisive questions facing the American communist movement, and trying to shove it under the rug in the alleged interest of unity is completely backwards.

Generously, I believe this is what the comrades in the Austin chapter of the CPUSA meant by naming settler-colonialism as “the primary contradiction”: that the abolition of the colonialist American state, the “prison house of nations,” and the liberation of the Indigenous peoples interred therein, is a necessary precondition for building socialism on this continent. This is certainly correct, though, to be absolutely clear, that no more makes any given settler-colonial relation the principal (much less “primary”) contradiction (of/in what?) than the necessity of friction to drive a car makes it the principal contradiction of driving. For this reason, the insistence on defending the theory of decolonization on the basis of its alleged principality only tends to weaken, rather than strengthen, this correct view.