Marxism and the Fight Against Native Oppression

The following excerpt from the Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste “Programmatic Theses” summarizes the Marxist perspective for proletarian-centered struggle against the oppression of Canada’s aboriginal peoples. The full document, published under the title “Who We Are, and What We Fight For,” was adopted by the TL/LT’s Eighth National Conference in 1998.

VII. Canadian capitalism was founded on the destruction of the pre-existing aboriginal societies, beginning under French and, later, English colonialism. The possibility of independent development of Indian nations was foreclosed by the expropriation of these peoples through fraud and military conquest, combined with the devastating impact of disease following European contact.

The majority of Native people today live in urban centers, where they are the targets of all-sided racism and police terror. Thus, aboriginal people are disproportionately represented both among the homeless and in the prison population. In Saskatchewan, where they make up less than 10 percent of the population, Native people constitute fully 70 percent of jail inmates. Tens of thousands of Native people continue to live on the squalid reserves established to formalize their dispossession. Others live in isolated communities where no treaties were ever signed, as in most of British Columbia.

Only the destruction of capitalism can hold out the possibility of voluntary integration, on the basis of full equality, for those aboriginal peoples who desire it, and the fullest possible regional autonomy for those who do not. The Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste demands that whatever residual rights Native peoples have been able to maintain, whether through treaty agreements or otherwise, be respected. In some cases, treaty rights and land claims run up against socially useful developments like railways, hydroelectric projects and oil pipelines. The aboriginal peoples should receive generous compensation for any deprivation of land or disruption of activity, based on completely consensual agreement. Only a workers government will guarantee these conditions.

The federal government currently holds out the promise of “Native self-government.” We warn that in most cases this is a cover for “transforming” the reserves, with their plagues of alcoholism and early death, into apartheid-style bantustans. Nevertheless, where Native people have a land base, the Trotskyist League/ Ligue Trotskyste will defend whatever measure of political autonomy they are able to wrest from governments, including the right to govern their land and control its resources. As elementary measures, we demand the immediate abolition of the racist Indian Act and the Department of Indian Affairs; and that the police, courts and state “welfare” agencies keep off the reserves and other Native land.

The Native peoples of northern Quebec have increasingly become a political football in the vicious contest between Anglo chauvinism and Quebec nationalism. We support the right of these peoples to determine their own fate. At the same time, we adamantly oppose the suggestion by some aboriginal leaders that, in the event of Quebec separation, they would call for intervention by the Canadian army. In addressing the concrete “choice” between being part of an independent Quebec or remaining in a rump Canada, our primary point of departure is that within the framework of racist capitalism, this simply means the right of the aboriginal populations to determine by whom they will be oppressed and brutalized. The unremitting proletarian defense of Native people’s lives and rights as equal citizens is part of the fight of the multiracial working class to overturn this whole brutal and violent capitalist system. Only an egalitarian-socialist society under workers rule will be able to redress three centuries of abuse and degradation.

VIII. Canadian capitalism’s depredations have done immeasurable environmental damage. This falls heavily on Native peoples, as in the horrific mercury poisoning (Minimata disease) of entire Ojibway communities near Kenora, Ontario in the 1950s and ’60s. Meanwhile, whole industries are destroyed, throwing tens of thousands out of work. The collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery, for example, was fundamentally the result of decades of devil-take-the-hindmost plunder by Canadian corporations.

As Marxists, we are for industrial development, and we support the introduction of useful new technologies. But we recognize that the rational exploitation of natural resources is impossible under the irrational, profit-driven capitalist system. We oppose the bourgeois “environmentalism” of groups, like Greenpeace, which push reactionary “back to nature” utopias against the interests of working people and the oppressed.

The history of our species, itself part of nature, is the struggle to master the forces of nature to provide a decent and worthwhile life. Against the spurious atavism of petty-bourgeois “environmentalists,” we stand with those workers whose livelihoods depend on development of resource industries, even as we denounce their leaders’ treacherous class collaboration with capitalist corporations like forestry giant Macmillan-Bloedel. The international success of “conservationist” campaigns against logging, trapping and the seal hunt has only reinforced the poverty of thousands, including Inuit and other aboriginal peoples. The right of Native peoples to control their resources includes the right to seek their development, a right we defend against the racist moralism of such “environmental activism.”

The working people in power, in full control of the productive resources of society, can preserve the co-inhabitants of this planet, while putting an end to human want. Only a centrally planned, socialist economy can ensure that necessary industrial progress proceeds with a minimum of ecological damage.