on the topic of that graphic you reblogged sort of excusing or at least downplaying latin american racism, have you noticed that people rarely include various latam countries when they discuss colonial projects? do you think theres a difference between the continued existence of states like mexico, argentina, brazil, paraguay ect and the continued existence of the usa, canada, isreal, and australia? i'm genuinely asking because the latter list is hardly ever mixed with the former
I think the ethnonationalism of the latter countries (WASP and anyone assimilated into that form of whiteness for U.S./Canada/Australia, Jewish for Israel) is what sets them apart from the coloniality of Latin American countries. The independence revolutions of the U.S. and Israel were accomplished by local elites for the sake of winning substantial democratic rights, but for colonists alone—in particular, the right of slave holding and maximum imperial expansion.
Latin American independence has always been an incomplete decolonial revolution, accomplished largely for the benefit of colonist elites before later revolutions filled them in with substantial democratic content. In most Latin American countries their democratic revolutions have always encompassed mass revolts of Natives, Black people, and mestizos against racial domination, colonial dispossession, and capitalist exploitation. The Mexican Revolution is the paradigmatic example but you can also see it in pretty much every major left populist upsurge in Latin America from the 19th century Paraguayan Revolution to the 20th century Popular Unity movement in Chile to the 21st century Bolivarian Revolution. In each case, while the popular democratic movements of course always had to confront their own internal divisions, it was possible to both fight for the democratization of the existing state and against colonial and racial domination. This is not to say that every racial liberation movement should’ve just assimilated into a one-dimensional national movement—there’s a clear justification for movements like the Indianistas, Kataristas, Movimento Negro, Zapatistas, and others fighting for autonomy, and they ultimately strengthen the democratic revolution by challenging its deepest pitfalls.
What’s distinct about the U.S. and similar countries is that they are foundationally and fundamentally ethnonationalist, and their institutional ethnonational compact between classes is the pitfall of every democratic revolution they have ever seen. Even at their most radical points. The U.S. Civil War was this country’s greatest upsurge against racial capitalism, to the point of abolishing the entire property form of chattel enslavement, but it ultimately coincided with the organization of genocidal wars against Native peoples like the Lakota and it was concluded on terms that demanded the assimilation of freedpeople into capitalist wage labor—which was the condition that allowed the plantocracy to return to power in full force with the rise of the post-Reconstruction Redemptionist Jim Crow regime. It’s not that there’s never been anti-imperialist and anti-racist movements in the U.S., but that they’ve always had to challenge the sovereignty of the existing democratic state (from the Mexican-American War to the Vietnam War) rather than trying to reinforce it against foreign enemies and exploiters.
To the extent that anti-racist and anti-imperialist movements accomplish real changes in the laws and organization of a country’s society, the struggle begins to look more like what prevails in Latin America, where deepening the democratic recreation of the state has a clear and straightforward tie to decolonization. But if this is only accomplished by half-measures and under conditions of surrender, as happened with Nixon’s sponsorship of Federal Civil Rights and Native Self-Determination, it ends up creating new methods for recuperating people into imperialism. This can have devastating consequences for liberation movements and even lead to a deeper defeat than before. That’s what happened with the Mizrahi Power movement in Israel, which ultimately just accomplished converting the Mizrahim into the mass basis for Zionist expansionist fascism. The widespread acceptance of mercenary militarism and war criminal affirmative action among racially marginalized and colonized people in the U.S. Empire is just another instance of the same pattern. We’re not gonna be able to just win over the lower class officers to our side the way that Latin American left populist revolutions do. It’s gonna be a much longer and harder process for us to reunite the democratic and decolonial revolutions, and it’s only gonna be possible on the basis of working class internationalism
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