jacobinmag.com/2016/11/native-americans-marxism-colonialism-nodapl-archie-phinney-means-nez-perce
Marxism, in Means’s account, would offer Native Americans nothing better than capitalism: both declare indigenous people and the land a cost of economic development. Marxism simply reorganizes a settler-colonial society’s power relations based on efficiency. Native peoples live in “sacrifice areas,” and any modern, industrialized society will need to extract fuel, surplus, and raw materials from their land.
A few years later, Ward Churchill elaborated on Means’s point, stating that Marxists would conscript all indigenous peoples into their proletarian army in order to win their socialist revolution. It is, Churchill states bluntly, “why Marxism . . . tends to be dismissed rather harshly by the Indian population.”
In more recent years, theorist Jodi Byrd suggested the same for twentieth-century Marxist political strategy more generally, arguing that Antonio Gramsci’s theories of counterhegemonic practices only make sense if one wants to reinforce a “democratic multiethnic settler state,” rather than provide for true tribal independence.
Anthropologist David Bedford did acknowledge that Marxism could provide a useful analysis in some anticolonial struggles, such as the fight to end apartheid in South Africa. In that case, Africans served as a reserve army of labor for white businesses. But, for tribes who may relate to capitalism outside of regimes of labor exploitation, Marxism, he argues, fails to account for indigenous people’s unique claims of sovereignty and self-determination.
“Development,” as it’s commonly understood, renders people and earth into abstract inputs; “universal democracy,” the critique implies, renders all people as abstract citizens, flattening group rights and independent nation status for tribes.
