On No Kings Day and the Tasks of Revolutionaries

This speech was delivered by a member of Liberation's Central Committee in Indianapolis on March 28th.

Settler-colonialism in the United States is taught as a single and special period of American history that occurred four hundred years ago. The pioneers came, saw, and conquered, then, lo and behold, the greatest country in the world was born and everybody lived happily ever after – the American Dream. This narrative is incomplete, for as long as it forsakes the next 400 hundred years of genocide, slavery, apartheid, displacement, erasure, assimilation, gentrification, deportation, and war. Because settler-colonialism in the United States is a standing and ongoing social and economic power structure that imposes its will on us every single day through state sponsored violence. Protest all you want, this will not bend its will, this will not stop anything. Much like in Palestine, settler-colonialism has taken the land and grafted onto it a capitalist mode of production that cannot sustain itself without war. War for oil, war for minerals, war for markets and transit.

Now, settler-colonialism has birthed new "liberal" and "progressive" ideas. These so-called progressives, instead of destroying settler-colonialism, want to graft onto it "socialist" characteristics that cannot be sustained without these same kinds of war. They propose free healthcare, free housing, free this and free that, and when asked how to pay for it, they say “Tax the Rich" – but conveniently left out where the rich get their blood money from: the super-exploitation of the third world, in one word, war. War for oil, war for minerals, war for markets and transit ways. This is not analysis, this is a great savior theory. For as long as political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color are better off organizing decentralized self-defense structures, like Iran, and mutual aid networks like the Panthers did to challenge settler-colonialism. "No war, but class war" means saying no to the Democrats and "progressives", too. Our unity must base itself around the defeat of settler-colonialism first, no matter in which political colors it presents itself. We cannot stop the war on Iran, the siege on Palestine, regime change in Venezuela and Cuba unless we stop settler colonialism at home.