The Killer is in the House
He's jammed the doors. The phone line is dead. No neighbor for miles will hear you scream. His knife glints in the moon's pale glow.
But you grip your bat tight. You aren't locked in here with him.
He's trapped in your den.
…
America, and more broadly the Americas, differ from Europe, despite extensive Europeanization, by dint of its relationship to colonialism. Europe was not depopulated and repopulated by settlers. Europe was not literally constructed by kidnapped slaves, even as it was born through the rationale that orchestrated their enslavement. The Americas were. Europe is haunted by a different order of ghosts.
The United States may appear to have made the transition from colonial subject to colonizer, but it was the colonizer's limb the whole time, a holding of, by, and for settlers. My ancestors who came as indentured servants, despite impoverishment and coerced participation, remained part of a genocidal campaign. The First Nations were to be colonized, and the poor and the forced were to do it.
Spanish and Portuguese holdings, as José Carlos Mariátegui highlights in the case of Peru, took a different approach to colonization than the French and Dutch and English. Rather than send laborers, they sent priests and administrators and soldiers, who converted and coerced their workforce from local peoples, themselves still in the process of monumental cultural shifts following the rapid toppling of previous prevailing orders. This meant that, to some degree, Iberian settlers were unable to advance colonization without integrating with the local population, even if that integration consisted of subjugation. It was a different sort of subjugation than the Huron faced.
Pale outlanders stalked the realm, heralded by plague, shrouded in suffering. They curried translators and would negotiate your complicity for an inch of your life, one betrayal at a time, inch by inch. Old enmities plumed unprecedented, fed by alien killing devices, alien killing methods, alien reinforcements. The ways of war became savage, full of massacres. Annihilation.
The northwestern powers of Europe favored a program of replacement rather than integration. They displaced their local colonized peoples — such as the English to the Irish — and brought bought peoples en masse, in order to offset the loss of labor potential resulting from genocide.
So-called “boarding schools” embody how these powers confronted that replacement cannot be total. Ultimately, because such depth of evil does not actually live in the human spirit, we cannot exterminate each other to the last. Still, a vicious machine tried. Destroying not only cultural institutions through war, they cut down cultural memory through this particularly brutal form of integration. But they couldn't destroy that, either, no matter how deep the scars their attempts have left.
Hear the Seventh Fire of the Anishinaabe:
In the time of the Seventh Fire a Osh-ki-bi-ma-di-zeeg' (New People) will emerge. They will retrace their steps to find what was left by the trail. Their steps will take them to the elders who they will ask to guide them on their journey. But many of the elders will have fallen asleep. They will awaken to this new time with nothing to offer. Some of the elders will be silent out of fear. Some of the elders will be silent because no one will ask anything of them. The New People will have to be careful in how they approach the elders. The task of the New People will not be easy.
If the New People will remain strong in their quest, the Waterdrum of the Midewiwin Lodge will again sound its voice. There will be a rebirth of the Anishinaabe nation and a rekindling of old flames. The Sacred Fire will again be lit.
It is at this time that the Light-skinned Race will be given a choice between two roads. If they choose the right road, then the Seventh Fire will light the Eighth and Final Fire — an eternal Fire of peace, love, brotherhood and sisterhood. If the Light-skinned Race makes the wrong choice of roads, then the destruction which they brought with them in coming to this country will come back to them and cause much suffering and death to all the Earth's people.
There is a way forward. There is a narrow path, I believe — but the part of the path I want to show you reveals my materialist-communist roots. It is not for me to judge whether this path is wise; I hope only that it inspires. I mean to illustrate a transformative revolution in the imperial core. I mean the death of America, and the birth of a new people.
You might think, how could a decolonial revolution in America possibly materialize? Fascism prevails and worse ascends. Political consciousness sleeps through its own vivisection. Literacy plummets because a death god panics that we might connect to our past. The deity's cult moralizes wage slavery and no parody or argument or sacrifice moves them. Liberatory struggle fails, or, at best it seems, crawls maimed.
Did Marx not find it inconceivable that the transformation that blossomed from Petrograd in 1917 could occur in such a backwards place as semi-feudal Russia? And yet, it happened. For all its faults, this attempt at communism — as they are all attempts — gained a lasting foothold in an unlikely place. Even Mao noted how the conditions of China prior to its Revolution differed from what the systemic analyses of communist theory described. And yet.
Humans do not, and perhaps cannot, fully understand the volition of the institutions and superstructures that animate their lives. As much divination as econometrics affords, we remain wrong. The Immortal Science boasts merely an extensive discourse. It is reality that holds the truth. And in the real, can you not see the cracks?
I feel that the colonial nature of our material conditions furrows opportunities within its particular dynamics. Much as peoples subjugated by colony can be turned against each other through redirected wrongs reframed as divisions of categorization, we can be united against settlerism by recognizing this common disjunction. Our differences are our advantage, as it has always been.
Mariátegui and J. Sakai both argue that class as we know it in the Americas is a product of colonialism. By understanding conditions through that pretext, the common enemy emerges. Not a white man, but a pale devil. A god, a cult, a numerology of cruel death, a contempt for the cycle of decay; the way of things as we live it today, down to the plastic in your tooth brush. No, I cannot call for any mere nationalization of industry, rather I must insist on its total transformation. The very rationale of why we perform our society for each other must be reinvented, its practices organized anew, novel institutions erected. Like turning over the earth itself, only then will the pale devil be buried; only then will the worms return it to soil.
…
In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon highlights the issue of borders in decolonial struggle, citing his experience during the Algerian war for national liberation. Borders proved a thorny complex for the intersection of popular consciousness and factional leadership. Honoring lines drawn by Europeans would be absurd, but the revolution itself is still boxed in by the shape of neighboring states. The faction most willing to carry on the colonizer's most important precepts — property and extraction — finds their driven-out foe eager to sue for peace, gaining legitimacy in exchange for this measure of complicity. It is, Fanon laments, a problem that one cannot escape in present times, both for want of practical post-industrial alternatives, and of the colonizer's assent. The French simply ran back to France, melting back into colony's beating heart to project its horrors with a thousand other limbs.
That is our difference. Here in the imperial core, the colonizer has nowhere to run. Through the destruction of hegemony, a new order now unimaginable becomes eminently achievable. Borderless nations, economies without prices, the abolition of need entire with the plenitude of wise industry. What might the CPC change strategically without the pressures and rewards of capital's dominance? That is the opportunity. Still the beating heart. Birth the new world.
In the core, rot prevails. We are starved and beaten, dead in the cold, bought and sold hour by hour or body entire. And with what to show for it? Plague takes us, war consumes us, as dead leaders sleepwalk through the crises they foment. An inept corporatism marionettes an empire made of clay and dust. Though, some curious advantage festers, an infection in our abuse.
I have wondered if 2008 was the last recession. A recession, like a depression, is a sort of economic correction, a painful realization of grievous error. This is necessary to the theology so that rich people can properly account for swindling each other. If the powerful fool the powerful, the difference is taken from the subjugated. But, if the powerful do not fool each other, then there is no need for a correction. They can take from the subjugated at will, together as one.
Marx noted the tendency of capital to destroy and reinvent the means of production, but Joseph Schumpeter identified it as a key process of accountability, calling it creative destruction. So long as competitors can destroy each other with, in theory, better products, better prices, etc., then capitalists will serve demand in pursuit of profit. They do this wantonly, exuding toxic externalities; nevertheless the taps run and the grocer holds inventory. But profit dwindles over time, such is its destiny. Capitalists eventually turn on each other not as competitors, but as existential threats. Through acquisition and capture, all sectors tend toward monopoly as even the state becomes a servant of profit alone. The competition necessary to hold capitalists accountable to the governance of production ceases, leaving a corporatist coven of a few unaccountable owners. Why would they need price corrections?
So, maybe the obvious AI bubble doesn't burst. Maybe crypto grifts remain eternal. Maybe property speculation fuels homelessness for the rest of our lives. Maybe the cost of groceries mysteriously outpaces inflation by an order of magnitude, and all we ever hear is that the good line went up.
This only becomes possible because the few remaining capitalists have lost all accountability to the governance of production. Not merely that they are immune to prosecution for abuses, but that they have become totally divorced from the realities of administration. It does not matter what conditions are really like, how production or consumption really behave, because all that these corporatists see is their own propaganda: that the good line went up. Their machinations prove inept, aloof. They fizzle, like the Metaverse, a meaningless waste. They prove ephemeral, as did the 2019 coup in Bolivia. Their rank opportunism slumps into war presuming itself a merchant of death, but they only rally their enemies. They flail in pursuit of autocracy, itching to shed the trappings of pluralism. Pessimists say capitalism is very good at what it does, but this isn't capitalism anymore. If 2008 was the last recession, then the situation has changed.
…
Does this abstention of governance feel like a void, or a hell-hail? Repression rains from the federal while blue team sends fundraising emails. So, we must distinguish what we call our governments — pageantries for settlers in a theology of illusory consent — from the actual work of governance.
It may seem obvious. Governance concerns the marshaling of sufficiency, by organizing (or mediating the organization of) the means of production. The goal of governance is providence, for the governed but more broadly for life itself. Why else are we alive if not to celebrate and perpetuate the cycle of mortality? Why should I not abolish hunger? Why would you expect any less of a compassionate order? Why should not all justice be restorative, all plenitude enduring?
It thus grows clear that despite a system of entities calling themselves governments, virtually no governance occurs in our lives, and it is all done by corporatists. Famine is only stayed in the food desert by the supply chain of McDonald's. The hospital seeks profit; if you're lucky, they'll extend credit. The university takes dividends from genocidaires and the extinctionists of oil. In many places, it is even illegal to perform the work of governance, as feeding those unhoused and hungry comes to risk arrest. Resisting the eviction notice is, so to say, an easy way to arrange a confrontation with the overwhelming force of militarized police.
Yet, it is quite easy to arrange such a confrontation, isn't it? They meet you in the streets, and at home when you call. They will go where you tell them, with the right summons. Being more of us than them, we can be in more places than them. They being always imported to the city, we will always have the home-field advantage. As Robert F Williams illustrates with his experiences confronting lynchers in Monroe, they are animated by a spirit of fear which can be exploited. The being beneath the armor can be terrified. The hands that grip the baton can be made to quake. They call me a monster, but their nightmares are only my beginning.
The battle for this vacuum of governance is not chiefly one of martial conflict. The colonizer will resist bitterly, that much is sure, but as the essential goal is providence then infrastructural work takes precedence. Repairing roads, rebuilding homes, feeding people, and restoring health and dignity. Militants say, arm up, but I will emphasize: regrow. One flows from the other. The momentum of the institutions capable of doing that work will survive to the first days of the new world.
...
Why does one read The Mishomis Book in English? Why does one not hear it spoken from one who has chosen to share it? These are compromises made in modernity for the sake of the sacred, and we must be careful to perceive how they color our words and spring savage traps.
Russell Means, quoted in For America To Live, Europe Must Die, speaks to this of even the written word itself:
The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of “legitimate” thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world's ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.
So what you read here is not what I have written. It is what I have said and someone else has written down. I will allow this because it seems that the only way to communicate with the white world is through the dead, dry leaves of a book. I don't really care whether my words reach whites or not. They have already demonstrated through their history that they cannot hear, cannot see; they can only read.
He goes on to critique both capitalism and communism as being essentially European inventions, both continuing to act against indigenous peoples around the world. The light-skinned race suffers from a failure of imagination. A dim spirit dulls their horizons; we forget the ground, and the cold, and the cycle. We prove inept at meaningful comprehension, for so stunted, so alien to here, are Europe's very languages. The lingua franca is poisoned.
The Anglosphere is a realm of psychic void. Overloaded words like nation and nationalism, capital and capitalism, belie the incredible violence that confuse their meanings. The Lakota have a nation; is it the same sort of civic organ as what settlers do, who use their nations to justify untold atrocity? When Kamehameha is called a king of Hawai'i, settlers hear king and compare it to European monarchies, institutions virtually defined by cruel subjugation. One hears king but not Hawai'i; the people are never allowed to speak for themselves. The examples they set prove unimaginable to a callous and cowed people-of-peoples.
I say spirits, but you can only hear me if I say patterns and institutions. Doing so sheds the power of the mystic and invites tedious conversations about concentrating authority. The structure of our interiority proves fraught with reflexive opinions about ownership and relation, mysteriously preceding conscious consideration. I believe a more sacred order of tongues lies in our future. As Everything For Everyone puts it, the settlers' game is ending:
When America was collapsing, a lot of the militants at reservations prepared for landback. But how to relate to the land was the question, like what Fast River called "a fundamental political question."
...
We couldn't keep up the settler game, or our impersonation of it that a lot of tribal governments had been running. We had lost our way, and people were waking up to that. So, opening onto a way of relating to the land that was collective, respectful, about the needs of everything and everyone. These were Fast River's words. She was good with words.
- Connor Stephens
How will we practice this new relation without a way to speak it? Like the fluttering motions of a crow's feathers, the act of the body is the message intended; the word is the deed, and the deed is the word. If we practice trust, and live up to trust, can we become the foundations of a greater faction-of-factions? Can we take responsibility for immensity? Can we grieve without dwelling in guilt or despair? A great spirit that has eaten its own eyes will forget where it has laid its influence, and something will rush into the vacuum. Let it be us! Let us apply the unimaginable leverage that the pale devil cannot perceive. We will spend thousands of years finding the words for the love we can share, but that work starts today as it begins each day. That is the Eternal Revolution.
As for the collapse of America, do you think it merely fiction? The foundation crumbles; the giant succumbs. Can you see how the horizon glimmers and burns like never before? Everything was forever until it was no more.
