• gothicdecadence@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m 100% down for efficient communities run like actual communities. If the land is commons and everyone can use it, instead of such a strong focus on personal property, that could become an incredible thing. Infrastructure could become much more human-forward, and homelessness would likely dissappear. Local gardens and food areas would also likely be a priority. So if that’s what decolonizing means, I can appreciate it.

    I’m just saying that’s not what the word “decolonize” sounds like to people like me who don’t know what it fully means, and perhaps a better word should be used.

    To me it sounds like moving people out that shouldn’t be there, or weren’t there when the colonizing happened. Where I live most people don’t own property anyways (I certainly don’t), so that would mean displacing poor people and mostly POC with very little money. I do think there should be reparations but “decolonizing” by transferring ownership is one thing, making people leave so they have full control of the land like they used to is another. I don’t have the answers but doing the same thing to innocent people that was done to innocent people in the past isn’t the right one, in my opinion. It just perpetuates the cycle.

    I’m super fucking down for transferring ownership from landlords to people actually living on the land. But with how America has evolved, most of those people are not indigenous people.

    Even looking up what the word means, it’s complicated and doesn’t give straightforward answers as to what it may mean to you and the person I initially asked.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonization

    • Kaffe@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      Why do you think Liberal American Wikipedia would have a genuine, Marxist definition of Decolonization? Colonization is the reason why Liberal American definitions are the first thing you think of and seek out. America has manufactured its demographics that favor white settlers, most states were founded with equal to indigenous majority but they weren’t considered citizens and the settlers violently expropriated land in self organized, private, and state ventures. America continues to make it seem like indigenous people no longer exist. It’s not a coincidence that Liberal American definitions of Decolonization feed into fascist fears of “White Genocide” and “Great Replacement Theory”. Did you know that the Bolshevik revolution kicking out German and Polish bourgeois colonizers of what is now Belarus and Ukraine by Slavic and Jewish Communists is what inspired fears of a “Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy to eliminate ‘Aryan’ dominance”? Doesn’t that sound familiar.

      Sovereignty over the land will be entirely in indigenous hands. Americans will have rights as citizens such as democratic control over their communities but they will no longer have political control over land in general as they do under the American state.

      Indigeneity is not a racial category, nor is colonizer, it is a political category in the national form. The indigenous nations still exist and still have claim to the territories we are settled on. The Black nation has a right to self determination from American rule. This is Decolonization. We will not change the definition. We should never give way to Liberal Colonizer definitions.

      This is the same cognitive dissonance surrounding ideas of Communism meaning taking all your stuff and giving everyone exactly the same amount of food. It’s them applying idealism to our scientific cause because idealism is the only way they can justify keeping their “so-called primitive accumulation” which Marx sarcastically defined in mockery of Liberal apologists of private property.

      Decolonization is not a metaphor.