Decolonize socialism means confronting what the Marxist tradition gets right about exploitation — and what it gets wrong about whose land, labor, and social relations it was built to analyze.
Where I Started and What Changed
I came into leftist politics understanding myself as a cishet white settler male — French, Irish, Scottish heritage, born inside the Canadian state. That was the framework I used to analyze everything else, including the left itself. Over time, tracing my matriarchal lineage revealed Métis heritage confirmed through genealogical records. What that forced was not an identity shift so much as an analytical one: the categories I had been using to understand exploitation — worker, settler, citizen, male — were not neutral analytical tools. They were produced by the same colonial process I was trying to critique, and they carried that process’s logic into everything I built with them. That is the starting point for what follows.
Two Colonial Projects, Two Political Economies
Settler colonialism is not a single process. It operates through distinct political economies that produce different class structures, land relations, and social organization. The ethnogenetic Métis colonies that formed on Turtle Island were organized around the fur trade — a mode of production that required sustained, non-extractive relationship with Indigenous peoples and land. The social relations that emerged from that material base were oriented toward kinship, interdependence, and flexible identity formation. They were not organized around the private ownership of land or the commodification of labor in the European sense, because the material conditions did not require those relations.
The British settler-colonial project operated from an entirely different material base: agricultural enclosure, private land title, wage labor, and the extraction of surplus value from a settled working class. That political economy required rigid social categories — property owners and laborers, productive and unproductive bodies, male and female roles in the reproduction of labor power. The Crown’s apparatus of governance, law, and census-taking was designed to make those categories legible and enforceable. The binary organization of gender and sexuality was not incidental to this project — it was functional. It determined inheritance, property rights, labor contracts, and the reproduction of the colonial household as an economic unit. As the British settler project expanded across Turtle Island, the Métis political economy was subordinated to it — not through cultural absorption but through the imposition of land title, the destruction of the commons, and the criminalization of Indigenous social relations that could not be mapped onto colonial property categories.
What Marx Got Right and What He Missed
The Marxist tradition is the most powerful analytical framework ever developed for understanding how capitalism extracts surplus value from labor, how class interests are produced by material conditions, and how ideology functions to naturalize those relations. None of that is in dispute. The problem is not the analytical method — it is the historical terrain on which that method was developed and the assumptions about social relations that were baked into it as a result.
Marx analyzed capitalism as it operated in industrializing Western Europe — a political economy already built on enclosed commons, dispossessed peasants, and a settled proletariat separated from the means of production. That analysis is accurate for those conditions. But it takes as its starting point a social formation that was itself the product of colonial dispossession. The “primitive accumulation” Marx describes in Capital — the historical process by which workers were separated from the land and means of subsistence to create a propertyless laboring class — is not a past stage that capitalism moved beyond. On Turtle Island, it is an ongoing process. Land dispossession, the destruction of Indigenous subsistence economies, the conversion of collectively held territory into private property — these are not the preconditions of capitalism here. They are capitalism, operating in its colonial form, in the present tense.
A socialism that takes the existing class structure as its starting point — that asks how workers can seize control of the means of production — without asking whose land those means of production sit on, or how the labor force it is organizing was constituted through ongoing dispossession, is not a materialism. It is a partial materialism that begins its analysis after the colonial act has already occurred, treats that act as settled history, and builds its program on the property relations colonialism created. Seizing the means of production on stolen land does not decolonize the land. It transfers ownership of the colonial economy from one class to another while leaving the foundational dispossession intact.
The Reproduction Problem
There is a second structural problem in the Marxist tradition that historical materialism itself should be able to identify: the role of social reproduction in sustaining colonial class relations. The colonial household — organized around the male breadwinner, the female domestic laborer, and the binary assignment of productive and reproductive work — is not simply a cultural artifact. It is a material institution that reproduces the labor force across generations, socializes workers into their class position, and naturalizes the property relations of the colonial state. Feminist Marxists from Silvia Federici to bell hooks have documented how capitalism depends on unpaid reproductive labor performed overwhelmingly by women, and how that labor was historically organized through the same colonial processes that dispossessed Indigenous peoples and constituted the settler working class.
The categories that colonial capitalism uses to organize social reproduction — the binary of male and female, the nuclear household as the basic unit of social organization, the distinction between productive labor and reproductive labor — are not neutral descriptors of how human beings naturally organize themselves. They are historically produced through specific material conditions, and they are enforced through law, property rights, and state violence. A socialist politics that treats these categories as given — that organizes around the male industrial worker as the default subject of class struggle, or that treats questions of gender and identity as secondary to the “real” economic base — is not being more materialist. It is failing to apply materialist analysis to the full range of social relations that capitalism requires to reproduce itself.
What a Decolonial Materialism Requires
A historical materialist analysis of settler colonialism has to begin with the land — not as metaphor, but as the actual material foundation on which all other social relations are built. Land in the colonial context is not simply a means of production among others. It is the primary site of dispossession through which the colonial class structure was constituted, and it is the ongoing condition of possibility for both the settler economy and the Indigenous resistance to it. Any socialist program that does not address land relations — that limits itself to redistributing the surplus value extracted from a colonial economy without addressing the colonial title to the land that economy sits on — is operating within the material conditions colonialism created rather than challenging them.
This is not an argument against class analysis or against socialist organizing. It is an argument for extending materialist analysis to its actual historical starting point on Turtle Island: the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the imposition of colonial property relations, and the constitution of a settler working class whose exploitation is real but whose class position was also materially constituted through that dispossession. These are not separate struggles that can be sequenced — first class, then land, then gender. They are produced together by the same colonial political economy, and they have to be analyzed and organized around together. The tools of historical materialism are adequate to that task. The question is whether the socialist left is willing to apply them without flinching at what the analysis reveals about the ground it is standing on.
Sources
- Rebellion, Riel, and Resistance — Decolonize.ca
- What Does Decolonization Mean? — Decolonize.ca
- Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I — Part VIII: Primitive Accumulation
- Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004)
- Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014)
decolonize.ca 
Leave a comment