Reparations, Revindications, and Grifters
A Critique of Certain Trends in the American “Left”
The cry for “reparations!”- for reparations to the black population for slavery, or to all colonized people for colonialism in general- has become a familiar slogan. But its meaning is vague, and when principles are vague they leave room for opportunists to creep in and corrupt them into servants of their own private interests. They have most certainly done this with the principle of the call for reparations; opportunist grifters have found a way of quite lucratively co-opting this slogan into a pretense under which they can feed parasitically off of progressive people and their good intentions. It may be said, then, that vagueness in politics is an unforgivable sin for revolutionaries and that there is a need for a very precise way of articulating just what the cry for reparations should really mean. The solution to this need is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
What are Reparations?
What are reparations? When the liberals make the call for them, they are usually calling for a blanket payment made by or on behalf of all white residents of the US to all black residents, as compensation for the damages of slavery. When the broad “left” makes the call, though, it seems they are often more generally calling for a mass allocation of resources away from those deemed “colonizers” (though in practice, they usually just mean white people without any regard to their role in the real material systems of colonialism- more on this later) to those deemed “colonized” as compensation for a whole host of damages associated with colonialism. But whichever version we discuss, both are marred by an unforgivable vagueness: they ignore entirely the most central and important aspect of social dynamics: class. It is absurd to blame slavery upon all white Americans, and no less absurd to blame all of colonialism upon all “colonizer” ethnic or racial groups. In either case, these social institutions- as all social institutions except under communism- serve(d) only the ruling class, and therefore only the ruling class can be expected to bear the blame for them. It is of course fact that the colonizing bourgeois class is disproportionately composed of those who fall under the vague racial descriptor of “white.” But colonialism and settlerism on this continent have always been the actions of capitalists- big or small- looking for resources to take ownership over (land, gold, fur, etc.) and of their states. Even if white proletarians occasionally enjoy certain accidental benefits by their racial association with these white capitalists, the actions of the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois classes are theirs alone and there is no justice in punishing the poor white workers dragged along to work on the property the white bourgeoisie claimed through colonization. Blaming whole racial groups, groups of people united only by inescapable genetics, for the actions of classes, groups united together by common actions done of their own accord, is foolhardy and borders on bigotry.
Who precisely these “leftists” term “colonizer” also seems vague and suspect. They have yet to define just what makes an ethnic group colonizers, makes them marked from birth by the Biblesque original sin of their colonizer fathers and doomed to be spat upon and shamed by the woke. The Irish are apparently colonizers in the US, according to the BHO{1} (an eclectic and racially chauvinistic counterrevolutionary “left” organization whose organizing seems limited to waffling about on the internet and whose version of “reparations” characterizes the vague approach to this issue and its many problems), a claim that seems hard to believe to anyone familiar with the history of the Irish in this country. When the Irish came across the sea in terrible conditions, forced by the racial prejudice of the English colonial state and the genocide-by-famine it had wrought upon their homeland, and arrived in a country where they were forced to take only the worst paying and hardest jobs (“Poor Paddy works on the railway…”) while being demeaned as drunkards, rioters, and criminals in the popular press (recall the work of Thomas Nast, so frequently upheld as the father of the political cartoon, for whom the Irish immigrant was a constant object of scorn{2})- this was colonialism on their part? Really? Why is it that, while desperate immigrants from other parts of the world are accepted as victims of colonialism, these ones and their descendants are accused of being its perpetrators? Tell me, is it because of their pale skin or because of their bright blue eyes? BHO has further claimed that Jews in America are guilty as colonizers- but only the white ones{3}! This further proves that their method for deciding who is and is not a “colonizer” has nothing to do with proper analysis of the material social reality of colonialism, rather it is a farcical melanin-based metaphysics in which anyone too light of skin is somehow intrinsically colonial, regardless of their actual material actions or relationship to the colonial systems of capitalism. This is a vague, absurd, and deeply objectionable way of looking at the issue.
The largest problem with the way the question of reparations is being approached, though, we have not yet broached. This is the fact all this vagueness, all this confusion over who is meant to give reparations, and to whom, and how, and when, and what it even means anyway- all this vagueness leaves room for opportunists to worm their way in and take advantage of people’s good will. The grifter, a very particular type of opportunist whom we shall discuss, arrives in the discussion and offers very simple answers to all these questions that enable them to profit at others’ expense: Who must give reparations? You. To whom? Me. How? However I demand. When? Now. And what does it all mean? Whatever I like.
The Grifter
The grifter is a repulsive creature. A species of opportunist, it is a parasitic worm that wriggles its way into the flesh of naïve, vulnerable communities of would-be progressives and poisons their minds, turning them away from genuine goals and towards phony ones that do nothing but feed and fatten the grifter.
The atmosphere created by the vagueness in most calls for reparations, especially on the internet, is ripe for the growth of a fat and happy population of grifters. The grift works in two stages: first, someone probably well-meaning but not thinking as hard as they should about the vagueness of what they say tells another well-meaning person that they are a colonizer and need to pay reparations. Our well-meaning “colonizer,” being an empathetic soul, would like to do this, but they have not been told in exact detail just what they need to give and to whom. Then a grifter steps in and provides an easy way to fulfill the duty: they provide the well-meaning “colonizer” with a link to their own PayPal, and a laundry list of reasons they deserve to be given somebody else’s money. This grift plays out all across the internet, whenever a well-meaning naïve progressive tells their following to pay reparations the comments swiftly fill with people doing this- and often organizations actively encourage it! Of course, not all of these people are grifters. Some may be people seeking genuine support that they genuinely need. But that is precisely the problem: there is no way we can know. A person can say they are x or y group experiencing a or b misfortune and are thus owed reparations by the “colonizer,” but there is no central or universally enforced system verifying whether anything they say is true. And certainly nobody is bothering to ask about their actual class relationship to the systems they claim to be owed reparations for- or those of the people commanded to pay. This vagueness is dangerous and leaves who knows how many people vulnerable to grifters.
The real problem here is a grotesquely individualist approach to what is surely a collective problem. The current way the broad “left” is handling reparations- to make a few random payments to a few individuals who demand them- is leaving the door open for grifters while failing entirely to actually help the broad masses harmed by capitalist colonialism. A couple people in need, and a couple who are not, get some money, but the wider system of colonialism remains and nothing is done to unseat the bourgeoisie who continue to profit from it. A new approach is surely needed, one that is not vague, disorganized, and individualist but clearcut, centralized, and focused on the broadest masses.
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and Revindications
The PCP, great pioneers of the Maoist movement and warriors for indigenous proletarian liberation, have their own sense of reparation for the crimes of capitalism. Their programme speaks much of revindications, which can be understood as meaning something like reparations but slightly broader in definition, meaning a reclamation of rights and resources that restores the dignity and liberty of people who have been brutalized by capitalism. Struggle Sessions, the theoretical journal, writes in their article “Popular Justice”:
The Communist Party of Peru (PCP) writes in the General Political Line that the struggle for political power is tied to the struggle for revindications with the struggle for power being principal… The PCP refers to this struggle as the struggle for revindications in particular, a term unique to Indo-Peruvians — who make up a majority of the population of Peru — which means something like how the word “reparations” is used in the context of national oppression in the United States. The language is important because we are talking about something that involves raw human emotion and dignity. The masses’ dignity is stripped from them regularly through all sorts of various injustices, and so the masses demand revindications. This struggle is linked to the struggle for power by developing the struggle for revindications as a function of political power.
What is key here, and what offers the guiding light for a way forward on this question in the US, is that the struggle for (political-economic) power is tied to the struggle for revindication and the struggle for power is principal. This means that it is only by seizing the power to rule themselves and society as a whole for the proletariat that those abused by the contradictory systems of capitalism can truly receive compensation for the harm it has done. In the US, this means what is necessary is the construction of a socialist democratic dictatorship of the proletariat through protracted people’s war.
The proper way to pursue reparation/revindication for victims of colonialism in the US, then, is as follows:
- With a clear understanding that it is a matter not simply of racial oppression but primarily of class oppression, that reparation is not owed from all whites to all non-whites but from the colonizer bourgeoisie to the colonized section of the proletariat- and the proletariat as a whole
- With an emphasis not on making meaningless payments to individuals but on giving victims of colonialism collective and democratic control over resources in order to restore them their human dignity
- With a vision guided not by vague platitudes, but by a very clear ideological plan of action
The way to fulfill these tasks is with a campaign of socialist construction through PPW. The proletariat of the whole country (irrespective of race or ethnicity!) must be united behind a militarized communist Party and a revolutionary People’s Army, all oppressed and exploited masses together, and must united in a revolutionary democratic United Front seize control of land and resources in order to inaugurate a socialist economy in which all value and labour is controlled fairly and democratically by those who do the labour and produce the value. This is the ultimate revindication, as it gives the colonized proletarian masses full control over their lives, the labour which they undertake, and the value and resources they produce. It restores to exploited humanity the dignity and liberty of self-rule and free existence, stolen from it by capitalism and its colonialism. It liberates the colonized ethnic and racial groups from unequal treatment and gives the colonized nations (e.g. the Diné, the Cherokee, New Afrikans, etc.) the right to self-determination, as upheld by Leninism. And it does all this collectively, for the proletariat of the entire country as the PPW sweeps through every part of it, instead of letting a few grifters profit off an individualist approach while the rest are left with nothing. And, vitally, all of this can be done only through a rigorous and precise application of the scientific proletarian ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. We shall have no more of vague and sanctimonious platitudes! There is only one way to truly bring forth justice for the victims of colonialism! We can achieve revolution and revindications only with a precise application of universal Marxist principles to the specifics of the US situation, forged and improved through study to produce the Guiding Thought of revolution in this country, and guided always by the work of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Gonzalo!
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