• jack [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    man when we get a socialist US (which we will btw, we’ll win), it’ll be pretty sick to use independence of island territories to help establish a Polynesian Confederation and a Caribbean Confederation with full decolonization and control of their territories under indigenous and socialist governments

    • Grapho@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      Any truly socialist US would have to balkanize and preferrably give back self determination to the overwhelmingly latino population in the territory they stole from Mexico

      • jack [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        2 months ago

        this is also a response to @balsoft@lemmy.ml below you

        Yeah there’s much decolonization to do, though I think ‘balkanization’ isn’t quite right. There’s going to be a massive redistribution of land to indigenous nations, but that’s not the same as just breaking apart the US. Not every single inch is going to be returned to native nations because the population imbalance and distribution simply doesn’t allow it. If you start by actually honoring all the existing treaties with native nations, then you end up with probably 15-20% of land area immediately returned in what’s the largest land back program by many orders of magnitude, and would mostly be pretty straightforward outside of dense urban areas because the US is actually pretty sparsely populated. Look at Cherokee lands, for example, which I’ve roughly outlined here excluding the major urban areas now on the fringes:

        This is more less traditional Cherokee land pre-Indian Removal Act. You have to deal with the existing material realities and exclude the major urban areas that surround this (especially given the significance of Atlanta to future Black land sovereignty). You do some sort of carve out around the siginificant urban areas within this of Asheville and Knoxville. According to the lying machine, about a quarter of that outlined land is state or federal parkland, military land, or wildlife management areas. That’s roughly 8-9 million acres. The current Cherokee population is about half a million, mostly in Oklahama (all of those lands they would obviously retain, as well). If you return all that public land and go further to create contiguity between them to avoid a messy patchwork, the Cherokee nation, currently at about half a million members, would easily have enough land to rebuild thriving and complex communities combining traditional and modern lifeways with full sovereignty and no need to rely on external support after a period of reparations to offset deprivation and enable development. This is absolutely the biggest and most complex land back process to complete, but it’s extremely doable with political will and a change of governmental mindset.

        Go down the line of native nations with enrolled members today. For those west of the Mississippi, restoring huge portions of their traditional land is trivially easy because almost western land is undeveloped and federal. The Navajo, at about a quarter million people, would anchor a Four Corners network of native nations that would include the Utes, Dine, Pueblo, O’odham, Pima, Yaqui, etc. Plains nations in the Upper Midwest would be easily returned because of low population density and the general need to wage war on ranchers as part of the socialist construction process. The Ojibwe could be restored sovereignty over the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, also largely underdeveloped, without much trouble. There’s absolute a plausible path involving very little population transfer to granting large, contiguous, traditional, and culturally and economically useful land to the existing indigenous nations of the US sufficient to support themselves independently that would actually disturb the settler-descended working class very little and largely only challenge bourgeois landowners and the military, who both need to go down anyways.

        The rest of the US has no real need to be ‘balkanized’. Unless you just operate from the assumption that it’s automatically illegitimate because of some metaphysical Amerikkkanness, it would be in everyone’s interest but the bougies for the continental US to remain largely unified under a socialist government.

      • balsoft@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        IMO it will also need to give back a lot more land and self-determination to the native american population in the territory they stole from native americans (so all the territory)