In an open colonial relationship, it is easy to recognize an oppressed nation. The Irish people live on an island that was conquered by England and subjected for centuries to colonial rule. Most of Ireland broke from British rule in the 20th century, but partition left six counties in the north under British control. Puerto Rico remains a U.S. colony today, and its people have waged a long struggle for independence and self-determination.
But national oppression does not always take the form of one country openly ruling another.
A nation is a historically developed people with common bonds that can include territory, economic life, language and culture. These characteristics do not appear in exactly the same way in every nation. Conquest, the kidnapping and forced transport of millions of Africans through the slave trade, forced migration and colonial rule scattered peoples, suppressed languages and cultures, redrew borders and disrupted national development without necessarily destroying a people or its national consciousness.
Human beings do not belong to biologically separate races. The racial categories used in modern society are social constructions, not divisions found in human biology. Modern racism developed historically alongside colonial conquest and the slave trade to justify and organize the enslavement, dispossession and super-exploitation of whole peoples.
Africans were kidnapped, transported across the Atlantic and enslaved because their labor could produce enormous wealth. Racist theories were then developed and hardened to justify treating African people as property and to present that exploitation as natural. Similar ideas were used to justify the seizure of Indigenous land, colonial rule and the oppression of other peoples.
Racism became more than an ideology used to excuse oppression. It was built into laws, employment, housing, education, policing and political rights, helping the ruling class divide workers and maintain oppressed sections of the working class as a source of cheaper labor.
As capitalism developed into monopoly capitalism and imperialism, giant corporations and financial institutions extended their reach across the world in the struggle for markets, resources and profit. Colonial conquest and economic domination drew whole nations and peoples into an unequal world system, uprooting populations and creating new forms of national oppression and super-exploitation.
This is especially important in the United States, where racism and national oppression developed through Indigenous conquest and land theft, African enslavement, colonialism, capitalist expansion and imperialism.
The U.S. is a multinational country
The U.S. contains many peoples and nationalities living together in one country. Some are oppressed nations with their own historical territories and claims to sovereignty. Others have been subjected to different forms of national oppression and racism arising from conquest, slavery, immigration and capitalist development.
Indigenous peoples include many distinct nations and peoples whose existence predates the United States, including Native nations throughout the continental U.S. and Alaska Native peoples such as the Iñupiat, Yup’ik, Unangax̂, Tlingit, Haida and many others. Their histories and political relationships with the U.S. differ, but all have faced conquest, land seizure and attacks on sovereignty and culture.
Puerto Rico is a colonized nation under U.S. rule. The Black population in the U.S. was formed through the enslavement of Africans, centuries of racial oppression and a common historical development. Chicano people in the Southwest arose in part from the U.S. conquest of Mexican territory. Hawaiʻi was an independent kingdom before U.S. businessmen and military forces overthrew its government and the islands were annexed.
The U.S. also includes millions of people with roots throughout Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and West Asia. These broad categories contain many different nations, nationalities and peoples. They should not all be treated as though they have the same history or the same relationship to the U.S. government.
The U.S. working class reflects this multinational character and includes people from many different nations and peoples. Workers labor side by side, while the entire working class is exploited by the capitalist class. But racism and national oppression place additional burdens on particular sections of the class. The U.S. capitalist class developed historically out of European colonial settlers, slaveholders, merchants and landowners and their descendants, while oppressed peoples were disproportionately pushed into the lowest-paid, most insecure and most dangerous work.
These relations did not arise accidentally.
European colonialists and settlers established the society that became the United States through conquest, land seizure and slavery. Later European immigrants arrived under many different circumstances — some seeking land or work, others fleeing poverty, persecution or political repression. Over generations, many were assimilated into the society established by the earlier European settlers and gained access to rights and opportunities systematically denied to conquered and enslaved peoples.
Conquered and enslaved peoples faced a fundamentally different history.
Indigenous nations already occupied the continent when European colonization began. Their land was taken through warfare, forced removal, broken treaties and genocide. U.S. expansion continued this process, opening Indigenous territory to settlement, railroads, mining, agriculture and capitalist property.
Millions of Africans were kidnapped from their homelands, transported across the Atlantic and held as chattel property. Their labor produced enormous wealth for plantation owners, merchants, banks and the developing capitalist economy. After slavery was overthrown, racism and national oppression continued through segregation, disenfranchisement, racist violence, unequal employment and other forms.
The U.S. war against Mexico in the 1840s seized an enormous territory that now forms much of the Southwest. The Mexican population living there did not cross a U.S. border; the border crossed them. Land loss, discrimination and capitalist development created the conditions under which the Chicano national question developed.
Puerto Rico was seized by the U.S. in 1898 and remains under U.S. colonial rule. Hawaiʻi was taken after U.S. business interests helped overthrow the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, followed by U.S. annexation.
These histories differ, but they share a common feature: capitalist development in the U.S. was inseparable from conquest, slavery, land seizure and national oppression.
Immigration and super-exploitation
Colonialism and imperialism underdeveloped large parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Through conquest, expansionist wars, land seizure and economic domination, imperialist powers reorganized whole economies around the needs of foreign capital — extracting raw materials, controlling markets and blocking independent development.
For many peoples, these conditions threatened the very means of survival. Land was lost, local industries were destroyed or subordinated, and millions were driven into migration or forced to accept super-exploited labor at home and abroad.
U.S. imperialism continues to shape migration through war, sanctions, corporate exploitation and economic domination. Many people who come to the U.S. looking for work are then concentrated in low-paid and dangerous jobs, where employers can use immigration status and the threat of deportation to hold down wages, steal wages already earned and intimidate workers who try to organize.
Racism makes this exploitation easier.
The capitalist class benefits when one section of workers can be paid less, denied rights or threatened more easily than another. Those inequalities then put downward pressure on conditions for the working class as a whole.
Different forms of national oppression
Marxists have sometimes used the term internal colony to describe oppressed peoples living within the borders of an imperialist state.
The concept can illuminate important features of U.S. history: conquered territory, land theft, political subordination, the super-exploitation of workers through racism and the extraction of wealth from oppressed communities.
But not every oppressed people inside the U.S. has the same history or occupies the same position.
Puerto Rico is a colony under direct U.S. rule. Indigenous nations have treaty rights, territorial claims and questions of sovereignty rooted in conquest. Black national oppression developed through slavery, segregation and a distinct historical formation inside the U.S. Chicano oppression is inseparable from the conquest of Mexican territory. Immigrant communities face racism and forms of national oppression that do not automatically make every immigrant group an oppressed nation.
Marxism has to begin with the actual history of each people, not force every form of oppression into one formula.
The ruling class divides to conquer
The capitalist ruling class has repeatedly used racism and national oppression to divide workers.
Oppressed peoples are denied rights, pushed into lower-paid work and subjected to greater police and state repression. White workers are taught racist ideas and encouraged to blame oppressed peoples and immigrants for unemployment, falling wages, poor housing and other problems created by capitalism.
Over time, European immigrants and their descendants were increasingly incorporated into the category of “white” and granted access to rights and opportunities systematically denied to Black, Indigenous and other oppressed peoples. That could mean better access to jobs, housing, land, education, voting rights, unions and legal protection. These advantages did not end the exploitation of white workers, but they gave sections of them a material and social stake in privileges denied to others and helped the ruling class weaken working-class unity.
The system of racism can give sections of white workers real advantages in employment, housing, education and social status even while they remain exploited by the capitalist class.
The ruling class also teaches workers in the historically dominant imperialist countries to identify their interests with those of “their” corporations and government. Workers are told that they will benefit when their country controls more markets, resources and territory. Some sections of workers may receive real advantages from this system, but the larger purpose is to enlist them behind the competition of their own ruling class and against workers and oppressed peoples elsewhere.
These divisions weaken the working class.
A worker who accepts the oppression of another worker is being recruited against their own class interests. Racism allows capitalists to pay some workers less, attack unions, break strikes and redirect anger away from the capitalist system.
The struggle against racism and national oppression is therefore not separate from class struggle. It is essential to building working-class unity.
The right to self-determination
Marxists support the right of oppressed nations to self-determination.
That means an oppressed nation has the right to decide its own political future, including independence if its people choose it. Supporting that right does not mean demanding separation in every case. It means opposing the right of an oppressor nation to decide for another people.
Workers belonging to the oppressor nation have a special responsibility to oppose national oppression carried out by their own ruling class.
Real unity cannot be built through forced assimilation or by telling oppressed peoples to set aside their national demands. Trust grows when workers of the oppressor nation defend the rights of oppressed peoples, including sovereignty, land, language, culture and self-determination.
The capitalist class uses racism and national oppression to divide.
The working class can unite only by fighting them.
Additional reading
- The National Question: Decolonizing the Theory of Nationalism — by James M. Blaut (1987). The Marxist theory this page rests on: national struggle as a form of class struggle, the myth of assimilation, and Puerto Rico as a nation rather than a “minority.”
- Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 — by W.E.B. Du Bois (1935). The overthrow of slavery and the betrayal of Reconstruction — and the source of the “public and psychological wage” of whiteness, the mechanism behind the “few extra crumbs” this page describes.
- War Against All Puerto Ricans — by Nelson A. Denis (2015). Washington’s war on the Puerto Rican independence movement — Pedro Albizu Campos and the Nationalists.
- Occupied America: A History of Chicanos — by Rodolfo Acuña. The classic internal-colony history of the Mexican Southwest — Aztlán.
- The unfinished revolution – by Vincent Copeland. His introduction to “A Voice from Harper’s Ferry,” the firsthand account by Osborne P. Anderson, the only Black survivor of John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. Copeland frames the war on slavery as a revolution left unfinished by the betrayal of Reconstruction.
- Return to What is Marxism?