by Luis Rodriguez and Trini Rodriguez
This is a time for revolutionaries to understand what’s happening, where things are going, and to unclog the murk of subjective and narrow cultural streams.
For this, we turn to the actual social conditions and motive forces shaping these times. While our current systems seem chaotic and maddening, they have roots in the crucible of advancing productive forces (technology, which includes the alignment of nature, minds, and labor) and the social relations (current class ownership and structures). These forces are chained to the corpses of moribund systems, forms, and ideas, and to old power dynamics.
Society is trying to transform, but is being held back by what’s dying. This quagmire is at the heart of the acute and chronic crises everywhere. Something new and vibrant is trying to be born, but it’s being strangled, especially by the U.S., the most technologically developed and militarized capitalist power in the world.
IMAGINATION IN MOTION
This moment requires revolutionaries to trust what we know, feel, and experience, not just as individuals but as part of a collective whole. Grounding this confidence demands consistent study and application. More importantly, we must trust what we can imagine. During a crisis, necessity opens up the mind and the heart. If our imagination is linked to unleashing the potential of material and historical stages of development, it will reveal the clearest path forward.
With such an imagination, even as we grasp the grave fascist nature of the current political system, we can be moved to create the conditions for the organized, creatively strategic resistance needed to break free from the human-made constraints of capitalism.
This requires understanding society in its motion, not in its stasis. Social scientists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels epitomized this task when 19th-century capitalism encompassed most of the industrially developed world. These teachers laid bare the political economy of their time, as well as that of the invaded world that was being colonized to provide stolen land, minerals, and people to initiate and fuel a profit-driven system.
It is important to note that Marx and Engels also looked “backward”, examining earlier forms of social formation for what they imagined as the way out of an exploitative class-ridden stranglehold. They imagined a world without hierarchical social classes. In their time, a small capitalist class had ripped the laboring masses away from land and family-based food and craft systems, forcing them to “sell” their ability to work to owners of large manufacturing companies, which paid them far below the value their labor produced. Marx and Engels recognized that this system resulted in widespread inequality and inequity, and they also imagined a world without women subordinate to men, without children as property of parents, without darker-skinned people as inferior to lighter-skinned people.
MARXIST LEGACY
Marx and Engels didn’t conjure up their communist concepts without real-life references. They studied the tens of thousands of years during which humanity across the planet lived under various forms of what was translated as “primitive communism.” They found that before society divided into classes, human beings cooperated for the common good. These early peoples ensured that what was “common” to everyone – such as air, land, water, minerals and the sustainability these life sources could engender – would be shared to meet the needs of people and their non-human relatives.
Some translators of Marx and Engels’ work assert that the correct word was not “primitive” but “original.” The term “primitive” implies less developed technology, and is also associated with lower level thinking. The world’s original ancestors had complex cosmologies and practices, honed generation after generation to protect and serve the needs of people and the planet. The term “original communism” recognizes the foundational social relations that existed when human beings knew how to live in accord with nature, their own natures, the nature of all relationships, and their own particular concepts of the Divine. The purpose of this order? Shared well-being.
Marx and Engels examined the past for clues to move history forward. They came to envision communism as the ultimate social liberation out of inhumane and oppressive industrial capitalism. By proposing renewed reactivation of ancient principles that preceded class societies, they imagined the end of all class societies as the next stage of humanity’s developmental spiral. In this way, Marxism champions communism as the resolution of immediate needs as well as the embodiment of securing the future. Minimum and maximum programs for the short and long haul.
SECURING THE GARDEN
Humankind was born into a world of ecstatic beauty and abundance, a real “Garden of Eden” traced back to the land we call Africa. After momentous migrations, cradles of civilizations, divisions of labor, conquests, countless natural and human disasters, but also wondrous inventions, by the early 20th century, escalating tensions, military buildups, and complex alliances ultimately led to World War I. This situation prompted the Spanish poet Antonio Machado to write a poem in which the wind asks humanity about what they have done with the gifts of life and nature.
“..the wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself: ‘What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?’
Indeed. So what can be done differently now?
Indigenous peoples continue to be a wellspring of ancient wisdom, creators of still-resonant systems of thought and action to achieve right relations of interconnection and reciprocity with the land and all its creatures. As original scientists, they have had to observe and properly engage with the material conditions in and around them to protect and sustain such land and life for themselves and future generations.
Given the global scope of the imbalance created by anthropocentric dominant social relations, we should revisit and incorporate the teachings of original peoples who still practice right relations. In the United States, we have the opportunity to deepen our relationships with Indigenous peoples in this hemisphere. While much can be learned from past democratic/governance traditions of the ancient Greek, Roman, and European systems, today we should also seek the guidance of Indigenous peoples here to ground our revolutionary imaginations and struggles further. After all, Native peoples’ cosmovision is based on tens of thousands of years, not just 500+ years of colonization and capitalism.
RELATIONALITY IS KEY
When we asked Google AI to define Indigenous relationality, it said this:
Indigenous relationality as a worldview and way of life sees existence as an interconnected web where humans are deeply linked to each other, ancestors, land, animals, spirits, and cosmos, forming the foundation of identity, ethics, knowledge, and well-being, emphasizing accountability and mutual responsibility within these relationships rather than individualism. It’s a core organizing principle that guides how Indigenous people understand themselves and their world, influencing health, governance, research, and sustainability by recognizing that harming one part harms the whole.
Not a bad summary for AI. But it’s incomplete. It should be added that relationality centers heart-based ideas and spirit-based considerations to ensure actions honor the sacred and preserve life.
In contrast, capitalism pushes the illusion of separation. Capitalism is misaligned with the needs of life at all levels and therefore deadly to that life. The capitalist class dominates and destroys nature to feed their addiction to profits. Insatiable extractionist production and unchecked consumption have degraded the land, bankrupted the water, and destabilized the air and climate worldwide. While capitalism has created the greatest accumulation of material wealth in history, the gap between those who have and those who don’t widens daily. Capitalism cannot exist without creating poverty. This poverty is not just material – it’s cultural, educational, and spiritual.
To help continue the scientific study of social development and create programs for life-affirming transformation, it’s crucial to fully examine and understand original communism as our inheritance, a birthright we would do well to understand and embrace. Seeing the end of capitalism without incorporating a Native lens narrows the possibilities. Indigenous knowledges could address some persistent hierarchies and dominant social constructs that plague us today. Neutralizing systemic white supremacy and patriarchy in the struggle for a post-capitalist social order will involve grappling with decolonization and re-indigenization, concepts still foreign to many revolutionaries yet necessary for the healing of this land and all who live here.
RESTORATION & INCLUSION
Many of us are unaware, due to conditioned prejudices, of the extensive impact Indigenous people have had on U.S. political and social systems, or of the ways that Indigenous thought systems have been distorted. For instance, the early founders of the United States based their framework for a democratic republic partly on the Iroquois Confederacy (the Haudenosaunee). However, instead of replicating a model that would protect everyone and everything through a representative government, the US Constitution privileged the class interests of a few. The founding fathers adopted the Iroquois Confederacy’s structural elements—like federalism and representative democracy — but rejected other crucial principles: 1) regard for women in power; 2) the Seventh Generation principle; 3) decisions by consensus (unity of mind) vs majority rule; and 4) a spiritual/ethical core as a way of life.
Similarly, American psychologist Abraham Maslow studied the Blackfoot peoples (the Niitsitapi) in 1938. During his visit, Maslow estimated that 80–90% of the Blackfoot tribe exhibited a level of self-esteem found in only 5–10% of his own U.S. population. According to 2007 lectures by Blackfoot scholars Narcisse Blood and Ryan Heavy Head, Maslow “discovered astounding levels of cooperation, minimal inequality, restorative justice, full bellies, and high levels of life satisfaction” in Blackfoot society. Yet, Maslow’s widely promoted 1943 paper on the Hierarchy of Needs centered on individual actualization and transcendence, bypassing the actual Blackfoot perspective centered on multi-generational community actualization.
The all-too-frequent historical dismissal and distortion of Indigenous vision and formation is, at best, an unfortunate oversight. At worst, it expresses socially embedded arrogance that underlies rule without consensus.
As today’s revolutionaries become what Marx and Engels called the “midwives” of a new society, we would do well to engage our imaginations more fully on the merits of Indigenous ancestral knowledges, wisdom, and experience to deal with today’s crises.
We can’t assume anything is a given about what and how capitalism will be replaced. We have a role to play on the social stage. We stand on the shoulders of giants – but the giants are also Mexica, Mayan, Inca, Lakota, Diné, Ojibwe, Tongva, Chumash, Ohlone, and more. Part of our task is to continue to weave a magnificent tapestry from what has been handed down to us. It’s time we include the presence and contribution of Indigenous experts of original communism in this land.
To be adept midwives, we need to learn from them. We must master the art of holistic processes, attunement, right relations, and the sacredness in all things. This requires a deep appreciation of the natural laws at play. Nature has limitations, and at the same time has infinite, ever-moving, and self-organizing power. By taking fully into account nature’s rhythms and patterns, we become free and abundant peoples. Our right to thrive in accord with Nature is only as secure as our responsibility to it. When we embrace and integrate nature, our natures, all relationships, and an expansive way of tapping into the Divine, we can imagine, create, and realize a new social order worthy of all our ancestors, all our sacrifices and laments, but also worthy of every liberating dream and aspiration.
A CHALLENGE
The original peoples of this land and their understanding of original communism, trampled yet still alive, constitute a motherlode of social wealth for today’s revolutionaries. Indigenous peoples in what is now the U.S. were the first to be dispossessed of their right to live in accord with Nature. The attempt to exterminate them and their teachings has failed. Every day, more Indigenous scholars and organizers speak up to end their institutionalized invisibility and share deep traditional principles with the world. As revolutionaries who also want to end the deadly madness of our current social order, we stand to gain from establishing proper relationships with our Indigenous kin.
We have a common dream. To lose our chains. To win a world.
A new world is trying to be born. Let’s imagine how to midwife this birth together.
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Luis J. Rodriguez has 16 books in all genres, including the bestselling memoir “Always Running, La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.” Rodriguez is founding editor of Tia Chucha Press and co-founder of Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore in Los Angeles. He has written for daily, weekly, and monthly publications and was a writer/reporter for WMAQ All-News Radio in Chicago, variously owned by CNN, Westinghouse, and NBC. As a freelance writer, he’s covered stories in Mexico, including indigenous and campesino uprisings; the Contra War in Nicaragua and Honduras; and the rise of the maras in Central America. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Jose Mercury, The Guardian, Christian Science Monitor, L.A. Weekly, The Nation, Grand Street, Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and The Huffington Post, among others. Luis served as Los Angeles’ official Poet Laureate from 2014 to 2016. His latest book is “From Our Land to Our Land: Essays, Journeys & Imaginings from a Native Xicanx Writer.”
Trini Rodriguez (Tlazohteotl) writes and presents for personal and collective healing with the aim of systemic social change. She facilitates Indigenous-based women’s sweatlodge and healing circles. She and husband Luis J Rodriguez produce “The Hummingbird Cricket Hour” podcast.
