Indigenous Peoples and the Capitalist World System: Researching, Knowing, and Promoting Social Justice

Abstract

<p align="justify"> <span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:12px;">This paper explores the major consequences of the expansion of the European-dominated capitalist world system, colonial terrorism, and continued subjugation for indigenous Americans, Australians, and</span><span style="font-size:8.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:12px;">Africans between the late fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Western powers as well as</span><span style="font-size:8.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:12px;">most of the descendants of European colonialists in Europe, the Americas, Australia, and in Africa and their regional and local collaborators deny or forget or minimize the crimes committed</span><span style="font-size:8.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:12px;">against indigenous peoples and claim that their ancestors spread modernity and civilization around the world.</span><span style="font-size:8.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:12px;">Not recognizing these crimes and ignoring or forgetting or minimizing them have far reaching consequences for humanity and raise moral and ethical issues for the validity of modern civilization that claims to promote the principles of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, democracy, and social justice. The commitment to these principles and truly promoting them require reevaluating the past and present mistakes in the modern world system to openly and honestly debate them and seek correct and urgent solutions for the surviving indigenous peoples who are still suffering from state terrorism, massive human rights violations, dispossession of resources and rights, absolute poverty, disease, and illiteracy.</span> </p> <p> <span style="font-size:8.5pt;"></span> </p

A visionary platform for decolonization: The Red Deal

“…Integral to European economic expansion was the search for resources and markets for industries and accumulated products, which required more control over land and exploitation of people for cheap labour (Smith, 2012). Dispossession of Indigenous lands for resource extraction and labour exploitation was the platform for expanding capitalist industries and corporate enterprises, prioritizing settler interests and power structures, and annihilating Indigenous sovereignty and ways of knowing and doing (Jalata, 2013;Roth, 2019).…”

Reimagining Global Social Movements in the Perspective of Egalitarian Democracy

“…For more than five centuries, both the agencies of capitalists and oppressed and exploited classes and ethnonational and other subaltern groups have been dialectically interconnected and changed each other. But, the capitalist classes, states, and their organizations such as multinational corporations and international institutions have played a determining role in alienating and exploiting the working class, terrorizing, committing genocide, enslaving, and dispossessing indigenous peoples both in the West and the Rest (Jalata 2013; Marx 1967). Generally speaking, the dynamic and contradictory interactions between global capitalism and diverse forms of resistance that sometimes developed into diverse social movements have shaped the current global system (Agartan, Choi, and Huynh 2008).…”

“…These practices involve diplomacy and war policies; therefore, Quan (2012:10) considers the U.S. war in Iraq as a neoliberal development strategy. Particularly, accumulation of capital by dispossession has involved state terrorism and genocide as the case of indigenous peoples illustrates (Jalata 2013).…”

“…This revolution technologically, organizationally, and militarily empowered Western Europeans and their collaborators in the Rest and helped in finalizing the colonization of Australia in the late eighteenth century and Africa and Asia during the second half of the nineteenth century. Marx (1967:763) notes that further socialization and racialization of labor through dispossession of the means of production and through colonialism resulted in “the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalist regime.” All these factors involved state terrorism, war, genocide, the destruction of indigenous leadership, cultural and institutional destruction and the intensification of social stratification, rationalized and justified by the ideologies of racism, sexism and classism as well as the discourses of progress, civilization, Christianity, modernity, and development (Jalata 2013).…”

Negotiating Global and Interdisciplinary Imperatives for Indigenous Education Scholarship and Pedagogy

“…When the challenges that confront Indigenous people around the world are examined, it is remarkable to see the degree to which their experiences are shared — especially in terms of colonisation, regardless of where they are situated on the planet. The invasions, the expropriation of land, the acts of genocide, the enslavement, the subjugation, the theft of children and sexual abuse of women, the denial of personhood, the imposition of alien laws and religious ideas and the general reluctance to restore stolen land and political autonomy seem to be largely standard fare for Indigenous people around the world (see for example, Jalata, 2011). This does not suggest however, that Indigenous people's experiences were and are the same all over the world.…”