Leftist Infighting: A community dedicated to allowing leftists to vent their frustrations

I advise you to read Marx and Lenin

As though I haven't. Thanks, though.

I’m unfamiliar with Tuck and Yang, and since they are not well known Marxist theorists such as Marx or Lenin

Your lack of reading past Lenin is not my problem. There's an entire contribution to critical theory in intersectionalism, post-colonialism, and decolonization. You could read Fanon, Freire, Sakai, or Tuck and Yang. In fact, I recommend you read all of them and wrestle with their writings in earnest. They may not have everything correct, but the process of moving beyond Lenin is important for all of us to continue to develop our understanding of the world in the spirit of scientific socialism.

One cannot simply walk into a theoretical space and say “x is fact, read person largely unknown in the space” and expect myself or others to simply accept the authority of these authors.

I don't. I expect you to commit yourself to reading the continuously developing and evolving corpus of theory as the world continues to develop.

Here's a link to Tuck and Yang's Decolonization is not a Metaphor.

And here's an excerpt from their abstract:

Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, non-white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism. The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. In this article, we analyze multiple settler moves towards innocence in order to forward “an ethic of incommensurability” that recognizes what is distinct and what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects. We also point to unsettling themes within transnational/Third World decolonizations, abolition, and critical space-place pedagogies, which challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors, making room for more meaningful potential alliances.

The argument is significant, and it draws upon decades of prior work, which it seems you may not have read, so it becomes difficult to summarize. Let me try to address your strawmanning of my position.

Cities and deserts are included in Marx’s evaluation of the contradictions between city and country side. The city exploits the country and in doing so must hold leverage over it (water).

First off, in the desert example I gave, the city is in the desert. The city does not exploit the country, it exploits quite literally another nation. The leverage it holds over this oppressed nation is genocidal leverage, meaning both mass murder of bodies and mass murder of cultures.

You conflate all of society which lives under settler society with those who benefit from it and thus maintain it.

This accusation is rich coming from someone who claims to read and understand Marx and Lenin. You may as well say Marx is conflating all bourgeoisie with those who have shared interests and thus maintain it. You have literally defined a class, a group of people who inhabit a structural role in society that share interests and use the mechanisms of the system, including violence, to maintain their shared interests through the reproduction of their way of life.

This is pointing to a contradiction which does not exist equating “white” Americans with the pette [sic] bourgeois simply because of their ethnicity.

This is also a complete misunderstanding of the colonial context. Settlers do not need to be equivalent with the petite bourgeoisie for them to share interests that are incommensurable with the interests of the colonized. It is, in fact, possible, and indeed is the case, that the settler proletariat do not have a shared interest with the colonized, most of whom would not neatly fit the definition of proletariat. In fact, this is the primary point. The colonized have interests and these interests are shared and the interests are maintained through reproducing their livelihood in a way that is fundamentally distinct from the settler proletariat.

Class not “race” determines politics, Lenin makes this perfectly clear.

Indeed, but race is an expression of class warfare and in colonial contexts is entirely inextricable from that class warfare. One cannot solve the class question without addressing the race question as equally urgent. It is not an either/or but a both/and. And it just this way because the bourgeoisie have used race as their secondary expression of class war, second only to private property, and private property in colonial contexts is inextricably bound up with the expression of race. In the colonial context, race and class interpenetrate.

Your argument that “all white people will band together to suppress the indigenous” falls flat once one looks to Standing Rock or the various pipeline protest movements.

Surely you just. No one ever said "all white people will band together" just like no one ever said all proletarians will join together simultaneously nor that no proletarians will betray their class nor that all bourgeois will use violence to defend their property. We are talking in terms of classes. Settlers, as a class, will see individuals who betray their class and stand with the indigenous. This is good, but it is in no way an indication of class interests breaking down, but rather a heightened consciousness of the settler class's place in history.

It is indeed at odds with the historical reality of settler colonialism, which has changed over time and is no longer the same as it once was. The descendants don’t magically have some racist gene, once’s interests are formed by their material conditions and their relation to the means of production of which the indigenous and proletarian “whites” share

This is a strawman of the actual argument. No one is arguing from a position of race. Settler colonialists obtained the land for their factories through genocide, rape, torture, child abduction, cultural grooming, and scorched-earth environmental destruction. The descendants don't need a racist gene. The descendants' entire way of life depends on the maintenance of the structural dispossession of the indigenous from their lands. Everything from language to education, from social mores to art, from religion to location, from production to consumption, absolutely everything about settler society is entwined legally, physically, culturally, ideologically, politically, and violently with the oppression the colonized. Decolonization explicitly works against the interests of the settlers AS A CLASS, regardless of their individual feelings or beliefs.

For every demand of the indigenous, there is a settler interest that will be impinged. There is no other way because settler society is structurally organized, intentionally, to harm and oppress the colonized. Whatever settler society is, it is such through a process of dispossession and genocide. Settler proletarians who have successfully taken control of the machine of state can negotiate nothing except either capitulation to indigenous leadership or oppression of indigenous needs. There is not middle ground because, as Tuck and Yang argue, the interests of the colonized and the settlers are incommensurable.

Each thing that the settler proletariat must solve for in the revolutionary mode - distribution of land, distribution of extracted resources, extraction planning, waste management, national defense - inherently will impinge on indigenous interests. Including indigenous leadership in the decision making process can only lead to either the interests of the indigenous being upheld or the interests of the settlers being upheld, with the possibility of the deferring of one of those interests to a later decision making time. In any case, there is no possibility of indigenous people's negotiating with a settler state in a position of equal power, and certainly in no way as nationally self-directed, as Lenin would require. Instead, the national boundaries would be those boundaries drawn by the settler imperialists, changing the boundaries would require settlers living their to live under indigenous sovereignty, and the indigenous may freely choose to organize their state according to settler interests or not. To assume that settler will simply adopt indigenous culture because all cultures are interchageable and the only thing that matters is one's relationship to the means of production is to completely misunderstood what is meant by "need".

That we're having this debate at all is indicative of a massive gulf that cannot be crossed by me attempting to summarize 60 years of theory and practice. Please read Fanon, Freire, Sakai, and Tuck and Yang. You'll find that these thinkers have read and engaged with the idea of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and others. There's an entire world of indigenous, anti-colonial theory that has been developing for decades and ignoring it will get you nowhere.