In his 2016 essay "An American Utopia," Fredric Jameson appropriates Lenin's concept of "dual power" to ruminate on its potential meaning in the present U.S. context. Jameson's remarks on "dual power" and U.S. politics offer a starting point to explore both the most recent developments in the U.S. and to revisit Lenin's State and Revolution fruitfully to review the concept of "the commune" as a post-capitalist political theory. Lenin's work transcends anodyne demands for abstract democracy. Indeed, my intervention aims to explore the limits of "democracy" in U.S. political discourse, demanding a reconsideration of Leninist political theory. In so doing, the conditions of struggle in the U.S. potentialize the dialectical development of struggles to extend democracy (reform) with struggles to overcome democracy (revolution).
What historian Tiya Miles calls the “settler colonial slavery complex” mediated knotty and contradictory relations among Native peoples and Africans living in the U.S. James Fenimore Cooper's The Oak Openings, a novel about white settler colonialism set in West Michigan, sought to represent a white supremacist-controlling mediation of those relations. The Oak Openings works to project dominant white/U.S. values, ideologies, and cultural constructions of race and appropriate relations of racialized groups onto imagined literary Indians. While evidence for organized links between the Odawa and African-descended people is scant in Blackbird's History, his and his people's political commitments during the Civil War signaled alliance with the hundreds of thousands of self-liberating Black people who fought to destroy slavery and white supremacy. Blackbird's support for the “Black Republican” ticket in 1856 combined with his active opposition to “copperhead” Democrats registers a meaningful struggle against white supremacy. Like Cooper, the copperheads deployed a racial hierarchy that aimed to disrupt potential alliances among Native and African-descended peoples. Blackbird's History is simultaneously a “lamentation” of the failures of the anti-white supremacy struggle, but also, given the future-orientated aims of the text, a preservation of the embers of that alignment of the oppressed for future use.
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