An unsettling marxist ideology

Settler colonial theory is yet another bizarre ploy by Marxists to unfairly discredit and destabilise Western democracies, argues communications consultant Tim Duncan.

Settler colonial studies brings together a bench of unforgiving academics, and a literature growing in influence, which classes the post-settlement history of this country and others like it as illegitimate and basically void. Its leading thinkers believe that nothing subsequent to first settlement can compensate for Australia’s birth as a genocidal colony. Accordingly, the pillars of Australia’s national culture—its egalitarian ethos, liberal democracy, the rule of law, private rights to property, its high standard of living—fail the relevance test. What counts for settler colonialism is the colonial genesis; although desirable, salvation is at best elusive.

British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote of “madmen in authority…distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”. Kirsch has found the ‘academic scribblers’ whose ideology denies legitimate nationhood for the highly successful Anglophone regions of recent settlement—Australia, Canada, the US, and New Zealand—and for a more recent settler society, Israel. For the settler colonies, the theory has it, the elimination of the native is the common foundation. Elimination is historically inevitable, ongoing and immutable. Once an obscure branch of Marxist social theory whose founding gurus occupied influential research, teaching and networking positions in Australian universities, settler colonial studies is now a global engine of disaffection inspiring a new generation of radical socialist activism. Its influence—on students, on activists, on political and cultural debate in the West—has been significantly under-recognised. The achievement of Adam Kirsch’s book on settler colonialism is to expose the linked ideas and pre-occupations at its heart and then to reveal the fatal limitations in its findings.

INVASION IS A ‘STRUCTURE’

The core tenet of settler colonial studies as expressed by its founding British-born Marxist, the late Patrick Wolfe, holds that the invasion of settlers ‘is a structure, not an event’. This means we are all settlers, including even the latest batch of immigrants to Australia from India or South Sudan. As such we are all guilty of perpetuating the oppression that stems from the colonial act of invasion. Wolfe, a social anthropologist educated in Australia who worked at La Trobe, Victoria and other universities until his death in 2015, wrote most of his material inspired by his critique of Australian colonial settlement. His most influential disciple, Lorenzo Veracini, also worked in Australia, at Swinburne University. Veracini’s main contribution is to expand on colonial settlement as structural genocide where assimilation, recognition, reconciliation, and all dimensions of policy and practice to do with Indigenous people, are defined as ongoing expressions of genocide.

Settler colonialism theory seems circular and absurd.

If you accept that invasion is not an event, but is rather a continuing structure, writes Kirsch, every inhabitant of a modern settler society not descended from the original population is a settler. In the US context, African Americans, descendants of people brought to America as slaves, are settlers and play their part in continuing oppression, just like the descendants of their former owners.

Kirsch explains of settler colonial theory: “So if settlement is a genocidal invasion, and if invasion is an ongoing structure, not a completed event, then everything (and perhaps everyone) that sustains a settler colonial society today is also genocidal.”

For the uninitiated, settler colonialism as an academic field seems circular and absurd. Part of its accusatory power rests on diluted usage of the word genocide, where anything from social displacement and official Indigenous policy is placed on the same pedestal as systematic race liquidation. Part of its punch rests on its disdain for historical facts and contexts, and its preference for the simplicity of pre-determined collective outcomes. Settler colonial theory is a one-size-fits-all way of thinking, so its practitioners eagerly write for each other about pretty much anything because pretty much anything can confirm the theory’s assertion of original sin.

The journal Veracini started in 2013, Settler Colonial Studies, is replete with earnest analyses lamenting settler gender preferences right up to laboured attempts to link decolonisation and the post-carbon transition. “What’s different about settler colonialism as a tool of political analysis is that it sees all types of social injustices as flowing from a single source: the rapacity of European settlers”, observes Kirsch.

THE LENINIST FOUNDATION

It is worth locating settler colonial studies in its intellectual tradition. Wolfe is first and foremost a structural determinist, whose denial of events over structure rules out history, and indeed historiographical challenge. His work is positioned firmly in the hardline Leninist tradition. Wolfe himself gave the game away in his major article, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’ (Journal of Genocide Research, 2006). He wrote:

Settler colonialism was foundational to modernity. Frontier individuals’ endless appeals for state protection not only presupposed a commonality between the private and official realms. In most cases…it also presupposed a global chain of command linking remote colonial frontiers to the metropolis. Behind it all lay the driving engine of international market forces, which linked Australian wool to Yorkshire mills and, complementarily, to cotton produced under different colonial conditions in India, Egypt, and the slave states of the Deep South. The Industrial Revolution, misleadingly figuring in popular consciousness as an autochthonous metropolitan phenomenon, required colonial land and labour to produce its raw materials just as centrally as it required metropolitan factories and an industrial proletariat to process them, whereupon the colonies were again required as a market. The expropriated Aboriginal, enslaved African American, or indentured Asian is as thoroughly modern as the factory worker, bureaucrat, or flaneur of the metropolitan centre.

For Lenin, imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism, where colonial industry provided an imperialist power a productive outlet for surplus capital. For Wolfe, settler societies simply played their allotted roles in Lenin’s industrial imperialism of the 19th century. Wolfe’s special contribution to Marxist insight was that imperial hunger for land drove a special variety of colonialism quite distinct from the European imperialism of earlier centuries focused on exploiting Indigenous and imported labour in the Caribbean, Latin America, and South Asia. In contrast, the foragers who originally occupied the temperate, fertile plains of the New World would not be part of any imperialist plan except to disappear. The settlers from the imperial centre and whoever drove them out of sight in order to exploit their land would forever be complicit in their genocide.

If you remove reconciliation, you remove hope.

It is hard to credit that the architects of this high-level theory would be as impervious to its contemporary impacts and implications as they seem to be. Despite its obsessive focus on winners and losers, historical determinism like this has little room for human values or particular historical contexts, preferring instead vast swathes of historical hindsight, with its crushing judgements and immutable verdicts. Kirsch points this out well: remove reconciliation and you remove hope; condemn all for all time and you invite despair; deny legitimacy and you seed alienation and violence; prohibit historical understanding and you condemn your present as well as your past.

THE SLOW BOIL OF ORIGINAL SIN

While Kirsch acknowledges the origins of settler colonial studies here in Australia, his main focus is on its impact on US universities, and in turn upon the politics of the Israel/Palestine debate there. Australian settlement, however, is clearly the bellwether case for the theoreticians owing to its uniquely binary nature. Unlike other regions, aboriginal Australia was totally isolated for thousands of years prior to European settlement; then suddenly it was not. Indeed, one cannot absorb Kirsch’s book without recognising that Australians have been experiencing the impact of settler colonial judgement as something of a slow boil until now.

Victims of the Hamas atrocities were ‘settler colonists’.

For example, we have been enduring the endless accretion of ‘welcome to country’ formalities (Kirsch calls them land acknowledgements) in our formal community lives for decades. There is nothing particularly welcoming or even reconciling about them because their purpose is to ritually reinforce the audience’s continuing responsibility for the act of dispossession. ‘Never ceded’, the core assertion in the welcome to country incantations, is there to ram home the implicit charge of illegitimacy and theft.

The slow boil is also evident on nightly Australian Government television, where the ABC has been implicitly endorsing the ‘never ceded’ attack by offering alternative Indigenous country names for our modern cities and towns, drawn from Indigenous languages and times when cities and towns in Australia did not exist. How often do we tune out of the news from one language group area and move onto events taking place in some other group’s country, mediated through the news desks of now-federated colonies? Kirsch notes how easy it is for some settler society theorists to flip into imagined pre-colonial worlds. North America, for instance, is re-conceived as ‘Turtle Island’, inspired by an Iroquois creation myth, despite the fact that no Indigenous American, let alone any European, could have had any idea prior to 1492 that the continent existed or that this concept could fit it.

Kirsch’s revelations provide timely context to what Australians have been unconsciously absorbing over the years as settler colonial theory has permeated public life. Annual Australia Day desecrations of colonial statues now include slogans like ‘the colony will fall’. Occasional windows into public administration also reveal the incremental encroachment of settler colonial ideology being overseen by activist arms of State governments. For instance, extreme limits on rock climbing at the world-famous climbing site at Mt Arapiles in Western Victoria were in part inspired by Parks Victoria accepting opposition to the approval of new climbing routes on the grounds that it would constitute “a continuing act of colonisation of the landscape”. This sort of thing is easier to spot having dipped one’s toe in settler colonial studies, courtesy of Kirsch’s powerful introduction.

ISRAEL: A SETTLER CLUB MEMBER?

The Hamas atrocities of October 7 have revealed a further step in activist adoption of the settler colonial framework. For the young Left in Australia and the US for instance, it is cool to be anti-Israel because Israel is occupied by illegitimate Western settlers, just like Australia and its fellow settler societies. Hence the weekly Sunday demonstrations in Melbourne and Sydney which feature signs deploring both Australian and Israeli genocide.

Kirsch is no specialist in the history of regions of recent settlement, or even of the history of a Zionist state in Palestine, nor does he pretend to be. A New York-based American academic who writes on poetry and literature, his book is the work of a highly educated generalist, researching as a detective the passage of ideas. Kirsch’s undertaking was triggered by his initial shock at the enthusiasm—sometimes even untrammelled joy—which greeted the Hamas murders and kidnappings of Israeli citizens. Much of this emanated from a number of elite American universities immediately following October 7, well prior to the mobilisation of the Israeli Defence Force in response.

We, the settlers, are being rounded up at last.

Kirsch found two troubling but widespread initial responses to the Hamas atrocities. First, that it was quite justifiable in the eyes of a disturbing number of US academics for Hamas to murder or kidnap Israeli citizens, and second, that this was because the victims were ‘settler colonists’. These people were not just the controversial settlers of the West Bank, but any Israelis since Israel is an illegitimate settler society. At the root of support for Hamas in the West was a radical world view that a society created by the invasion of settlers can never transcend its origins. Accordingly, it is forever violent and forever illegitimate and its only path to salvation is to experience decolonisation.

In the Israeli context, decolonisation means the dismantling of the settler society and the expulsion of its citizens. Kirsch notes that for other settler societies, the US and Australia, for instance, the decolonisation step of settler colonial analysis is not so clear. Indeed, the bankruptcy of settler colonial theory becomes evident with its ultimate mind game that the only solution for settler societies with scarcely any Indigenous populations left is the recognition that they still cannot continue as the sovereign entities they are. Veracini, for example, wrote in the introduction to the first edition of Settler Colonial Studies that in order to become genuine post-settler societies they must “discontinue the colonial substantive attack against indigenous sovereign autonomy”.

Settler colonial theory seems to be all about the Left getting back to unfinished business.

Israel’s membership of the settler society club is both illogical and bewildering and, not surprisingly, Kirsch sometimes struggles to explain it. Perhaps this has to do with the innate flaws of the theory. First, there is the narrowly defined settler club itself and its selective focus on British colonisation. The main focus of the field pretty much remains on the arrival of Europeans seeking to found new countries in temperate, fertile, lightly populated geographies initially under British colonial rule.

Attempts to explain this narrow focus in settler colonial studies literature offer the consistent but lame excuse that this is because the principal theorists have largely lived and worked in the settler societies whose existence they lament. Yet it is hard to see why Argentina, Chile and southern Brazil, for instance, do not rank with Australia and the rest, except for the possibility that a larger basket makes theoretical generalising even more problematic than is already evident in settler colonial studies literature.

Then, there is the theory’s obsessive focus on Israel, which was argued first by Wolfe himself. At first sight, there is little in common in the settlement of Palestine and the settlement of Australia and the other regions beyond the shared fact that the newcomers initially came from Europe (ignoring the Judaic descendants of those who had remained). Indeed, the theorists recognise this when at once they simultaneously label French occupation of Algeria and British settlement of Rhodesia as ‘settler societies’ but then dismiss them from the club owing to the subsequent expulsion of the settlers by their respective imperial masters in the second half of the 20th century.

The settlers here today are not going anywhere.

Clearly, there is something else in common with the British settler colonies, such as Australia, and Israel, which is that the settlers here today are not going anywhere. Without the French or British governments which decolonised Algeria and Rhodesia against the wishes of its settlers, there is no colonial centre of power to make them leave even if there were any possibility of it occurring, which there is not. So, if all that matters is the fact of original displacement of native populations at the hands of Europeans and that nothing thereafter will cut across that fact or cause the settlers to either leave or accept Indigenous sovereignty, then it follows that the post-invasion histories of Australia, Israel, the US, Canada, and New Zealand are basically all the same.

The simple, shared story of European settlement is the invasion of settlers, the imposition of oppression, the delivery of genocide, the theft of land, and the minimal prospects of any genuine decolonisation orchestrated from outside. Hence the inclusion of Israel in the settler society club of the theorists, and later in turn, the peculiar combination of political slogans mouthed by the Australian (and international) Left in solidarity after October 7: all proudly anti-colonial, anti-genocide, pro-Palestine, pro-Indigenous, and anti-Israel.

THE LEFT’S UNFINISHED BUSINESS

This is not the first time that Marxist social theory has cast its net anew. Indeed, settler colonial theory seems all about the hardline intellectual Left finally getting back to some unfinished business. One of its proudest accusations is that in contrast to the traditional colonial exploitation of vast pools of Indigenous labour in Asia or Latin America, the successful settler societies thought they had got away with it, that nobody had noticed.

As Veracini smugly puts it in one of his celebrations of the settler colonial studies field he largely helped invent, “Where it is most triumphant, settler colonialism effectively covers its tracks. That ‘settler’ and ‘colonialism’ needed to be appraised conjointly, after all, had been disattended for decades”.

Well, we the settlers are being rounded up at last. Following Kirsch’s book, we cannot say we weren’t warned.

Dr Tim Duncan is co-author with John Fogarty of Australia and Argentina: On Parallel Paths (MUP, 1985). He was a journalist with The Bulletin, Business Review Weekly and The Australian before moving to Rio Tinto as Head Australian External Affairs. He now owns a Melbourne-based financial communications consultancy and for many years has been a member of the IPA Board.

This article from the Autumn 2025 edition of the IPA Review is written by communications consultant Tim Duncan.