from Kaimataara Substack
If you want your revolution to succeed - look to your ancestors
Marxism and European anarchism are often treated as original political theories, but in reality, they borrow heavily from Indigenous and non-Western social structures. Concepts like communal land, mutual aid, anti hierarchy or dialectical and historical materialism weren’t invented by Marx, Engels, or Bakunin. These systems already existed and endured in Indigenous societies across the world.
The key difference is that those Indigenous societies weren’t just built on political structure. They were held together by culture by relational systems, intergenerational obligations, protocols, stories, spiritual beliefs, and deeply embedded values. That’s what made them resilient over long periods of time, even under immense pressure.
Marxism and European anarchism, in contrast, attempt to reconstruct these ideas in theory, but without the cultural foundations that sustained them. These European ideologies emerged in societies already disconnected from land, kinship, and traditional knowledge. They try to rebuild community through politics alone, without the deeper relational systems that keep people connected and accountable beyond ideology.
This is one reason why leftist movements frequently fracture and fail. Without shared cultural ground, without protocols, shared story, or spiritual connection, conflict becomes personal, power struggles emerge, and internal cohesion breaks down. Theory alone can’t hold a group together.
Movements like the CNT-FAI, the Makhnovists, the USSR, or Maoist China did exist within broader cultural contexts, and often drew strength from those surrounding traditions. But that’s not the same as Marxism or European anarchism being culturally rooted. The political theory sat on top of those cultures, it wasn’t born from them. And when conditions changed, or pressure mounted, the political system often couldn’t hold.
Some will argue that communism and European anarchism failed because of constant attack from capitalist powers. That’s partly true. But Indigenous societies have also been under violent, prolonged assault by colonial capitalism, with even worse treatment and many of us still survive, still around. Not because we're politically superior, but because our social systems are rooted in something deeper than theory. Culture carries us.
Culture is infrastructure. It teaches accountability, obligation, humility, and care. It ties people to each other and to the land. When political systems lack that, they are unstable. They rely on constant effort, enforcement, and ideological unity to function which rarely lasts.
What Marxism and European Anarchism Needs, It Left Behind
If you follow this logic to its conclusion, for Marxism to truly work, it would need to be rooted in something like early, pre-modern Germany. The kind of communal, kin-based life Marx sometimes referenced, village-level organization, shared land, interdependent survival. Ironically, that kind of life looked much closer to Indigenous social structures than to anything in industrial Europe.
But even that Germany was already disappearing in Marx’s time. Christianity, empire, private property, and centralized authority had already reshaped it. And rather than seriously engaging with living Indigenous societies who still embodied the communal values Marx idealized, Marx dismissed them as “primitive” and placed them at the start of a universal historical ladder.
So Marxism ends up reaching for a kind of society it doesn’t know how to create, because it cuts itself off from the people who still had it. It wants the structure of Indigenous life without the culture that made it work.
That’s the paradox. Marxism needs what it ignores. It claims to be scientific and universal, but it actually depends on a kind of cultural cohesion that is neither included in its theory nor reproducible by politics alone.
European anarchism followed a similar path. Thinkers like Proudhon and Bakunin developed powerful critiques of state power and capitalism, but they were also working in a cultural vacuum. The societies they came from had already lost many of the communal, land-based, kinship systems that once supported mutual aid and collective responsibility.
Their anarchism tried to reconstruct those values through theory, but without the deep cultural practices that made them functional in the first place. Like Marxism, it became a framework without a foundation, strong on ideas, but weak on the relational infrastructure that holds people together across generations.
Comments
it isn't just that - "These…
km (not verified) Sun, 03/01/2026 - 16:09
it isn't just that - "These European ideologies emerged in societies already disconnected from land, kinship, and traditional knowledge" though this is the case. it is also the case that European thought has an *antagonism* to land and all the non-human beings & entities who share the land, a belief that the real Human world is not on Earth but transcendentally elsewhere. it is the notion that humans and nature are separate. nor has Science escaped from the belief in this separation. this is the soup European anarchism & marxism came from.
an interesting question is how did this mode of thinking, this epistemology arise? i don't believe this can fully be answered but still, it is worth exploring.
so, i don't see a conflation of marxism & anarchism here but an acknowledgement of shared antecedents, knowledge-wise.
tho the pragmatist approach still sez...
anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/02/2026 - 01:58
In reply to it isn't just that - "These… by km (not verified)
"the notion that humans and nature are separate" is true to some extent. When driving on an highway through a wild natural area, you are being separated from the nature around. Same for the pavement, building structures and furniture on which you are sitting... that is all part of a construct, artificial environment inherently isolated from the nature underneath and around.
The nature vs culture separation is not about based on the belief on a world that transcendentally elsewhere, but the enforcement of a world to is *to be here*. Culture is everywhere in what humans do, regardless of their spiritual belief systems; they still make stuff as more or less detached from the natural habitat.
You apparently don't have a clue where European anarchism came from, if you are still within such a poor analysis.
The "Enlightenment"
rako (not verified) Mon, 03/02/2026 - 23:23
In reply to it isn't just that - "These… by km (not verified)
This separation of Human and everything else is at the root of the problem and can be directly linked to European Renaissance Enlightenment: the idea that humans are fundamentally fantastic, that science can explain everything and when some field doesn't have scientific studies it doesn't really exist.
The scientific process is of course primordial, but the total reliance on it blinds us on aspects of our lives that are not necessarily avoided by choice but out of ignorance. This dissociation between humans and nature, backed by a new kind of science, is the foundation of human domination of nature. Because domination can be justified through human means, it is also the justification for domination of men upon women, of white europeans upon everybody else, etc...
Marxism, interestingly, approaches politics through a scientific lens. But as was said it was created at a time when this dissociation of men vs everything else was still very common
That focus on White…
anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/03/2026 - 07:16
In reply to The "Enlightenment" by rako (not verified)
That focus on White europeans' domination is a tired old narrative that just ended up helping all these non-White authoritarian regimes and the hyper-conservative or fascistic cultures they promote. The Turkish/Ottoman for starters have always been extremely phallocratic and somewhat misogynistic, it was a major engine of slave trade for centuries, even before the western Euro empires got in the game, and despite a democratic shift in the 19th century have had their own kind of theocracy in charge. They also committed genocides against non-Turk populations.
Then you got these brutal Islamist dictatorships spreading in Africa and the Middle East, that reinstated slavery and the reduction of women to servile status. You don't seem to be very concerned about these non-Western, non-White traditions that rejected or just ignored Modern Enlightment, no? Neither are the Trump crowd, btw!
But here's a few good things Enlightement has brought:
- notion of equality between genders (as yes, feminism was part of Enlightement),
- notion of all humans, too, as being equals, which helped in the abolition of slavery in Euro empires and the US.
- putting an end to the tyrannies of religion and bloodline
- SECULARISM. I.e. you're free to believe and follow whatever fairtly tale you like, but the public domain isn't your space to monopolize and enforce it to others. And yes, that includes squats and other "commons". The public space is neutral and open; religion is for the private space.
as i said in my comment…
km (not verified) Tue, 03/03/2026 - 10:28
In reply to That focus on White… by anonymous (not verified)
as i said in my comment above, i don't think we can say definitively where ideas come from originally.
many peoples and cultures have developed ideas either separately from Europe, concurrently with Europeans or flat out stolen by Europeans.
so while slavery has been a Human practice from before history the Atlantic chattel slave trade was an intensification that has reshaped the globe, including the weather. and while this was happening some man was developing notions of Universal Humanity, all the while excluding Black people and women from inclusion.
the whole thing (our current circumstances) is built on anti-blackness and misogynoir and white people need to get over being butt-hurt about this and start saying yeah this is not good, maybe let's stop with all that, admit our complicity, and burn the motherfucker down. then look to those who still have land based cultures for how to come to something better.
"In a remote village, people…
anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/03/2026 - 11:52
In reply to as i said in my comment… by km (not verified)
"In a remote village, people have decided to get together to discuss certain matters of capital importance to the well-being of their community. A meeting is thus fixed for a definite date at the marketplace at nightfall. On the day and at the time agreed, each member eats, washes her/himself, and arrives only when s/he is ready. Things proceed smoothly as usual, and the discussion does not have to begin at a precise time, since it does not break in on daily village life but slips naturally into it. A mother continues to bathe her child amidst the group; two men go on playing a game they have started; a woman finishes braiding another woman’s hair. These activities do not prevent their listening or intervening when necessary. Never does one open the discussion by coming right to the heart of the matter. For the heart of the matter is always somewhere else than where it is supposed to be. To allow it to emerge, people approach it indirectly by postponing until it matures, by letting it come when it is ready to come. There is no catching, no pushing, no directing, no breaking through, no need for a linear progression which gives the comforting illusion that one knows where one goes. Time and space are not something entirely exterior to oneself, something that one has, keeps, saves, wastes, or loses. Thus, even though one meets to discuss, for example, the problem of survival with this year’s crops, one begins to speak of so-and-so who has left his wife, children, family, and village in search of a job in the city and has not given any news since then, or of the neighbor’s goats which have eaten so-and-so’s millet. The conversation moves from the difficulties caused by rural depopulation to the need to construct goat pens, then wanders in old sayings and remembrances of events that occurred long ago … A man starts singing softly and playing his lute. Murmurs, laughter, and snatches of conversation mingle under the moonlight. Some women drowse on a mat they have spread on the ground and wake up when they are spoken to. The discussion lingers on late into the night. By the end of the meeting, everyone has spoken. The chief of the village does not “have the floor” for himself, nor does he talk more than anyone else. He is there to listen, to absorb, and to ascertain at the close what everybody has already felt or grown to feel during the session."
sounds good
km (not verified) Tue, 03/03/2026 - 12:07
In reply to "In a remote village, people… by anonymous (not verified)
i would like to move to this village. or begin this practice in the place i am currently.
what is this quote from, btw?
women native other - by…
anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/03/2026 - 12:26
In reply to sounds good by km (not verified)
women native other - by trinh t. minh-ha
"some man was developing…
anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/03/2026 - 14:31
In reply to as i said in my comment… by km (not verified)
"some man was developing notions of Universal Humanity, all the while excluding Black people and women from inclusion."
That's not true in all the thinkers of universalism. But I kinda agree with the last sentence. It's just that "land-based" means people who have adapted to their environment, instead of formatting/destroying it for industrial imperatives. Let's admin a lot of non-White societies have played their part into this mess, and usually whenever you go on or near the equatorial belt you'll be having a terrible stinky and noisy wasteland. This is due to the impact of Western industrial capitalist civilization of course.
You reify traditional…
anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/02/2026 - 00:06
You reify traditional culture and values, but ask yourself: where did these things come from, and where have they gone? They were epiphenomenal effects of people engaging in long term practices, of particular modes of life. You mention indigenous relations, yes, but relations with what? With ecosystems and climate and neighboring societies. All of which have been utterly transformed (for the worse, of course) by the ravages of capital. Any potential anarchist / communist future cannot be a simple retvrn to tradition, just as it cannot be a continuation of industrial civilization under new management.
I'm agreeing here, or at…
GEF (not verified) Mon, 03/02/2026 - 10:36
I'm agreeing here, or at least the article is asking the right question...
There were clear and well-known attempts at counter-culture at the dawn of the postmodern era, but they have fizzled or hollowed out, mostly under the constant crushing collective pressure of normie cultures since at least the Zoomer era.. due to the onslaught of portable screen-cops, their corporate social media and its hypernormalizing effect.
The print culture... perhaps it still has got a bit of fame in some areas but has remained underused. It's nowhere any less effective or powerful tho, as it is reaching at spaces that totally got left over by the smart phone invasion. But the problem with print is that it's the old-school unidirectionalism; or the fact you can't argue or discuss with a text or a poster. Well maybe you can publish your answers & critiques... but what does it do? What movement or tendency or relations does it create? I did the hole graffiti dialogues in a hood with a lot of anarchists... this didn't do shit against isolation and lack of conversation.
Even the bookfairs -happening once a year- are spectacles in their own ways. They *might* pave the way for convos and maybe building ties, but you know that's not where you got your buddies and lovers from, right? Especially not the accomplices.
So yea... a living culture in the real world is totally what's lacking and the reason why both commies and anarchists, to some extent, have been losing ground, or at least not gaining any major one.
It doesn't take much, actually, to come up with a culture. Tho one that'll survive past one or two gens, that can be trickier. That's partly why (more or less secret) societies exist, as institutions that aim at going beyond space and time. Culture's unlikely to come from an institution, but the institution can and does support its flourishing. The society acts as this supporting framework for the development of projects and activity. It can exist and persist despite, inside/outside, beyond and below any authoritarian systemic order as well, and can permeate through the world of "normies" just like connect with the minority cultures, as a kind of universality.
Add new comment