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I don’t think we disagree – either on Wolfe or on the danger of dilution of settler colonialism as an analytical tool.

The latter is the reason behind both this blog and the paper that inspired it – to re-inscribe writings on settler colonialism in a wider critique of global networks of capital accumulation, dispossession, and exploitation, which it seems to me the dominant scholarly approach in SCS often fails to do sufficiently.

As to your critique of Wolfe and the danger of erasing existing radical traditions of anti-colonial struggle, I think I acknowledge this in the piece:

“Second, and related to the above, this approach has led SCS to avoid engaging with existing traditions of analysis of, and resistance to, settler colonialism. Across the globe, indigenous populations have theorised, debated, and struggled against settler colonial regimes. They often did so while identifying their oppressors’ relations to global capitalist circuits of accumulation and more general colonial processes. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s writing on the subject in the 1960s and 1970s (see for example, George Jabbour’s Settler Colonialism in Southern Africa and The Middle East) or the more well-known writings of Frantz Fanon on Algeria (which, tellingly, Wolfe positioned outside of the settler colonial world), are powerful testimonies to these intellectual traditions.

As well as impoverishing the intellectual world of SCS, these absences in much of its output further intensify its particularistic tendencies and undermine the possibilities of developing analyses that can link settler colonialism, and indigenous struggles against it, to other power structures and social movements. It is also striking how much more attentive to these connections – without however undermining settler colonial specificities – Indigenous scholars and activists have been (see for example the work of Jodi A. Byrd, Mahmood Mamdani, or The Red Nation).”

in solidarity,
Sai

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I agree that “all settler classes participate in the process of indigenous dispossession. They then struggle amongst themselves over the nature of the internal distribution of the colonial loot” as well as the “continued centrality of settler colonial processes – and indigenous resistance to them – to present political and economic realities”. I do not agree, however, that Patrick Wolfe discovered anything. We started using the settler description and understanding inspired by J. Sakai who wrote the activist oriented “Settlers” way before that. Of course not all settler regimes are the same. There are those where the settlers became the majority population and were buttressed additionally by slavery (the US), those that had settler minorities that lived off indigenous labor (Algeria, Rhodesia, South Africa) and those that do not intend to live off indigenous labor but ethnically cleanse them altogether (Israel). In the US, continued dispossession is a factor along with settler politics, possible due to the resulting effect of a disproportionately large white property owning middle class relative to the size of the middle class in “normal” capitalist countries.

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