Marx, Engels and Indigenous struggles

Karl Marx argued that the beginnings of capitalism were largely made possible by colonialist barbarity. Yet he and his collaborator Frederick Engels had little or nothing to say about the resistance and fate of the Indigenous peoples of North America and Australia. Despite this, their fierce hostility to racism inspired the early Communist Party of Australia, whose members blazed an anti-racist trail in the early 1930s that we can still learn from today. To discuss this history and its contradictions, we talk to Paddy Gibson. Paddy is a member of Solidarity who works at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at UTS, the University of Technology in Sydney.