The American Land Question: Mass Indigenization Under the Dictatorship of the Cowboys
William ‘Panther’ Pardalis
Abstract
This article presents a Marxist-Leninist reinterpretation of the “American land question” through the symbolic and historical figure of the cowboy, arguing that the Western genre encodes the unresolved class struggle over land, labor, and sovereignty in U.S. history. William “Panther” Pardalis traces the evolution of the cowboy as a blue-collar archetype whose position between production and circulation — like the modern transport worker — made him the latent revolutionary subject of the frontier era. By examining the enclosure of the commons, the decline of the Knights of Labor, and the cultural mythology of the Wild West, Pardalis identifies how America’s mass culture has unconsciously expressed the nation’s unrealized potential for socialist transformation. The paper proposes a theory of “mass indigenization” under a future “dictatorship of the cowboys,” in which all Americans reclaim collective custodianship of land through public ownership and technological planning, synthesizing Marxist-Leninist dual power strategy with Indigenous communal traditions. Through this fusion of cultural analysis, economic history, and revolutionary theory, Pardalis advances a distinct vision of socialism with American characteristics — rooted in land, labor, and popular mythology — that reframes indigeneity as the collective destiny of the working class in the struggle against financial cartels.
Keywords
American land question, cowboy communism, indigeneity, dual power, Marxism–Leninism, Western genre, film theory, art, colonialism
