The Greenlandic general election took place on March 11, 2025, amid unprecedented global scrutiny. With 28,620 ballots cast,Greenland finds itself at the heart of a new frontier in Arctic imperialism that has courted appeals from the highest formations of our modern imperialist order. From the orderly and legally sanctified entry of Chinese capital in Greenlandic mining to the boorish advances of President Trump in the name of “global security”, the island’s future has captured global attention. However, if the election results reveal anything, it would be that the upset triumph of the Demokraatit Party and their likely coalition partners will preserve their alignment towards Europe along the path of gradual independence through the usual institutions and bourgeois legal procedures. The course of Greenlandic politics should be taken as proof that the liberal world order is in the process of retrenching against the decades of gains by populist reactionary vulgarians. The faith of all “right-thinking people in the free world” shall soon be rewarded.

And yet, the working class of Greenland could be forgiven for proving slow to rejoice. Like all workers everywhere, misery stalks their every moment. 17.4% of Greenlanders live below the median poverty rate, the highest anywhere within Nordic Europe. A mere 48% of Greenlanders complete secondary school education, by far the lowest in the developed world, with limited access for non-Danish speakers. Recent findings on the operation of Greenland’s Ivituut cryolite mine by Danish state and private firms between 1853 and 1987 suggest no profits whatsoever were shared with the locals, a matter currently preoccupying the Danish Finance Ministry. These failures embarrass the left wing of capital with their naked exploitation and social inequality ,along with the sinister legacy of colonialism plaguing the territory. Given the spiralkampagnen, a genocidal program of forced sterilization of Greenlandic Inuit women through the nonvoluntary imposition of IUDs only a few decades ago and a rate of child sexual abuse that has only recently receded from 45 to 20 percent, the ignominious distinction of having the world’s highest suicide rate should be as unsurprising as it is grim. Greenlandic workers can expect very little from the government’s underfunded mental health facilities, and if they insist on aid may instead have their children seized from them under the forældrekompetenceundersøgelse parenting laws. Renowned for targeting Greenland Inuit in particular, they salt the wound that comes with the question so many emergency operators ask callers - “Ja, er han dansk eller grønlænder eller hvad er han?” (Yeah, is he a Dane or a Greenlander or what?)

That such reforms over the decades has done so little to relieve any of these blights on the lives of Greenland’s workers has done nothing to discourage any of the recent winners of the elections, naturally. This is of no surprise to us, for reforms are offered only when there is mass expansion of capital, whereas social inequalities can be tolerated when the working class is otherwise pacified. Naleraq and Demokraatit, the second and first place finishers, openly promote pension, tax, fishery and business reform; this is their proposed basis for a coalition and a path towards independence. As with any independence party of their sort, they maintain that national autonomy is the key to “modernization,” a term as fraught in Greenland’s recent history as anywhere in the developing world, and just as dependent on intensified working class exploitation and environmental degradation. It is for these reasons that Greenlandic national liberation offers nothing to the working class, but merely demands their political consent to a disgruntled local bourgeoisie. The aspiring capitalist class of Greenland is quick to frame Danish supervision as the fetters inhibiting Greenlandic flourishing that must be cast off, no matter the immense Danish subsidies provided to support the island. Ambiguities such as whether Nuuk or Copenhaagen hold the final say in development negotiations continue to deter investors as well, and at just under 57,000 inhabitants, mostly concentrated in Nuuk, the island is demographically unprepared for the labor requirements of capital development, implying a turn to migrant labor to fill the abundant gaps that would offer ample opportunities to isolate and intimidate these atomized workers. Already, Filipino migrant workers constitute the region’s third most populous demographic category, a development entirely restricted to the past decade and a half. It is clear that even though the local bourgeoisie are at an impasse between maintaining a system of patronage with Denmark and pursuing their own pipe dreams of autonomy, the demand for greater exploitation to lubricate either ‘path’ of further development is already being met. Perhaps most ominously of all, either path will also come with environmental degradation and extraction of highly hazardous minerals. A precedent for this has already been set, after the 2013 repeal of a ban on such operations was modestly reversed by the Inuit Ataqatigiit government due to immediate health and safety concerns, a measure that the incoming coalition is likely to regard as an obstacle to development.

It is on this point in particular that the hopes of local bourgeoisie may be rewarded by wider shifts in the world market and geopolitical conflict. Demand for rare earth minerals indispensable to the production of batteries, solar panels, windmills and other renewable energy infrastructure central to the green transformation of capital are projected to quadruple within 15 years, to say nothing of microprocessor production vital to arms manufacturing. Trump’s insistence that Greenland was necessary for “national security” evinces this logic despite his crudity since control over strategic resources insulates national capital from crisis and better prepares them for war. The geographical and infrastructural obstacles will eventually yield to the calculus of escalating geopolitical conditions as the traditional sites for mineral procurement in South America, Central Africa, Russia and China become increasingly inaccessible, be it due to local conflict and instability or to tariffs and sanctions on the flow of goods. Intimating a mounting clash, Trump in his first term implied the opening blow of this contest when pressuring Copenhaagen to block the construction of an airport in Nuuk by a Chinese firm. Regardless of which alignment their rising bourgeoisie pursues, ultimately, one thing remains constant; Greenland’s path to the community of nations promises nothing to Greenlandic workers but exploitation, despoliation of their environment, and everything else that being thrust onto the front lines of a new imperialist theater has to offer.

Whether as a Danish colony, an autonomous territory, an independent state or as a newly inducted American holding, all roads under capital lead to ruin just as surely for Greenland as they do for everywhere else. Perhaps as an oblique acknowledgement of this tension, Greenland’s capitalists waste no time in conversation asserting their unique fitness to resolve these contradictions, citing their harmonious indigenous traditions that emphasize the unity of the people within the land that sustains them, an assertion that the wider Greenlandic Inuit public is eager to cosign. But here as with all capitalists, Marx elucidated long ago that “In order to relate their products to one another as commodities, men are compelled to equate their various labours to abstract human labour. They do not know it, but they do it, by reducing the material thing to the abstraction, value,” an unknowing act of reduction which has no precedent in any indigenous culture and therefore no mechanism by which it may be detected or inhibited. This added layer of cultural mystification simply obscures the true development of social relations under capitalism for those prone to being seduced by having them repackaged into rustic Inuit cultural presentations, chief among them the self-same Greenlandic capitalists eager to balm their uneasy conscience and the workers struggling to confront their own alienation in the absence of an organised and politically conscious working class. In the bid to tame capital via a shotgun marriage to traditional Inuit culture, it will instead be Inuit culture that finds itself debased and bent to the purposes of capital, just as surely as the mourning hunter who pursued the mythic wolf Amarok and slew his pups to draw him out instead found his own soul torn from his body. The working class of Greenland shares a common cause with the workers of the rest of the world, that of the abolition of wage labor, of capitalist production, of cancerous overproduction, and the inexorable march towards global slaughter that awaits us if not averted by our hand. Rather than the treacherous hunter driven by grief to seek to humble Amarok, the workers of Greenland could instead look to the tale of Kagsagsuk, the orphan boy who fled the tormentors who called themselves his family into the wilderness and confronted Amarok openly, who then dashed his body upon the ground over and over, knocking small bones out of his body that purged the weakness from him until he was finally able to return and vanquish his captors. Surely, as Marx would doubtless agree, Kagsagsuk had nothing to lose but his chains, no less than we do.