Fucking made my month. I can die happy.
Sure J Sakai is a pen name. But he publishes all his books for free, he seems to have cred from his activist days, and he’s not pushing anything self serving. If it makes you feel any better, I read Settlers with a critical eye, and checked the footnotes for facts that seemed sus to me, and things in fact checked out.
I can’t say enough, any critique of the book comes down to “it’s so negative” or “it divides the left”, which aren’t critiques at all. Anyone can argue against the facts he’s stating, yet no one does.
any critique of the book comes down to “it’s so negative” or “it divides the left”, which aren’t critiques at all
Defeatism is a valid critique, as is its cousin, an extremely negative analysis that presents no path forward.
More specifically, there’s plenty to critique about the idea that poor (by U.S. standards) white people are unable to be radicalized by virtue of having a higher standard of living than people in developing nations, and by virtue of the privileges afforded to white people in the U.S. There’s a passage in Settlers that uses the percentage of U.S. households that have basic appliances like refrigerators to make the labor aristocrat argument. I’m supposed to believe someone working a dead-end, low-wage job can’t be radicalized because they have a fridge and a TV?
There’s also a contradiction between the point that race was socially constructed to get settlers to buy in to colonization projects and the conclusion that centuries later this constructed identity of whiteness is some immovable barrier. Leftists talk about deconstructing all sorts of deeply-entrenched ideas: economic systems, gender, family, education, justice, etc. But we’re supposed to look at whiteness, throw up our hands, and say “I guess communism is just impossible here”?
white people are unable to be radicalized
Book doesn’t say that, but OK
There’s a passage in Settlers that uses the percentage of U.S. households that have basic appliances like refrigerators to make the labor aristocrat argument. I’m supposed to believe someone working a dead-end, low-wage job can’t be radicalized because they have a fridge and a TV?
Super disingenuous way for frame the following text:
All statistics show that the amount of consumption in Euro-Amerikan society is staggering. Enough so that it establishes for the mass a certain culture. In the settler tradition today’s Euro-Amerikan culture is one of home-owning, with 68.4% of all settler households in 1979 owning their own home (up 50% from 1940). These households share a cornucopia of private electric appliances: 89.8% of all U.S. homes in 1979 had color TVs (watched an average of over 6 hours per day), 55% had air-conditioning, 77.3% had washing machines and 61% had clothes dryers, 43% had dishwashers, 52% had blenders and food processors, and so on. 1 ^ Much of the world’s health products are hoarded in the U.S., with, for example, one out of every three pairs of prescription eyeglasses in the world sold here.
In terms of the “basics,” the most characteristic for Euro-Amerikans is the automobile. In 1980 there were a total of 104.6 million cars on the road. 84.1% of all U.S. households had cars, with 36.6% having two or rnoreJ^ 1 Everyone says that owning automobiles is a “necessity,” without which transportation to work (83% drive to work), shopping, and childcare cannot be done.
(All in bold is my emphasis). Comrade, it’s not just TVs and fridges. Engage with the text as it stands.
Super disingenuous
Come on. I read the book a few years ago; there’s nothing disingenuous about correctly remembering it uses “a cornucopia of private electric appliances,” among other items, to argue that poor white Americans are so well off they (generally) won’t respond to radicalization. Bringing in the actual text is good for the discussion, but there’s no reason to start accusing people of intentionally misrepresenting it.
Besides, I’m mostly questioning the conclusion here, not the facts it’s drawn from. Of course living standards are higher in the U.S. than, for instance, Guatemala. But most Americans will never visit Guaremala or have more than a passing thought about living standards there, so how relevant is that disparity to whether I can radicalize a poor white American? If a politician from either major party told poor Americans they can’t complain because poor people in other countries have it worse, we’d clown on that, and your poor American would compare their living standards to that of their boss and think it’s nonsense, too. It’s a bad argument.
But we’re supposed to look at whiteness, throw up our hands, and say “I guess communism is just impossible here”?
Again, not in the text. We just can’t pretend that settler attitudes don’t exist in settler countries. Please don’t attach your own ideas to the book. At least engage with the text.
I don’t think the text ever literally says “you can’t do communism in the U.S. because of the role of whiteness and settler colonialism,” but that’s the takeaway of almost everyone who reads and agrees with it. What the vast majority of people read a text to mean = what the text means.
Now, how would you feel if it turned out that J Sakai was actually Bernie Sanders
there being no white proletariat in the West
I don’t even think that statement is true. The book was written in the 80s? Even Sakai admits that material conditions have changed since then. To hyper simplify, the book argues that a large segment of the white population has been bought off, which is petty unarguable. Historically, whites have actively tried to push him whites out of the best jobs, which Sakai footnotes like hell. I don’t think anyone can debate the second part. Lastly, a lot, but not all, white left movements in the US were pretty reactionary with race. The most obvious would be Bacon’s Rebellion. The left used to uphold that as some sort of cross class revolution movement. Sakai was ahead of his time, now we all know that it was about stealing indigenous land and owning more slaves.
