Not that it’s… bad per se.
But I feel that it’s already (I’m almost halfway through the book) covering ground that’s talked about in more depth in other books that have come out since 1983. Which I guess isn’t the book’s fault and it’s a nice overview of US history from a different viewpoint, but its analysis is kinda… Eh, bad, I guess? Marxist thought in general does not recognize slaves as “proletarians” and I don’t think many black Americans even recognize themselves as “New Afrikans,” which I think is a Maoist term.
I also don’t like how it misquotes and attacks people like Herbert Aptheker (who was attacked by the FBI during his day) and communist historian Philip S. Foner. Just seems that the author has an axe to grind, which would make sense if he was indeed a Maoist before Gonzalo turned Maoism in to something more than just a pro-China stance during the Cold War. After all, William Z. Foster, Herbert Aptheker, and Philip S. Foner were pretty staunchly pro-Moscow (originally, being a Maoist usually meant that you had a pro-Beijing stance during the Cold War after the Sino-Soviet split).
Anyways, I know that @muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml loves Settlers and, if I have it right, it influenced him during his more formative years as a comrade. And I get that. So I don’t mean to come off as attacking the book, which is fine as an overview of the atrocities committed by the United States. How many people talk about the genocide against the Asian immigrants along the West Coast of the continental United States? But I do think that it lacks in terms of analysis.
I’m currently halfway through the book, of course, so I’ll continue reading. I like that it gives a who’s who and what’s what of people and events of colonial and United States history. I would recommend it to get a breakdown of the events leading up to the modern-day, but as the saying goes: don’t believe everything you read. Or rather, sometimes, it’s good to read something a bit critically.
Some books I would recommend if you like Settlers (or even didn’t like it):
White Supremacy Confronted: U.S. Imperialism and Anti-Communism vs. the Liberation of Southern Africa from Rhodes to Mandela by Gerald Horne (Author)
Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation by Nicholas Guyatt
Black Worker in the Deep South by Hosea Hudson (Author)
Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis by John Smith (Author)
Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) by Glen Sean Coulthard (Author)
I’ve read Settlers, recently. Most of it i already knew, but discovering how much of the US was built by Chinese people, and then how badly they were treated afterwards, was new to me.
My issue with the book is an undertone of ‘You can’t trust whitey’ And where many people take that undertone. On some forums, i have had people [only 2 so far] tell me not-jokingly, that concentration camps, and mass extermination is fine, as long as it happens to white people. Basically, the nazis were right, they just had the wrong targets. And they cited this book as to why.
And when you bring this up, people jump to white fragility and so on, as explanations as to why you MUST be hating the book. What the book says is not new. And much of it is true.
My issue with it is that it seems to be purpose written to stop Fred Hampton. Because he wanted to unite the working class, black, brown and white. And you have people citing this book as reasons to abandon the white members of the working class to the far right, and condemn any attempts to reach them in a revolutionary context.
there are better books saying the same stuff, without the drama. https://erich-arbor.medium.com/the-anti-marxist-elitism-of-j-sakais-settlers-409ff2d496ee
Settlers was written in the 70s when this labour aristocracy was probably true and scientifically correct
It was written in a quite bleak period of history
Todays US though has hungry people lining up at foodbanks, hook worm (a disease of extreme poverty and had thought to be eradicated from usa) is flourishing in places like Alabama
If you went to these White working class neighbourhoods in the 70s you would have seen an industrial proletariat mostly bought off by the crumbs of imperialism
That isnt true anymore. They have no jobs and are high on opiods
First I will say that Settlers isn’t primarily a theory book, but rather a history book with a guiding central thesis. In reading it, you’ll find that it often doesn’t define the undercurrents or do analysis of, the historical events it focuses on. Its less “analysis” and more “history” focused, but of course it does have a few central ideas and themes that Sakai feels drives US history.
The main thesis of settlers stands, that is proven thoroughly throughout, is that the US perfected a system of socialized bribery that allowed a minority of capitalists and slave-owners to recruit white settlers from europe, to form a settler garrison in the US, and gain from the genocide and conquering of hundreds of Indian tribes, and to steal the country from coast to coast, in a phase of orgiastic primitive accumulation. The bourgeoisie then continually invented new ways for this absorption into the murican dream and whiteness to occur, and had a mass base to carry out their goals, always at the expense of the oppressed nations living within the US’s borders, the black nation, the indian nation, etc whose class interests were at odds with the settlers, and who had no path out of exploitation.
TL:DR; want some free land? All you gotta do is kill some indians to get it. And thousands of poor white proles from europe very loudly said yes.
Its an expose of the US’s settler-colonialist foundations, its history of genocide, exploitation, social bribery, and the spoils that went to those who willingly absorbed into whiteness and the murican dream (even if they had to kill indians to get some cheap land to do so.) Also has an excellent and unique analysis of FDR’s new deal as the bribery and absorption of the labor movement into settler colonialism that I haven’t seen elsewhere.
The spats with other leftists, and detractions from the book are really incidental IMO… the “READ SETTLERS” meme is important because there’s nothing more dangerous to the pride of western leftists than telling them they’re likely descended from generations of bastards. Making sure people don’t read settlers is the best way they can defend their identity and race pride, which must be eradicated for any true internationalism to arise. This book really separates the social chauvinists from the internationalists.
Also there’s a tendency for imperialist leftists to dismiss the book by calling Sakai racist, or claim that he was a race essentialist, which has been disproven many times: Settlers probably more than any other book first elucidated the complicated overlap between race and class; how they are inextricable, and how those US leftists who attempt to split the two are committing a mistake, and have their progenitors in the history of the US labor movement.
Oh one other thing, the New Afrikan thing doesn’t have to do with Maoism (In a post-interview that I recorded as part of the audiobook, he talks about how he has great respect for mao, but he isn’t MZT or MLM), it has to do with the idea of “colonized nations within the borders of empire”: IE peoples with shared traditions, origins, and class interests, that should make up a nation with its own autonomy and system of governance, but is prevented from doing so. This is “the right of nations to self-determination”, but within the US’s borders, that everyone from Malcolm X to Indigenous leaders to puerto rican anti-imperialists pushed for.
I’ve never seen anyone call Sakai a racist.
Also, thousands of poor white proles didn’t say yes. Marx/Lenin never defined whites as a labor aristocracy and Sakai hardly accounts for the fact that there were many black or brown labor aristocrats. Also, Settlers has essentially been done better in terms of history and analysis since 1983. Also, you didn’t really account for my issues with the book, such as the misquoting and attacks on big-name communists like Herbert Aptheker and Philip S. Foner, who were attacked by figures like the FBI.
The issue here, is that everyone in US is pretty much a labour aristocracy. The wrong of Sakai is seeing it throught race, and the civil rights movements and the follow up rainbow coalition politics followed by the then-black nationalists proved him incorrect.
The labour aristocracy is not the ‘whites’. It is almost the entirety of the people in America, black and whites included. America is not ‘Amerika’, and leftists should start understanding this small truth which is being more and more evident by Holywood.
