this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2022
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Wonderful summary of the book, comrade. While I disagree with some excerpts of the book, such as when Sakai affirms there is no "white proletariat" in the US (sometimes he even affirms there is no proletariat at all), I still think that everyone should read it. But not only read it, but read criticisms of it, analyze them as well, and through this dialectic movement form their own perspective on it. I believe it's still a valuable book which offers many insights into the white supremacist nature of the US and its historical causes.
This is what detractors say but it is never substantiated as a criticism. By what natural law of capital is it so ubiquitous that a revolutionary proletarian class must exist among colonizers? This criticism usually amounts to disappointment or frustration that the processes of class formation in Amerika differ from that of Western Europe. Settlers is not a description of the moral quality of white people but rather the material process of class formation in settler colonial Amerika and its consequences for labor organizations and for colonized peoples. I read the book and I have yet to see any successful criticism of the book among its mkst common criticisms, I have, frankly, only seen strawmen and white fragility.
Where did this "revolutionary" come from? You are putting words in my comments where it does not exist. Interesting how you complain about strawmen and begin your comment with one. I am not a "detractor" of J. Sakai's work, I mentioned several times that there's value in it, but a critical reading is definitely essential. So that I can "substantiate" my criticism, here is an excerpt from the very first chapter :
"most completely bourgeois nation", "bourgeoisified", "Amerika (...) has no proletariat of its own". Sakai uses Marxist terms, but how they are used are completely meaningless. What "bourgeoisify" means? How come Amerika has no proletariat of its own? The country is still an industrial powerhouse, it's a producer of commodities as well, therefore it has proletarians producing these commodities. Even slaves to that point, which consists of 60% of the prison population which are obliged to work for several corporations of different economic sectors.
I am making a reasonable critique of this work from a Marxist standpoint. If you can only see "strawmen" and "white fragility", I'm sorry, you are possibly projecting a white fragility or white guilt onto others, because I'm not even white by your standards. For all intents and purposes, I am disgusted by white people in United States. I've seen the shit white women (karens) in this awful country do, it's frankly terrifying. But I am a Marxist, I understand that these people were not at all born this way, they are conditioned by their environment, by white supremacist bourgeois ideology, and that treating them and the ideology that affects them as one and the same is the purest sample of race essentialism.
Under the Nazi Germany, the most vile racist chauvinism was promoted as state ideology, and genocidal rapist campaigns of terror were promoted throughout the whole Europe. Yet, Stalin in 1942, in the midst of an war, said:
Nowhere a Marxist would declare a whole people, and even, the majority of the Statesian people as irredeemable to the point they would claim it is useless to work with them. The white people of the US are captured by bourgeois white supremacist ideology, and instead of self-defeating themselves, all revolutionaries should devise strategies and enhance their agitation and propaganda to fight against this ideology, an effort led by the oppressed ethnic groups. Fighting white supremacy does not mean fighting Statesian white people.
Revolutionary class consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the proletariat that not every working class has. If a working class has no consciousness and no revolutionary potential, then it is not a proper proletariat even if it performs wage labor.
Not trying to put word in your mouth. Im trying to communicate how we differ in our analysis of class, especially in the US.
Your criticisms dont answer my question on why it is ubiquitous that such a class must exist among colonizers. IMO it is a fundamental question to understanding class in Amerika.
As I understand, the proletariat is not only a wage-slave but also a producer of commodities. In a footnote on the first volume of Capital, Marx writes:
I cannot confirm that every time Marx refers to the proletariat he means this. But this definition is extremely important. In the whole book of Capital, Marx is analyzing how value is produced, and how it is extracted by the bourgeoisie to turn into profit.
Under this definition of proletariat, the revolutionary potential of this class becomes more clear: they are the producers of everything that is consumed, even by the bourgeoisie, therefore, they are in a better position to bargain, protest and organize a general strike which is the ultimate weapon of the working class.
The US has proletarians, irrespective of the color of the skin. But the bulk of everything that is consumed by US citizens is actually produced by the proletarians in the Global South.