Roaming the streets with a knapsack of settlers paperbacks and firing them from a tshirt canon into the white unwashed masses
I read the first few pages then I had to go eat dinner and I forgot to finish the rest
i read the first few pages, was completely unable to take it seriously with all the 'amerikkka' stuff etc, went and read wretched of the earth instead
i stand by my decision
Wretched of the Earth by Fanon & The Darker Nations by Prashad are both good.
I've heard it said that Sakai isn't even a real person because there's no pictures of him and his books were distributed by liberal think tanks to black prisoners but that sounds like some tinfoil shit.
I do somewhat agree with the logic though, that the primary contradiction is colonizer vs. colonized, imperial nations vs. occupied nations, and that the proletariat in the imperial core has been thoroughly indoctrinated with bourgeois propaganda and roped into bourgeois financial assets (someone on here once told me that 40% of workers in the USA have a 401K which is technically an indirect form of owning means of production in the form of stocks). I think it gets somewhat overstated. Like the idea that white people can't be proles despite their relationship to the means of production seems a bit excessive. Like exactly the type of narrative I would promote if I wanted to divide the proletariat in the imperial core on racial lines, and breed a lot of bitterness and bigotry between people.
40% of workers in the USA have a 401K which is technically an indirect form of owning means of production in the form of stocks
That may be true but they don't own 40% of stocks, they own an incredibly small percentage of the total market cap. Capitalists are more than happy to let the workers own like 1% of the company so they have zero control but the capitalists get to act like they're doing workers some big favor
That may be true but they don’t own 40% of stocks, they own an incredibly small percentage of the total market cap.
But they don't see it as market share. They see it as a benchmark until retirement.
When the market tanks and their 401ks fall, they see that as years off their life. When it rises to the point that retirement is feasible, they become that much more untethered from their working peers, as their interests align with the bourgeoisie.
The volume of accrued wealth is less important than the association with the property owning class
the primary contradiction is colonizer vs. colonized, imperial nations vs. occupied nations
where does that leave Europe though which has nations that have imperial hold but locally don't have any people that were displaced America and Israel are settler nations but France isn't
or nations like China which are liberated
America and Israel are settler nations but France isn’t
Morroco, Algeria, Tunisia, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic, Mauritania, Mali, Senegal, Guinea, Cote D'ivoire, Burkina Faso, Benin, Madagascar, Gabon, Cameroon and others would disagree.
yes they were colonised and France did brutal things there but the French don't live their now while Americans displaced the natives and now live where they used to. Which is a limitation of the term settlers as the French by and large didn't settle the lands they took beyond soldiers and administrators most of whom considered their true homes to be in France and returned there once they were done leaving another Frenchman behind to live where they used to
i misread this thread originally, you are bringing needed clarity to the distinction of settler colonization v colonialism as a form of imperialism, thank you comrade :heart-sickle:
yes they were colonised and France did brutal things there but
:brow: but?
but they did slightly different brutal things than the Americans and for different reasons and the description of what the Americans did therefore doesn't apply.
I get what you mean, but I don't think the difference is slight. Like, Algeria is fucked up by the French. Billions in wealth stolen, millions killed, culture destroyed, even today French is still a main language.
But that's no where near the degree to what happened in NA. Indigenous language barely exist, indigenous "sovereignty" is completely controlled thru the colonizers, and (obviously) most of the people in NA aren't indigenous whereas most folks in Algeria are Algerian
More importantly, it creates a different relationship to imperialism today (hence neocolonial versus settler colonial)
the settler nature of france's colonialism was for the large part resolved with independence in the post war period. just because economic exploitation continued through neo-colonial mechanisms doesn't mean that the french remained settlers.
I think it gets somewhat overstated.
Piggybacking on what star_wraith said, the purpose of a 401k is financial security, and it doesn’t give people who have them any meaningful control over companies or the economy. Putting people with 401ks in the same category as the wealthy capitalists who own and control large businesses is completely absurd imo.
It does however, further weld the self interest of the worker to the growth of the market, in real terms and symbolically.
I think it depends on what the alternative would be. How many people would prefer a guaranteed retirement instead of having it depend on the whims of the stock market? Quite a few, I’d imagine.
It's less about the end alternative than the effect the actions required to move toward that promised alternative have on what you already have.
Yo I’m reading the wretched of the earth now and I’m having trouble understanding something. Fanon refers to colonizers repeatedly as “manichaean”, and I don’t understand why. The only meaning I know for that word is in reference to a now extinct central Asian religion. Are you able to help me understand better what Fanon means when he uses this term?
i cant remember specifically with fanon, but people generally use manichean to describe very black-and-white thinking about good and evil (which i guess was one of the big parts of that religion)
Oh wow thank you! Now I have to go back and read the first few chapters again with that knowledge. It comes up a lot.
edwardligma is exactly right. "Manichean" as Fanon describes it refers to the colonizers tendency to portray their exploitation in humanitarian term - they are bringing the light of "civilization" to the savages (the people being colonized).
Franky, it's a point that comes up a lot in Settlers that really makes a lot of American leftists rage, but it's fact. A lot of historical "change" movements in the US have been dominated by crazy Puritans/"Progressives" who treat colonized and oppressed people as abused children who need to be saved via morality. Not a coincidence that the early-20th century Progressive movement was rabidly opposed to Socialists - who were largely continental Euros or non-white people as opposed to good founding stock Americans.
Manichean generally refers to a great struggle between fundamentally opposed forces - Good and Evil, light and dark, pepsi and coke.
I hope a single k in amerika won't stop you from reading Assata Shakur
nah that i can live with, but when youve got stuff like this on literally page 2
The key to the puzzle is that Theirstory (imperialist Euro-Amerikan mis-history) is not incomplete; it isn't true at all. Theirstory also includes the standard class analysis of Amerika that is put forward into our hands by the Euro-Amerikan Left.
it really starts to feel like a ranting polemic from some student-group newspaper rather than a serious scholarly work, which is fine if you just want to be entertained by some ranting but then when he starts throwing out statistics etc its very hard not to question whether the sources were chosen because theyre the most accurate or because they align best with the story, and frankly the whole thing felt very very flimsy to me
like yeah maybe theres some unexamined ideological baggage of scholarly authority coming from a very white and classist approach to using the right words to show youre in the club, but it is literally physically impossible to read that paragraph without rolling your eyes
who gets to decide what “serious” and “scholarly” work is?
me. i do.
maybe its all impeccably and even-handedly sourced, i dunno. but when someones on a rant but also wanting me to trust a bunch of historical statistics theyre throwing out im gonna be suspicious of their sourcing and whether theyve made a serious attempt to engage with all the relevant historical evidence to build the most accurate picture or whether theyve picked the most extreme numbers they could find that best suited their case and maybe massaged the context to give a more extreme implication from them to boot. so im gonna go spend my theory-reading time reading something else instead cos theres unlimited theory to read and i have limited time and im not gonna spend it reading stuff that gives me untrustworthy vibes
yep exactly, it triggered my bullshit detector and he absolutely didnt convince me that he had done the research to properly lay the groundwork for his assertions at the start, so i decided it was a more productive use of my time to read something else instead, i dont think thats an unreasonable thing to do at all. and that something else at the time happened to be fanon, which did not trigger my bullshit detector (despite also not being written in a conventional western academic style)
is my detector faulty? maybe, but theres a million bits of theory to read so im gonna read the ones that seem like theyve done their homework instead. i havent read all the theory and neither has anyone else, we all have to make judgements on which theory is worth our time. im making no judgements on the concepts in it cos i didnt even get that far, im saying "he did a shit job of convincing me it was worth reading further instead of reading something else"
Eh. It's a different voice for a different audience from a different time. Roll with it.
Good decision. Sakai's ideas are anti-revolutionary at worst and anti social at best. He played a part in helping prevent any serious attempt at the formation of a working class party in the imperial core since the 80s
I very specifically said
"He played a part in helping"
Marxists have always had to deal with imperialism, settler colonialism, racism, and all the other problems that capitalism creates and intensifies. Lenin of all people was certainly not blind to these problems and nonetheless managed to organize workers of all ethnicities, many of whom had suffered pogroms, oppression, and extermination in a massive imperial state. Debs' party was able to do the same, as did communists all over the world within a generation or two after Marx. What mass party did people build after reading and understanding "lessons" from Sakai's "Marxism"? Is Sakai's lesson that organizing in the imperial core is hard? That's not news to any Marxist from the first international onwards.
Most people who read Sakai will tell you that they left thinking that organizing a multi-racial movement for socialism is an impossible task and that revolution is impossible in the first world. Quotes in Sakai's book are intentionally distorted (ex. quotes from William Foster) to make leaders of the early Socialist Party of America seem racist. Again, a completely defeatist CIA position and its insane that organizers in the US buy this stuff. All orthodox Marxists understood that capitalism is much, much harder on some racial groups than others, that some suffer disproportionately, that leaving anyone out of the working class movement (intentionally or not) meant that the same people would be used to strikebreak, or as shock troops in the counter-revolution. All orthodox Marxists understood that some workers receive some benefits that others are denied. None of this is new. All orthodox Marxists understood that not organizing workers in the African or Arab or Indian colonies meant the same workers could be organized by Capital and sent around their own countries or Europe to put down revolutions. Marx understood this as far back as 1848. What is Sakai telling people that is new other than that the largest group of workers in the imperial core (so-called "whites") are uniquely treacherous because they've been bought off. If they're treacherous because they're part of the labor aristocracy then pack your bags and throw in the towel and don't bother organizing because that isn't changing anytime soon even if China continues growing. The labor aristocracy is a group you can heavily recruit from for a working class movement, its not a group you can ever just write off as hopelessly counter-revolutionary. America is the global hegemon, without a revolution in America, America will continue to export counter revolution all over the world.
"Lenin didn’t denounce these First World proletarians who were massacring each other by the millions as hopelessly counter-revolutionary, because they’d been manipulated by their “own” national bourgeoisie to commit atrocities against each other, which the so-called revolutionary leadership of the second Communist International supported. Instead he – recognizing that it was a leadership problem – founded the Third Communist International (Comintern) to create, coordinate and organize revolutionary ML Parties in the imperialist countries to root their masses in Marxism and “turn the World War into Civil Wars”, where the proletarians would instead of killing each other for the bourgeoisie turn their guns on their “own” national bourgeoisie and engage in civil wars to overthrow them." -Rashid Johnson from the Intercommunal Black Panther Party writing on why Sakai is anti-Marxist
No he didnt lmao. If you are listing the factors that played a part fucking Settlers and Sakai isnt even in the first 100 you should be thinking of
I am literally not white but I guess the next charge would be that I'm a race traitor or internalized white supremacy or some thing like that.
All of this stuff is revisionism of the worst kind from first world "Marxists" in the heart of empire who want to offload responsibility for carrying out revolution onto starving people in the developing world instead of doing something at home.
I left my copy with my family with my strongest recommendations, so I know it'll never be touched. good thing the pdf is online ( readsettlers.org )
