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.
It's not the takeaway that I have. You could source a positive opinion this. Honestly I think you're adding your own preconceptions of the book. Have you read it?
I've read it. The takeaway I'm describing is easily the most common among discussions on Settlers:
Like the idea that white people can't be proles despite their relationship to the means of production seems a bit excessive.
IMO the bulk of white Americans are a lost cause. Not to say white folks can't be revolutionary (I'm white), but I think we probably should be spending our very limited time and resources on folks outside the imperial core break from western imperialism, and focus on the oppressed within the core.
The thesis, as they state it, is that Americans can't organize a leftist front because they are Settlers.
"While there were many exploited and poverty-stricken immigrant [colonizing] individuals, these… Euro-American workers as a whole were a privileged labor stratum. As a labor aristocracy it had, instead of a proletarian consciousness, a petit-bourgeois consciousness that was unable to rise above reformism." (Sakai, Settlers, 24-25)
Note that the last one references the text itself, where Sakai argues that "Euro-American workers [are] unable to rise above reformism." People aren't pulling this interpretation out of thin air.
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.
It's not the takeaway that I have. You could source a positive opinion this. Honestly I think you're adding your own preconceptions of the book. Have you read it?
I've read it. The takeaway I'm describing is easily the most common among discussions on Settlers:
Note that the last one references the text itself, where Sakai argues that "Euro-American workers [are] unable to rise above reformism." People aren't pulling this interpretation out of thin air.