J. Sakai's Settlers: An Informal Review

I was hanging with my friend Ènziramire and he asked me if I had read either Settlers or “The Breadbook” (The Conquest of Bread)¹, which Maoists and anarchists respectively were proselytizing through the power of forced internet memes circa 2017. I had went the Settlers route myself, but it had been so many years that I felt like I could not be a reliable commentator. After all, it’s been six years of being engrossed in annoying online communist discourse. As much as I had internalized popular critiques of Settlers, I also may have internalized many of its theses without realizing it. It didn’t help that when refreshing myself with a cursory glance at online discourse, most of it seemed like cope rather than actual criticism. How wrong could Sakai could have been, and how much of his work have I taken for granted as simple fact when indeed it is the source of so much controversy?

So, after chitchatting, I re-read Settlers. And it’s really good.

The Big Point

Let me just kinda give the rundown.

1. The Anglo petite bourgeoisie founded the American colonies in order to escape proletarianization in Europe, and bourgeois self-interest has driven the economic development of their ‘Euro-Amerikan’ nation ever since.
2. The Euro-Amerikans committed purposeful and systematic genocide against indigenous peoples in order to appropriate their land, a precious commodity for petit bourgeois settlers seeking a new ‘self-sustained’ living.
3. The Euro-Amerikans imported black slave labor en masse from Afrika, rivaling the Euro-Amerikan population. This became essential for Euro-Amerikans to achieve their desired development since none of them wanted to work for someone else. The Afrikans thus served as their captive proletariat.
4. American history consists of Euro-Amerikan settlers colonizing non-white peoples in various ways—generally, genocide—or of intra-bourgeois struggles where non-white (especially Afrikan) peoples played the role of pawns. This is everything from farmer revolts in the early years, to the Civil War and thereafter (once Amerika truly entered its industrial and imperialist era).
5. ‘Progressive’ white workers have historically excluded or exploited black workers in their labor movements: in the former case, because of their close collaboration (and common interests with) white supremacist groups; in the latter case, because they viewed black workers as competitors in the labor market and sought to control their dissent.
6. The white labor movements were fully integrated into the bourgeois government as part of the New Deal, while also allowing certain people groups (particularly eastern and southern Europeans) to become part of the white settler nation. White Amerika attained levels of enrichment and decadence never before seen, while Afrikans and other non-white groups were economically, politically, and violently repressed.²
7. In modern times (circa 1970s-80s), white Amerikans continue to occupy the highest social strata while non-white Amerikans constitute the working poor, taking menial and low-paying jobs which are basically ‘below’ white Amerikans. Sakai identifies the managerial and professional industries—in which a plurality of white Amerikans are employed—as virtually bourgeois, not just part of the labor aristocracy.
8. White Amerikans are more incentivized towards preserving the white society in which they are privileged than overthrowing capitalism, which necessarily entails the former’s destruction. On the other hand, non-white Amerikans must overthrow the settler society in order to really abolish themselves as a proletariat.

Not too bad, huh? Sorry for spoiling the book! I feel like, anyway, much of the historical analysis if pretty obvious if you give it even a moment’s thought. But Sakai goes further than anecdotal examples and ad hoc rationalizations: he analyzes the economic interests of white Amerikans across history, as well as their economic relationships with non-white Amerikans, to arrive at a explanation of what constitutes the settler society, why it exists, and how it functions. I don’t think Engels or Lenin, whom I associate with the concept of a labor aristocracy, put much effort into historicizing it—but Sakai ‘proves’ its existence, as it were, here in the U.S. where we have the “benefit” of an internalized national struggle (it seems to be the case that such closed ecosystems are easier for us to understand).

Nation and Class: Which Supersedes Which?

Thank you to Ènziramire for sharing this work of art.

This is sort of the big question of twentieth century Marxism, whose terms were basically set by the revolutions in Russia and China. It’s a question for which Sakai assumes the so-called Marxist-Leninist answer, that national struggle supersedes class struggle especially in the era of capitalist imperialism. Sakai then imposes this answer onto his analysis, so that it leads to the necessary conclusion that Afrikan Amerikans and other non-white national groups in Amerika must view their struggle as a national one in order to fully realize their liberation.

It sucks because I don’t want to be the fucking idiot against whom Sakai has been arguing for the entire length of the book, saying like “Ackchually, class supersedes nation, not the other way around!” Let’s get it out of the way that such a perspective, as Sakai has shown, is historically ass-backwards and stupid (at least in this particular context, where white people have demonstrated over and over again that they are more materially interested in their race than in their class). But I do think that one hard position or the other puts too much faith in people’s desire to unify with interests unlike their own. What if neither one supersedes the other, but both situate individuals on one side or another of exploitative social relations—by extension, driving those individuals towards certain desires?

As much as white Amerikans sided with other white Amerikans, so did bourgeois side with other bourgeois. Sakai tends to frame examples of this as hopeful nationals taking, naively, a poltical position betraying their less fortunate kin. Instead, I would be inclined to read them as bourgeois doing bourgeois things, however unaware they are that the white bourgeoisie does not have their interests at heart. The black bourgeoisie was not any more naive than the working whites were; for different reasons, one betraying their race and one betraying their class (sort of, lol), both were incentivized to reform society rather than revolutionize it. Both saw bag in their future and chased it (although, only one really saw it through–the U.S. being more than happy to initiate more whites into their race society, at the expense of colonized people or imperialized nations).

This means that the question is less whether race or class supersedes the other in an objective sense, than whether black and other non-white workers benefit more from (and are incentivized more towards) a proletarian or a national revolution. But isn’t even this a false dichotomy of sorts, when classes fall along racial lines anyway (as Sakai has shown)? Does the racialized proletariat need the white labor aristocracy or the non-white bourgeoisie to accomplish its goals? Like maybe we should avoid calling upon increasingly specific intersections of society, but if we acknowledge that both (petit) bourgeois and white people (as such) have reactionary tendencies when threatened with communism’s specter, why prioritize unity over being upfront with one’s actual aims? The worst case is that they’ll take the side they always have.

Sakai actually explains this nuance in an interview entitled “When Race Burns Class”; his position just seems, maybe, less clear from Settlers as published. I can’t blame him since, for a solid couple of days, I too was high off the New-Afrika-aid. He also discusses the difference between racism (per se) and settlerism (per se); in my review, I am being kinda sloppy in referring to whites/non-whites instead of settlers/non-settlers, but that’s the same difference here in the U.S. (whereas, e.g., settlerism does not fall along racial lines in Ireland—although it kinda did historically since the English often deluded themselves that Irish people were biologically distinct and inferior). A succinct way of putting it, which might also be somewhat sloppy, is that racism is an ideology of settlerism as a social ecosystem.

Where Class Lines Fall

This is a tangential discussion—one in defense of Sakai—about how he determines the class makeup of white society circa 1980, and finds that a majority of them are bourgeois. Among the bourgeoisie he counts managers, salespeople (in this case, salesmen), and professionals. I remember this being a point of contention in the discourse surrounding Settlers since, although such individuals may receive higher wages (a greater share of the social product!) and enjoy higher standards of living than the working poor, they still do not own capital nor employ workers. Sakai addresses this by quoting Lenin:

The class of those who own nothing but do not labor either is incapable of overthrowing the exploiters. Only the proletarian class, which maintains the whole of society, has the power to bring about a successful social revolution. And now we see that, as the result of a far-reaching colonial policy, the European proletariat has partly reached a situation where it is not its work that maintains the whole of society but that of the people of the colonies who are practically enslaved. The British bourgeoisie, for example, derives more profit from the many millions of the population of India and other colonies than from the British workers. In certain countries these circumstances create the material and economic basis for infecting the proletariat of one country or another with colonial chauvinism.

There are a couple other touchpoints I can think of. One is Guy Debord’s description of the post-industrial economy in Society of the Spectacle, where a capitalist country reorients itself around mass consumption rather than mass production; such a country relies upon a sufficiently advanced world economy where commodity production is outsourced to imperialized countries, while the lives of those in the imperialist country are dictated entirely by consumption as dictated by the market (rather than the market being dictated by consumption). Debord says in thesis 42:

The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world. Modern economic production extends its dictatorship extensively and intensively. In the least industrialized places, its reign is already attested by a few star commodities and by the imperialist domination imposed by regions which are ahead in the development of productivity. In the advanced regions, social space is invaded by a continuous superimposition of geological layers of commodities. At this point in the “second industrial revolution,” alienated consumption becomes for the masses a duty supplementary to alienated production. It is all the sold labor of a society which globally becomes the total commodity for which the cycle must be continued…

There’s also David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, in which he discusses the massive societal shift from blue-collar to white-and-pink-collar labor.³ This shift corresponds with the shift from productive to consumptive economy and with improvements in living standards. All these things are not just related, but go hand in hand with each other, as well as with worldwide imperialist capitalism. Graeber summarizes:

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.

As Sakai says, “There’s a message there for those who wish to pick it up.” The U.S., like other first world countries, hosts a class of people who exist to consume the products of an outsourced proletariat—their labor resulting in, basically, nothing of worth except to pay them wages with which to buy things. What sets apart the U.S. from more ‘perfect’ imperialist countries, e.g. the economically and racially homogeneous European countries, is that such an outsourced proletariat lives inside its borders, along racial or national lines. Does the consumer class share material interests with the working class, since both sell their time to get by? Sakai seems suspect of this idea, and I would be too.

Please excuse the Wojak meme; I'm not usually like this.

Here’s my hot take, though, which maybe Sakai isn’t even going for but which I know was a talking point back then: I think salaries are a perfectly reasonable measure of social standing and material interest, at least when it comes to high salaries. Doesn’t it speak to something, anything at all, that C-level executives (as such) could hold zero stake in a firm and still make hundreds of thousands of dollars each year? That professional and managerial workers in big firms make upwards of $80k a year? That non-settlers have been historically excluded from these positions, to struggle on a fraction of that? Sure, on one hand it’s about how their labor is valued which itself is a can of worms, the point where economics becomes (in the vulgar sense) politics. Doesn’t all this, by extension, speak to the interests of the benefactors? To some extent, class analysis is less about finding rigid, categorical divisions in society than determining on which side of a line certain groups of people stand.⁴

Sakai and Maoism

In my under-educated opinion, Settlers doesn't feel very Maoist except in its nationalist rhetoric. At least when reading Mao, I've come to associate his thought with class collaboration (via national democracy), peasant revolution, national populism, and abstract philosophy. I say this not to detract from Mao as a peasant revolutionary who fronted the anti-feudalist and anti-colonialist movement in China, but I feel like not he would call himself a proletarian revolutionary even if he called himself a communist one.

Sakai, on the other hand, is strictly concerned with proletarian revolution against the U.S. national (and international) bourgeoisie—with the extra twist that classes fall along national lines inside one country, rather than being inside one nation or being split between multiple countries. It actually explores what class means in a country with greater social mobility (for some), and determines that social mobility is a privilege of a population with the power to outsource its strife somewhere else (or to someone else).

The big difference might be that Mao's rhetoric of nations was to justify class collaboration within a nation against that nation's oppressor, whereas Sakai reads nation (in the U.S.) as an abstraction or fetish of class. Both say that some nations oppress others, but for different reasons. In my opinion, Sakai seems more in line with Marx and Lenin in that he investigates the nation as a social form that emerges out of underlying social relations, especially capitalist/settler ones. I don't think the same can be said for Mao, but that's something I should investigate further. Speaking out your ass is another form of liberalism!

The Present?

There's also something to be said that the generation being discussed in the back end of the book is the post-war, Reagan-era boomer generation. It's been pretty typical lately to talk about how the boomers, i.e. white ones, enjoyed a better standard of living than their descendants who now deal with higher housing costs, ridiculous education and medical debts, and higher barriers of entry into white-collar industry. So, is there a white proletariat again yet? I don't have the numbers.

A general answer might be: yes, whites may have been proletarianized relative to their ancestors, but they're new to the game compared to the black and immigrant workers who have been dealing with much worse for much longer. Anecdotally, it seems like less well-off whites from well-off families (or kids from bourgeois families in general, thinking about professional and bourgeois immigrants) absolutely have petit bourgeois tendencies because their situation feels temporary rather than certainly stuck—and for many, it is temporary.

My partner and I have talked about this a lot in the context of how many artist types from from rich families and were thrown out of the house for being gay (or w/e), and think that their subsequent economic situation (being struggling artists) is due to them being gay, rather than realizing that their family let them do whatever career-wise (up to a point) because they had the resources to support them. This group of people is such a minority that they do not really factor into things. However, anecdotally, I think that this sort of generational bourgeois aspiration is totally real, and that we can absolutely expect to find similar behavior from white workers unless they're fully committed. Otherwise, just look at what happened after the New Deal.

Conclusion

That’s all I have to say about that. You should read Settlers. It is so easy and quick to read despite its length, and the connections that Sakai makes between past and present, and between race and class, will blow your mind on a historical and theoretical level. It feels like essential reading to understand the political situation of the U.S., something which I think white communists here have only grasped at (and, often, have delusions about).

One more criticism I have is that I wish Sakai elaborated upon some of the figures he uses, like when he breaks down the 1970 U.S. census into bourgeois or proletarian professions for white men. I tried to look at the same information that (it seems) he did for more context, and it is a massive multi-page table that does not give separate counts for white men in particular (you have to subtract black and Latin men from a total number of men for each row). The math would have been helpful! But it gives an impression, which we know to be true, that Settlers was originally written as an internal document for an organization rather than a published work. Keep that in mind if you read it, and think about how that informs the text.

Finally, for so many months I have been complaining off-handedly to the effect of, "Leftists want one thing and it's fucking disgusting: Lebensraum." Now I feel like I know why!

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1. I swear to God there was a Breadbook website like the one for Settlers. Can’t find it anymore. Oh well! ↩︎

2. Sakai points out that the Amerikan communist and socialist parties never faced any of the same violent repression suffered by non-white activists and radicals, mostly because—when questioned about their loyalty to the Amerikan nation, in light of it being threatened by non-whites—they tended to roll over and show their tummies. Such parties, such as the CPUSA, also saw massive decreases in membership after New Deal labor reforms, indicating that their own struggle had been won in the eyes of their members. ↩︎

3. I’ve actually only read the original essay, not the book. ↩︎

4. I’ve seen this referred to as one of the distinctions between early and late Marx, in that he shifts from a focus on class struggle as the underlying mechanism of capital towards capital (and value) as the underlying mechanism of class struggle. ↩︎