Rather than denying “the semi-autonomous nature of ideology,” a careful reading of Settlers would indicate that this is in fact one of the subjects Sakai is examining. Relying on the materialist assumption that how people live, how they are exploited (or how they exploit), how they resist (or how they submit) are the true “points on which history turns” – and supplementing this with insights into how people are organized into communities and nations beyond the workplace (“the ‘sensuous’ reality of human society”) – Settlers retells the history of White America from the perspective of its victims. It does not purport to be a “cultural history” (don’t we have several bookshelves too many of those already?) or a metaphysical inquiry into “agency” or the “dissonance between belief, location and action” – instead, it provides a class analysis of US history. Settlers is a remarkably easy book to read, a down to earth economic and political history of White America that uses Marxist concepts and “movement lingo” while dodging the twin traps of academic mumbo jumbo and lefty jargon. Sakai’s Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat cover to cover! His review, published in your last issue, raises some interesting questions, but tackles Sakai’s argument in an almost bizarre “apples and oranges” fashion. Sakai by Ernesto Aguilar.I am honestly wondering if Tyler McCreary read J.

This new edition includes a new essay and an interview with author J. Sakai, the United States has been built on the theft of Indigenous lands and of Afrikan labor, on the robbery of the northern third of Mexico, the colonization of Puerto Rico, and the expropriation of the Asian working class, with each of these crimes being accompanied by violence.

Always controversial within the establishment left, Settlers uncovers centuries of collaboration between capitalism and white workers and their organizations, as well as their neocolonial allies, showing how the United States was designed from the ground up as a parasitic and genocidal entity. Written by activists with decades of experience organizing in grassroots anticapitalist struggles against white supremacy, the book established itself as an essential reference point for revolutionary nationalists and dissident currents within the Marxist-Leninist and anarchist movements. A uniquely important book in the canon of the North American revolutionary left and anticolonial movements, Settlers was first published in the 1980s.

Settlers by j sakai