Some Critical Remarks on ‘Settlers’ by J. Sakai

Perhaps no book in history is quite as overrated as the infamous Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat. Laden with philistine moralism, crippled by fundamental misunderstandings and logically shaky throughout, the book is little more than a verbose temper-tantrum directed against the ‘white masses’.

Sakai’s central thesis is that, owing to its basis of slavery and genocide, the United States is an entirely bourgeois country, with no proletariat — certainly not one capable of acting in a revolutionary manner. This would be quite the revelation, if true. No doubt millions of workers living hand-to-mouth in America, many of whom are black, would be delighted to learn that they have been promoted from members of the proletariat to members of the bourgeoisie. But alas, no such luck. As we shall soon see, J. Sakai has an entirely different nation in mind for them.

The book is far too long to perform a line-by-line critique here, so we will concentrate on the first chapter, entitled ‘The Heart of Whiteness’. Here, Sakai sets out his basic historical and theoretical presuppositions for all to see — and they are not pretty.

Fundamental misconceptions

In this section, Sakai is keen to stress that what drew Europeans to North America in the first place was a lust for land. This is not a revelation to any Marxist, nor to any student of history. By the time European — and especially English — settlement of North America began, primitive accumulation was well underway back in Europe. Traditional ways of life were being disrupted by the emergence of capital; peasants were being evicted from the lands of their fathers and grandfathers, forced to seek employment in the towns or emigrate so that their fields could be transformed into pastures or hunting-grounds. It is hardly surprising that, with a glut of labour-power pouring into the towns in search of employment, there were many who sought refuge abroad.

America awaited them — vast, sparsely populated in relation to its sheer size, defended by technologically inferior civilisations who were quickly driven west by the first waves of ‘settlers’. Land was plentiful here, and could be acquired much more easily than in Europe. Sakai’s judgement on the historical treatment of these ‘Euro-Amerikan’ settlers is scathing:

‘What made North Amerika so desirable to these people? Land. Euro-Amerikan liberals and radicals have rarely dealt with the Land question; we could say that they don’t have to deal with it, since their people already have all the land.’

It is curious that he believes radicals have ‘rarely dealt with’ the question of land as it pertains to the settlement of America. Indeed, the vast majority of leftist and liberal discourse on the subject consists of white handwringing and expressions of guilt over the theft of Native land. Long before Sakai’s time, Karl Marx had written an entire chapter (Chapter 33) of his magnum opus, Capital, on the effect this abundance of land had on colonisation efforts. References to the conquest of Native American land are utterly rife in academic treatments of the subject.

But more interesting here is that Sakai presupposes a community of interests between ‘Euro-Amerikan liberals and radicals’ and those who own ‘all the land’. Indeed, he views the two groups as belonging to a common ‘people’ who collectively own this land. This is a glaring and fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of a society based on private property. In this society, land is not owned by nations, but by individuals or groups of individuals—almost exclusively capitalists, who make use of the land for profit. Even where the state owns land, it does so as the organisation of one class as against another; state land ownership is not identical with ownership by the entire population. The fact that Sakai views the world in terms of monolithic ‘peoples’ who automatically possess things in common will become even clearer as we progress, and is indicative of his nationalist standpoint.

For example, towards the end of the second section in this chapter, he writes that ‘Afrikans were the landless, propertyless, permanent workers of the U.S. Empire. They were not just slaves —the Afrikan nation as a whole served as a proletariat for the Euro-Amerikan oppressor nation.’

This is obviously absurd. Firstly, ‘Afrika’ is not a nation. The slaves imported to America were drawn from many different areas of the African continent, spoke many different languages, worshipped many different gods, had many different racial/ethnic influences, etc. Afrika is a figment of Sakai’s imagination — ditto ‘Euro-Amerika’. What he is describing is in fact the class of slaves, who were united not by their nation but by their common material conditions and interests. And this leads us to another fundamental error: with ‘not just slaves’, Sakai suggests that the ‘Afrikans’ were simultaneously slaves and proletarians.

This reveals a deep ignorance regarding what the proletariat actually is. As Marx informs us, the proletarian is ‘free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale’. This is evidently not true of slaves, who are not free to dispose of their labour-power as their own commodity. Rather, they are commodities themselves, and are entirely owned by their master. They are mere conditions of production, akin to draught animals or machinery.

Sakai follows this absurdity with an even more ridiculous statement:

‘Amerika imported a proletariat from Afrika, a proletariat permanently chained in an internal colony, laboring for the benefit of all settlers. Afrikan workers might be individually owned, like tools and draft animals, by some settlers and not others, but in their colonial subjugation they were as a whole owned by the entire Euro-Amerikan nation.’

For one, ‘Amerika’ did not import slaves from Africa. The colonial-American bourgeoisie did. Here again Sakai simply presupposes what he is trying to prove, namely a uniformity of interests and action among ‘Amerikans’. For two, the slaves imported were not proletarians, because they were slaves. The two classes are mutually exclusive. For three, the fact that they were ‘individually owned … by some settlers and not others’ obviously precludes their ownership ‘by the entire Euro-Amerikan nation’. Specific individuals owned slaves in their capacity as private property owners, for their own interests, not in their capacity as members of a (fictional) ‘Euro-Amerikan’ nation. If we follow this line of reasoning to its natural conclusion, every American owns JP Morgan, every Briton owns Buckingham Palace, etc. Always Sakai operates from a nationalist point of view – he simply assumes that the world is divided up into different monolithic ‘nations’ which act in uniform ways. The Euro-Amerikan nation oppresses, the Afrikan nation labours, etc. This is pure mystification, the invention of a community of interests between mutually opposed classes. In a word, it is the nationalist illusion, taken at face value by Sakai.

So far we have learned that:

1. Sakai assumes a community of interests among the nebulously defined ‘Euro-Amerikans’, on the one hand, and the equally nebulous ‘Afrikan nation’ on the other, disregarding class entirely. For him, then, the white President of the United States has the same interest as the white factory worker, and the black business owner has the same interest as the black proletarian. This is what he calls ‘historical materialism’: assessing someone’s material position and interests by means of their skin colour. If this is historical materialism, then surely phrenology is the highest materialist science.
2. Sakai misunderstands what a proletarian actually is. He believes one can be both proletarian and slave, free labourer and unfree labourer, at the same time.
3. Sakai misunderstands the nature of class more generally, and often confuses it with nation. For example, he believes that what united black slaves, what gave them the same interest, was the fact that they were ‘Afrikans’ – a nationality that does not exist, and has never existed – rather than the fact that they were slaves.

Now we will see how Sakai misunderstands the nature of capitalism more broadly as well.

‘The life of European settlers,’ he writes, ‘and the class structure of their society — was abnormal because it was dependent upon a foundation of conquest, genocide, and enslavement.’

Here his naivety is on full display. What is abnormal about this? Every country in the world is founded upon ‘conquest, genocide and enslavement’. Conquest and enslavement are and have been common features of human history for millennia, and genocide is no rare occurrence either. As Marx illustrates in Capital Volume I, the primitive accumulation of capital consists in the forcible eviction of people from their ancestral lands, the massacre and rape of those who resisted, etc. He writes:

‘The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.’

And even more explicitly:

‘ In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part.’

But now we are asked to believe that American capitalism is unique in its violent origins. This is so that Sakai can depict America as a special circumstance, one in which all the rules that govern the rest of the capitalist world — for example, the necessary existence of a proletariat — are suspended.

Now he says:

‘The myth of the self-sufficient, white settler family “clearing the wilderness” and supporting themselves through their own initiative and hard labor, is a propaganda fabrication.’

What Sakai takes to be a ‘propaganda fabrication’ is in fact an illusion arising necessarily from capitalist social relations. In this form of society, premised upon private property, people are connected only via their commodities — in order to obtain something of yours, I must give you something of mine. My freedom, my right of disposal, my property, ends precisely where yours begins. Each property-owning individual or family appears to be a monad, perfectly self-sufficient, like an atom, separate from every other. As Marx puts it: ‘This individual liberty and its application form the basis of civil society. It makes every man see in other men not the realization of his own freedom, but the barrier to it’. But of course no individual, no family, is really self-sufficient; the production and exchange of commodities simply mediates and masks our real dependency on others, the fact that our needs cannot be satisfied individually. Self-sufficiency is a delusion, one that necessarily arises from relations of private property, not an ideal to be striven towards — and this applies just as much to modern capitalist nations as to individuals. But Sakai does not grasp this, and insists in paranoid fashion that this misconception is ‘propaganda’ designed only to justify white supremacy. The fact that this same illusion prevails in other countries, with entirely different racial dynamics, is ignored. Instead, Sakai reproaches ‘Amerika’ for its ‘parasitism’, and notes:

‘The point is that White Amerika [as opposed to black Amerika? What then of ‘Afrika’?] has never been self-sufficient, has never completely supported itself.’

Where is the capitalist society that does completely support itself? In place of the modern world, with its rich interconnections between all corners of the globe, and which has placed ‘world-historical’ man in place of the local, narrow one, Sakai celebrates and pines after ‘self-sufficient’ societies. He wants, in a word, the most dramatic regression of the human species. And since he does not grasp that self-sufficiency is an illusion produced by the relations of private property, he adopts it uncritically as an ideal to be striven after. Earlier we described him as a petty-bourgeois socialist — let us now hear what that means.

‘In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.’

• The Communist Manifesto

This describes Sakai perfectly. He wants nothing more than for every nation to become ‘self-sufficient’, for ‘Amerikans’ to stop feeding off of the labour of others. Hence he wants nothing less than the abolition of modern, connected, world-historical society. Instead of condemning the fact that ‘Afrikans’ were compelled to work as slaves, he condemns the fact that they produced for the sake of others. His ideal is the very same ‘propaganda fabrication’ he condemned earlier: the self-sufficient monad, producing only for itself.

Sakai develops his rejection of the rich web of international economic interdependencies which emerges under capitalist production even further:

‘The mythology of the white masses pretends that while the evil planter and the London merchant grew fat on the profits of the slave labor, the “poor white” of the South, the Northern small farmer and white worker were all uninvolved in slavery and benefited not at all from it. The mythology suggests that slavery even lowered the living standard of the white masses by supposedly holding down wages and monopolizing vast tracts of farmland. Thus, it is alleged, slavery was not in the interests of the white masses.’

And now, it is not sufficient for him to assert the dependence of ‘Amerika’ on the labour of slaves, but he must also pretend that the ‘poor white’ of the South, the ‘Northern small farmer and white worker’ were all beneficiaries of slavery. Since Sakai’s whole goal is to slander white workers, to prove that they could not possibly have been proletarians, let us examine whether or not workers ‘benefitted’ from slavery.

It is possible and even likely that profits extracted from southern slavery were reinvested as capital elsewhere, i.e. used to hire white workers. But this, which Sakai interprets as a ‘benefit’, was in fact a great misfortune. Under capitalist relations of production, the worker is a wage-slave — he works for capital or he dies. Labour is nothing but a tool for capital to valorise itself with; by hiring more labourers, capital extends its grip, its domination over the population. To be hired as a wage-labourer means to be exploited in exchange for the barest means of subsistence, to submit to the domination of an alien force, capital. Beneath the formal exchange of equivalents — labour-power for wages — lies concealed a relation of subordination and domination, by which the worker becomes nothing more than a means to an alien end, to be exploited and thrown aside when no longer useful. He cannot stop working, because he depends on his wages for survival; and as long as he works, he is exploited.

Wage-slavery and slavery proper differ insofar as the former is mediated by commodity exchange. The worker sells his labour-power, and receives in exchange money with which he buys his means of survival. But the relation is still one of slavery. He is still forced to work, because if he quits he will perish— just as the slave will be killed if he tries to escape. His formal freedom in choosing his employer only masks his broader enslavement at the hands of the capitalist class. While the chattel slave has one master, the proletarian has several — but both are ruled nonetheless.

So to depict the extension of capital’s rule over the population as a benefit or gain for that population is more than a little dishonest. Wages allow the proletariat to survive, yes — but so do the food, clothing, housing etc. provided by the master to his slaves. Yet Sakai would never dream of alleging that slaves ‘benefit’ from being enslaved, and rightfully so.

So this argument cuts both ways. If profits extracted from slaves were used to ‘benefit’ the white proletariat, then surplus-value extracted from the white proletariat, if used to purchase slaves, thereby ‘benefitted’ the slaves themselves — at least by Sakai’s twisted logic. And even in material terms, the slave economy, despite Sakai’s protestations elsewhere, was not ‘self-sufficient and economically whole’. It depended on external production for a number of things, chiefly manufactured articles produced in Northern factories and foodstuffs from the West. Besides, without the demand for cotton in Britain, the slave economy would have no basis. Thus to describe it as ‘economically whole’, as a self-contained system, is absurd. The whole enterprise was inextricably bound up with the wider American economy, not to mention the global one. Sakai wants to prove the dependence of the world on slavery, but is unwilling to acknowledge the dependence of slavery on the world.

Sakai’s whole obsession with the ‘benefits’ obtained from slavery by white workers is therefore a complete red herring. He misinterprets what is really a relation of domination and exploitation – wage-slavery – as a mutually beneficial partnership, in which both worker and capitalist gain. If this is the case, slavery itself must also be accepted as a beneficial partnership.

Sakai goes on in this vein:

‘‘It is important to see that all classes of Euro-Amerikan settlers were equally involved in building a new bourgeois nation on the back of the Afrikan colonial proletariat.’

If the white working class is supposed to have been ‘equally involved’ in building American bourgeois society, then surely so were the black slaves themselves — both groups were exploited by capitalists, and the profits extracted as a result were used to build ‘a new bourgeois nation’.

The most important thing to note here, though, is that Sakai once again conflates African slaves with proletarians. Marx and Engels once said of the utopian socialists:

‘Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.’

And it is just so with Sakai. Because the African slaves suffered the most, he thinks, they were the real proletariat. Not only does this make a mockery of science generally, but it could hardly be further removed from the ‘historical materialism’ he champions in the Introduction. Once again, Sakai’s fundamental misunderstanding of what makes a class comes back to bite him. And this leads us to the most staggering assertion of all:

‘Amerika not only has a capitalist ruling class, but all classes and strata of Euro-Amerikans are bourgeoisified, with a preoccupation for petty privileges and property ownership the normal guiding star of the white masses.’

If ‘Euro-Amerika’ is separated into distinct ‘classes and strata’, then how can all of them be ‘bourgeoisified’? If this were the case, there would be only one class, the bourgeoisie. It is telling here that Sakai derives the ‘bourgeoisified’ class identity of white Americans from an ideological affliction — a ‘preoccupation for petty privileges and property ownership’. Does a proletarian cease to be a proletarian if he yearns to own property? Certainly he is not class-conscious, but his position within the social structure does not change as a result. He continues to sell his labour-power in exchange for his means of survival. He is still part of the ‘class in itself’, i.e. the collection of people possessing similar conditions of life and, as a result, similar interests. The fact that he is not yet conscious of those interests does not change this. And surely we could say the same about black proletarians — many of them yearn to own property, to rise above their current miserable position. And there are many black bourgeois! But Sakai does not lump them in with the ‘bourgeoisified’ whites or ‘Euro-Amerikans’. His double standard, which has been evident throughout the text, is on full display here.

As the reader will surely agree, this is becoming tiresome — but we will furnish one more example of the way in which Sakai fundamentally misunderstands the capitalist world we all inhabit:

‘Amerika is so decadent that it has no proletariat of its own, but must exist parasitically on the colonial proletariat of oppressed nations and national minorities. Truly, a Babylon “whose life was death”.’

The notion that America has no proletariat of its own is completely insane. Across the United States, there are white people who experience the same conditions of economic life as black proletarians. The white proletarian, like his black counterpart, ‘has nothing but his two hands … consumes today what he earned yesterday … is subject to every possible chance, and has not the slightest guarantee for being able to earn the barest necessities of life… every crisis, every whim of his employer may deprive [him] of bread’. But we are supposed to simply pretend that these people do not exist, or else that they are not really proletarians simply because of the colour of their skin. This is the kind of petty nationalism any racist would be proud of.

Secondly, what Sakai points to here as a characteristic feature of America, i.e. preying on the proletariat of oppressed nations and national minorities, is in fact common to capital in every country in the world. Capital goes where it sees the best opportunity for profit, and this has led to its internationalisation. It seeks to reduce its costs of production to the barest minimum, and doing so often requires exploiting the low price of labour-power in ‘oppressed nations’. All developed capitalist countries are guilty of this, not just ‘Amerika’. And since proletarians from national minorities are generally even more desperate than proletarians of the majority ethnicity, they too can be exploited more effectively. Thus what Sakai identifies as a special characteristic of Amerika is in fact a general characteristic of capital, and the society to which it has given birth. Even his choice of metaphor — ‘a Babylon “whose life was death”’ — reflects this. Capital’s life is death, because it is dead labour, and it lives only by exploiting living labour, incorporating it into itself.

This substitution of nationality for an economic relation is present across the board in Settlers. Wherever Sakai speaks of ‘Amerika’ or ‘Euro-Amerika’ doing something, what he generally means is capital, the bourgeoisie. Where he speaks of the ‘Afrikan’ nation, what he generally means is the class of slaves, etc.

These are the ramblings of someone so mired in nationalist myopia that he can no longer distinguish economic category from racial division.

Conclusion

We could go on and on like this, adducing example after example of how Sakai travesties the historical materialism he claims to apply. Settlers is a work of such staggering mediocrity that it almost defies critique, since the ‘points’ it makes are so confused and self-contradictory as to repel rational treatment. And yet it is the de facto Bible of the online ‘Third Worldist’ tendency, whose followers believe that it thoroughly debunks the existence of a ‘white proletariat’ in America.

In reality, the book contents itself with casting moral aspersions on white workers. Its sole intent is to depict the ‘white mass’ as an unqualified evil, and the ‘Afrikan’ nation as an unqualified good. Unfortunately for Sakai, classes are not defined by their alignment with his personal system of morals. Even if it were true that the white proletariat somehow ‘benefitted’ from slavery, it would still remain a proletariat, forced to sell its labour-power to capital in exchange for a living. This condition, which whites share with blacks, is ultimately what will permit the development of solidarity between races, and the realisation that the great divider in modern society is class rather than race.

Sakai is not interested in any of this. He has no constructive intentions towards the labour movement at all. What he aims to do is morally vindicate the victimised black ‘nation’, and morally condemn the ‘Euro-Amerikan’ one for its original sin of slavery. This is an author who, with the faith of a religious fanatic, never wavers from his nationalist standpoint, never questions whether the identity of interests between ‘Euro-Amerikans’ and ‘Afrikans’ that he has invented is actually present. He glosses over centuries of vicious class struggle between workers and bosses of all colours. He disregards completely the brutal nature of capitalism as a global system, presenting America as a special case deserving of special condemnation. This is the logical end-result of the ‘anti-imperialist’ standpoint, which sees the root of all evil in one country — America — rather than the capitalist mode of production.

For the nationalist, it does not matter which economic position one occupies in society, which class cause one devotes oneself to. All that matters is membership in a fictional community of interests: for Sakai, the ‘Afrikan’ nation. So the white workers should clearly shut up and get on with the job. After all, even if they are being brutally exploited, often by fellow whites, they are members of the ‘Euro-Amerikan’ nation, the dominant nation, and have that to be thankful for. And on the other hand, black capitalists — who wring surplus-value from their workers just as brutally as their white brethren — can sleep easy, knowing that they are part of the Afrikan proletariat, hence on the right side of history.

This is what passes for ‘radicalism’ these days.