I am only part of the way through reading J. Sakai’s Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat and honestly it is the...
I am only part of the way through reading J. Sakai’s Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat and honestly it is the most complete Marxist analysis of American history I’ve ever seen.
For example: Have you ever thrown your hands up in frustration at the fact that, as the old saw has it, American workers do not see themselves as an exploited class but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires? How is it that a proletariat whose seeds were often composed of the most advanced proletarians in Europe forced to flee their homelands for their radical Marxism has become the least advanced in the world?
Turns out there’s a reason for that. In the early days of the Republic, when its wealth mainly came from looting Indian nations and the labor of Black slaves, it was entirely possible, and indeed probable, for a White worker to save up enough money to sooner or later buy a farmstead of their own to be the independent little lord of–in short, the reason we see ourselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” is that there was a time in American history when that was true and when class, in the Marxist sense, didn’t exist. (If you were White, at any rate.)
Indeed, this frequent drain on the body of White labor conspired to keep (White) wages up even as the plentiful loot of empire conspired to keep commodity prices low–in other words, for perhaps the only time in human history, the market was working exactly as Capitalists have always claimed it does, and all it took was industrial-scale genocide and slavery along with a perpetual state of war to accomplish. And that’s the high White America has been chasing ever since, even as the drug slowly loses its effectiveness over time.
No wonder it’s so fucking difficult to make us see sense on this issue. God damn.
That must be why in the 19th-century US white workers opposed slavery because it depressed their wages as unfair competition. That must be why in the early 20th-century there was a flourishing socialist movement in the United States until the Red Scares crushed it.
If you take Settlers seriously you’re an idiot. “class didn’t exist” what the hell are you smoking
yeah, a lot of this directly conflicts with my understanding of amhist
for a White worker to save up enough money to sooner or later buy a farmstead of their own to be the independent little lord of–in short, the reason we see ourselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” is that there was a time in American history when that was true
being a small independent farmer sucked, and is not comparable in any way to being a millionaire
when class, in the Marxist sense, didn’t exist.
i think there may be a failure to understand what marxist class is here. it’s true that small landowners were not workers, but there is a marxist term for people who both own and work the means of production: petite bourgeoisie. the actual bourgeoisie, on the other hand, are easily spotted: plantation owners owned huge tracts of land and all the work was done by the people they enslaved.
And that’s the high White America has been chasing ever since, even as the drug slowly loses its effectiveness over time.
this is another statement that doesn’t really make any sense if you think about it for a bit - arguably the most recent stretch of high wages for white workers occurred from the end of WWII to about the 70s, when high levels of unionization and increased wealth due to manufacturing lead to better quality of life and stability for workers everywhere (though white people disproportionately benefitted etc etc).
the idea that white america is trying to chase the high of being a small farmer in the 1700s and 1800s doesn’t really feel like it holds much water if you think about it for very long.
One of the advantages to having even an undergrad background in American history is you can distinguish between the flavors by which Sakai isn’t treated seriously and Zinn isn’t treated seriously
First of all, y’all, don’t come at me without reading the book, because even if, for the sake of argument, you do manage to discredit my fast-and-dirty, simplified examples of the concepts in the book based on my own (possibly erroneous) understanding of them and lacking the spoons to go into greater detail, that’s not the same thing as discrediting the actual concept being discussed here. That being said:
Notice how you specify the nineteenth century, when the colonial project began in 1607–in short, you’re talking about a time period that’s nowhere near the formative years of the American identity.
Colonial projects are expensive and the English one in America wasn’t being paid for by the goods produced by White Americans, which were mainly for their own use and sale to other White Americans.
Whether or not a small farmer was comparable to a millionaire–that was a far too literal reading of that comparison, regardless, as what was being examined was the expression that American workers see ourselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires–it meant financial independence and inclusion in the better class of people, from an European perspective.
What I mean by Marxist class not existing is that the barriers to class mobility were basically non-existent. Proletarians came to America and were no longer proletarians. They were, well, temporarily embarrassed bourgeois and petite bourgeois.
The high is a capitalist system that works. I’m very early in the book, but I already see the seeds of a pattern of behavior among the American working class in which we demand not the dissolution of capital but a bigger piece of the pie. I also predict that as the book goes on every such push by working Americans will regain less and less of their lost privileges, due to less imperial loot needing to be shared by a larger population–hence, the allegory of the high getting less effective with every hit.
Because, you know, there’s no other possible reason why a Marxist and Black Nationalist reading of history would be dismissed out of hand by academia, right?
Who the fuck are you?