Like many radicals who struggle as organizers, i had wondered why our very logical “class unity” theories always seemed to get smashed up around the exit ramp of race? At the time i’d quit my fairly isolated job on the night shift as a mechanic on the railroad, and was running a cut-off lathe in an auto parts plant. The young white guys in our department were pretty good. In fact, rebellious counter-culture dope smoking Nam vets. After months of hanging & talking, one night one of them came up to me and said, that all the guys were driving down to the Kentucky Derby together, to spend the weekend getting drunk and partying. They were inviting me, an Asian, as a way of my joining the crew. Only, he said, “You got to stop talking to those Blacks. You got to choose. White or Black.”

When Race Burns Class: Settlers Revisited (An Interview with J. Sakai), 2000

j. sakai? who's that?
sakai is a revolutionary communist in amerikkka. it is the opinion of the person who compiled this that he is one of the most important revolutionary scientists in the u.s.a. today

everything quoted here can be found in full at kersplebedeb.com please throw them some money

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readsettlers.org

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readmarxeveryday.ml

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for discussion visit rHizzonE.net/forum


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on revolutionary theory

Revolutionary theory in form has too often in essence become its opposite.

One part or aspect of revolutionary theory falling into disuse, is that it's mostly decoration right now. Maybe like an old sword hung on a tavern wall. Real, but not real.

Once it was genuinely revolutionary, startling even, cutting edge in describing a new world coming into being. But now? The little black and white tv screen of revolutionary theory has a mighty dull resolution, and to feel the new everyone turns to mediums like hip-hop, manga, to illegal fiction, or to just checking out the latest street fighting.

The main use of established revolutionary theory now is maybe even conservative: as recycled propaganda, or as an ideological stage prop to claim that someone's triumph is “inevitable” or that someone’s politics must be “correct.”

prologue: “science” and “theory”, The Dangerous Class and Revolutionary Theory, 2018

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Was talking to a comrade about this work, and she broke in: “I don’t see why you're writing about Marx at all? To me he's real 19th century, a stuffy, middle-class white man, and his writings are difficult to read.”

That's obviously a popular opinion, but there’s also something singular about this situation. The real old dude, Karl, is different here because he was present at the instant of creation. He was the co-discoverer back then of not one but two significant class formations in capitalism: both the lumpen/proletariat and the industrial proletariat itself. He wasn’t like an astronomer who discovers a comet; he was more like a scientist who discovers how the solar system is structured. Though he was wrong about some bodies in motion, i’d believe.

We need to scope out his theory about the lumpen/proletariat, not so much to applaud it or diss it, but because all groundbreaking scientific endeavour has an inescapably high “did not work” rate. And we need to understand all the research theories and the methodology, so we can avoid the same dead ends and big potholes on the highway. Just because he was a pioneer, estimating and pushing the test results in one direction rather than the other, and lived way back in the 19th century, doesn't mean that any mistakes from back then aren't still being passed along in the political atmosphere. And need to be cleaned up.

Again, we know that most scientific exploration, most theory, is imperfect and often turns out to be not as hoped for under one condition or another. Whether that's some new cancer therapy or new strategies of teaching kids, or the latest “computer security” software patch, or... you know. This is just reality. So in getting the benefits of any theoretical explorations or discoveries, we need to also know what ideas didn't work as well as what did. And why. Even imperfect theories, even failed theories, are important, because they help fill in blank areas in the map. Guide us away from dead ends and towards the more productive directions. That's pretty useful. Think of this as research, experimental theory, not so black or white, “incorrect” or “correct.”

Chapter 5, forensic analysis of suspect: k. marx, The Dangerous Class and Revolutionary Theory, 2018

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As Butch has pointed out, folks don’t know the difference between a science –the systematic effort to accumulate facts and conduct investigations that test theories or hypotheses about a given field of reality–and the developed results from that science. So today physics is highly creditable in a Strangelovian way, having led to H-bombs and computer chips. But behind this was centuries of simple observations, crude experiments, and many many completely wrong theories. Many of the most famous scientists of their times espoused reasonable sounding but now discredited ideas. So is physics a fraud? Bad engineering and imperial-shoddy management produce bad automobiles and our demented transportation system. Bad science doesn’t mean that science as a basic concept & activity is wrong.

Revolutionary science itself is less than two centuries old, and has had its full share of doctrinaire mistakes and failed attempts, but the development of its scientific methodology always persists and has great value. It’s funny how American radicals desperately want science the more the better when they’re hurting & scared in the ER, how they want engineers with orthodox science training when bridges and buildings are being built, but when it comes to the much more difficult challenge of fighting imperialism then they say, “Science? We don’t see any need for all that heavy learning stuff, we just want to do whatever feels good.”

Exchange on “Thoughts,” 2000

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Our political toolboxes are jumbled with theoretical tools old and new. Some we don't use because they appear nonfunctional, obsolete now if they ever worked. Many of us don't use theoretical tools at all, approaching politics with bare hands, because we have been taught to distrust tools in general. It's basic that a tool has to be grasped the right way. Which is another way of saying that perhaps our cultural "handle" is wrong. The approach we use on radical theory like Marx's on capitalist crisis is wrong. Not so much the theory but how we take it.

Marx is a big case in point, usually exceptionalized either as some improbable thinker far above us or dismissed as a monumental relic, another piece of dour Victorian mental furniture. In the first case he is like a genius too complex to be understood by the rest of us, and in the second case he is someone to be politely ignored lest we set off his worshipers. He is rarely accepted as just another revolutionary against capitalism, with his own contribution. Although one shaped by a different time than ours. To me, it is better to simply take his analysis of capitalist crisis as the insights good and bad of another revolutionary. Like the thoughts our own contemporaries exchange right now, it may be wrong in ways but still give us an unexpected insight into the crowded reality of capitalism.

Notes Toward an Understanding of Capitalist Crisis & Theory, 2009

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on imperialism

European capitalists actually took over title to the entire planet and its planetary population (including–as my comrade Butch always says–not only all humans but every animal and plant down to the last seal and tree and stalk of grain) in the Berlin imperialist conference around 1895 or so. But as rising Asian billionaires can happily testify, Whitey is definitely losing it double-time. In this real new world order, militarily victorious Vietnamese “Communism” is begging for more Nike sweatshops. Post-colonial Ethiopians and Eritreans with their own tanks and artillery aplenty slaughtered way more more of their own people in one year’s little Black-on-Black border shoving match than the u.s. military killed in Iraq and Afghanistan put together. The post-liberation Black “socialist” men’s gerontocracies in South Africa and Zimbabwe are killing more women and children with their deliberate AIDS plague right now than the u.s. empire did in eleven years of invasion in Vietnam. Many more killings than Hitler did Jews. Remember that funny Black cultural nationalist line from the 1980s that Africans are the supposed “Sun people”, genetically predispositioned to be more humane and civilized than those admittedly nasty “Ice people” from Northern Europe? Clowns don’t always make you laugh.

Beyond McAntiwar: notes on finding our footing in the collapsing stageset of the u.s. empire, 2010

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We can use imperialism’s wars itself as our depth gauge of their historic decline. Two generations ago the u.s. empire fought a great world war 2 against other industrial capitalist powers. A brutal, bloody, fighting toe-to-toe war of near-equals in which millions of soldiers crisscrossed oceans and borders, leaving well over 60 million dead bodies as their rotting residue. In one single European battle alone, in one week in a forgotten Luxembourg forest, 33,000 white GIs died in combat (with another 10,000 dying from exposure and disease). And it doesn’t mean a thing now.

Then one generation ago the u.s.empire threw a 500,000 man expeditionary force that was the heart of the u.s. military into a protracted, eleven-year war to stop Communist-led national liberation movements in three Southeast Asian countries. To their white surprise, they lost big time and 58,000 GIs and Marines and sailors and airmen lost their lives as well (though to be sure they each got an engraved line on that spiffy black wall in Washington –’cause in America there’s always a prize in every box of crackerjacks). And it doesn’t mean a thing now.

Today, in contrast, the u.s. bubble empire, with its heavy-technology storm troopers, struts and preens itself in decadent ecstasy whenever they can recapture any small, poverty-stricken Third-World capitalist neo-colony (often done in a fake war, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, with cooperating bribed warlords and generals). Hollywood invasions of Haiti, Afghanistan, Panama, tiny Philippine islands or dysfunctional oil field dictatorships mark the true level of their beat power now. But if a few hundred or a few thousand of its mercenary techno-legion GIs get whacked, then the whole society is weeping and wailing. Privileged amerikkka is too soft to slug it out anymore. We might say that the u.s. empire is less like a great military power in the old sense and more like a superbly-armed private mafia for a gated suburb. Its power is very dangerous on a tactical level–like a SWAT team blowing down your front door will really put some concern on your mind–but strategically it is more and more dysfunctional and immobilized.

Beyond McAntiwar: notes on finding our footing in the collapsing stageset of the u.s. empire, 2010

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Destructive power now exists everywhere, after all, on all levels. That’s why W. had to secretly fly into Baghdad on turkeys day 2003 with his jet’s lights off and maintaining radio silence–for a handjob of a media visit that never got further than the airfield hanger itself–because the mr. mighty of this mighty empire has to zig-zag in fear of any 19 year-old unemployed former Iraqi army private with an old Russian missile. You can catch the wave, but not by standing on the shore.

While the u.s. empire has since its birth sent arrogant military expeditions into other lands & continents, the “natives” have seldom been able to retaliate before. So when those real “Oceans 19” with a budget of only thousands and some boxcutters brought down the World Trade, killing thousands of affluent euro-settler men (80% of those killed were upper-middle class white men), and blew out part of the Pentagon itself, it set off a worldwide shockwave. Fuck Bush, Chaney & Rummy, this was real shock & awe.

It was a smack so devastating that many couldn’t really believe that it was the lowly “sand niggers” (as the GI guards at Guantanamo so charmingly refer the Muslims there) that had stuck a cap up Captain America’s ass. To this day millions of confused people of color are convinced that only the white man is sophisticated enough to have pulled off this fantastic scheme. Confused conspiracy theories “proving” that the c.i.a. or the International Jewish Conspiracy staged it all are mostly just pathetic, showing how a slave-like inner awe of White Power and feelings of inferiority still infects many nationalists of color (and “Socialists” for that matter). But that sure isn’t what Osama and his boys are feeling, because they are the wave.

Beyond McAntiwar: notes on finding our footing in the collapsing stageset of the u.s. empire, 2010

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Imperial storm troopers must descend on neo-colonial nations one after another. This isn’t a sign of success but of growing failure, of system breakdown. Their own barely launched neo-colonial states, many hardly older than your local used car lot (like, i’m older personally than the nation of Pakistan or the Republic of Iraq–or the Israeli Fourth Reich, for that matter), are crumbling. Often these nations have lost much of their artificial inner cohesion. As the hundreds of millions of dispossessed without real jobs or agricultural land keep rising, as capitalist exploitation screws tighter and tighter on the very poorest, as capitalism itself forcibly breaks up all the old ways of life while State parasitism is protected with death squads and torture chambers, social upheaval can no longer be contained within limits or borders. To be able to control any square mile of territory you want anywhere in the world–by crushing weight of military hardware–but to control less and less outside of that, is not victory.

Beyond McAntiwar: notes on finding our footing in the collapsing stageset of the u.s. empire, 2010

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Oil in international capitalist discourse right now is like their metaphor standing for all key globalized commodities (just as nuclear weapons were once their illusory symbol for military supremacy). While petroleum is important economically, it is no more so than soybeans or rare industrial metals or migratory labor or narcotics or many other major commodities which capitalist civilization can’t do without and which the ruling class therefore needs to control. Oil is certainly much less important a commodity than women. White liberal/leftists and Black cultural nationalists together (and they have so much in common politically) have been shouting their tired cliches about how the world conflict was over oil, but, as Butch Lee said recently, “What is starting to emerge is a world war 4 over who shall own women. If you haven’t understood that, your daughters will.”

Beyond McAntiwar: notes on finding our footing in the collapsing stageset of the u.s. empire, 2010

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The neo-colonial societies are not, of themselves, stable or viable. To maintain them imperialism subjects the world to a never-ending series of search-and-destroy missions. There is both the "white death" by starvation and disease and the literally millions of Third World casualties from endless war.

Chapter 11, This Great Humanity has Cried 'Enough', Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

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Thus, there is nothing "benign" about imperialistic parasitism. The so-called world market is not a neutral trading ground, but a system of rigged transactions and economic crimes at gunpoint. There is a direct, one-to-one relationship between world hunger, mass unemployment and proletarian "conditions approaching slavery" (to use the words of the Wall Street Journal) on the one hand, and a fortified Babylon filled with consumer decadence and arms factories on the other hand. For generations the increasingly proletarian masses of Afrika, Asia and Latin Amerika have labored - and yet live in misery.

No society would freely enter into such self-destructive relationships. A world of colonies and neo-colonies create the only conditions for the imperialist "free market." In addition to its own armies, imperialism maintains in every nation that it dominates puppet military and police forces, amounting world-wide to millions of armed men, in order to extend capitalistic repression into the smallest and remotest village. The Third World War is already going on.

Chapter 11, This Great Humanity has Cried 'Enough', Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

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on class and parasitism

Mao might question this were he kicking around today, but i would say that capitalism has an absolute tendency to skew and geometrically increase the human population whenever it takes control. And keep increasing it beyond any reasonable level. It’s significant that colonialism always repressed native women’s birth control. Although people don’t want to see it, it’s strategic that the metropolis has developed a huge “Roman” surplus population, who neither labor nor fight.

Many, many tens of millions who have no or little productive function but who must be subsidized. Funny, that white radicals look for “class” contradictions in the metropolis but can’t see that the biggest class contradiction of all within the system are the layers of useless citizenry like themselves that must be subsidized. We remember the Roman proletarii who didn’t labor or fight, but were entitled to “bread and circuses” at th empire’s expense. (This is not the same thing as the other millions who are doing productive work although not in the M-L economic definition necessarily of the term “productive” re surplus value, but in the sense of doing socially necessary contributions to human life–and are heavily subsidized by part of the super-profits from imperialism).

Exchange on “Thoughts,” 2000

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These classes in the metropolis most bitterly up in arms against “McDomination” and the WTO are not the oppressed, not the proletariat. Who are quite capable of organizing themselves without any white help whatsoever. 250,000 Mexicans, Chicanos, and Central American immigrants marched in Los Angeles against Prop. 187 on October 16, 1994. A year later a million New Afrikan men gathered on the Washington Mall. And after that some 400,000 Black women came to Philadelphia from all over the u.s. for the Million Women March. But not in Seattle – it wasn’t their protest. Because those mass Latino and Black mobilizations were fighting the same old nationalism that is at the heart of the anti-WTO sentiment in the u.s.

It is the old middle classes of the imperialist center that are in motion here politically. Commercial family farmers; small retailers; the labor aristocracy of highly-paid craftsmen and unionized industrial workers; that stratum of intellectuals (more than a few of them liberal or “socialist”) tied tit-to-mouth to the old welfare state. Plus the marginalized white lumpen-petit bourgeoisie, bitter at their social exile from paradise.

These are middle classes whose privileged but also precarious existence is bound up with successful national imperialism, and who look for security from their old national economy and the insular national culture of the “good old days”. In a word, who deep down consider themselves rightfully part of the capitalist winners, not the oppressed “losers”. (Don’t forget that Tim McVeigh tried to be a career Army officer, while his comrade-in-arms Terry Nichols was a failed farm owner).
Instinctively, the liberal managers of anti-corporate protest have understood this. Which is why the WTO protest managers have catered to nationalism and accepted neo-fascists as their allies.

Just as the New Right has understood how much this WTO issue is on their ground, based in classes that are sympathetic to their world outlook.
This is not some matter of some intellectual “line”, some slogans, as the Left dreamily thinks of as politics – but of what you kill for. And the Far Right is killing people. First a few, then more & more often, until they establish their unwritten Aryan law of what is to be “normal”. Assassinating pro-Choice doctors or torching buildings full of immigrant laborers.

Aryan Politics & Fighting the W.T.O., 1999

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The short era of "Pax Americana" after World War II was one of completing profound changes for Euro-Amerikan society. Those expansionist years of 1945-1965, when U.S. military and economic power lorded over the entire non-socialist world, saw the final promotion of the white proletariat. This was an en masse promotion so profound that it eliminated not only consciousness, but the class itself.

Just as in the 19th Century, the Euro-Amerikan bourgeoisie both watered-down class contradictions and reinforced its settler garrison over the continental Empire by absorbing immigrant European nationalities fully into the U.S. oppressor nation. This 20th Century cycle had begun in the anti-communist "Americanization" campaign of the World War I period; it reached its decisive point in the accommodation between the imperialist State and the dependent, settleristic CIO unions of the 1930s. The process was sealed by the post-World War II imperialist feast, finally laying to rest the class contradictions of the period of industrial unionism. While the deproletarianization of the white masses was a historic pacification, it led to an increase in decadence and parasitism that has today reached a nodal point.

Chapter 12, The Global Plantation, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

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Essential production and socially useful work occupy a gradually diminishing place in the domestic activity of U.S. corporations, in the work of its settler citizens, in the imperial culture. Decadence is taking over in an even deeper way, in which non-essential and parasitic things become the most profitable, while worthless activities are thought the most important. Always present within imperialism, this decadence now becomes dominant within the oppressor nation.

We can see this in the dramatic increase of the non-productive layers in economic life. While this phenomenon is centered in the rule of finance capital, its manifestation appears in all imperialist institutions. Advertising, marketing, package design, finance, "corporate planning," etc. mushroom with each corporation. Management on all levels grows as numbers of production workers shrink. When one includes the large army of white-collar clerical workers needed to maintain management and carry out its work, the proportions become visibly lop-sided. At Weyerhaeuser, the large timberland and natural resources corporation, top executives and professionals alone (not including supervisors, foremen and clerical workers) account for one out of every six employees. At the Southern Pacific Railroad, one out of every ten employees is in management.

Chapter 12, The Global Plantation, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

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on sakai's 1983 book, settlers: the mythology of the white proletariat

Settlers completely came about by accident, not design. And what was so “new” about it was that it wasn’t “inspiring” propaganda, but took up the experience of colonial workers to question how class really worked. It wasn’t about race, but about class. Although people still have a hard time getting used to that–it isn’t race or sex that’s the taboo subject in this culture, but class.

When Race Burns Class: Settlers Revisited (An Interview with J. Sakai), 2000

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First chance i got, i asked the UN representative of an Afrikan liberation movement if he thought u.s. whites as a society, including workers, were settler oppressors in the same way as Rhodesians, Boers, or Zionists in Israel? He just said, “Of course.” Upset, i demanded to know why he didn’t tell North Americans this. He only smiled ironically at me, and i won’t even bother telling you what certain Indian comrades said. So Settlers didn’t involve any great genius on my part, just finally listening to the oppressed and what the actual historical experience said about class. Finally.

When Race Burns Class: Settlers Revisited (An Interview with J. Sakai), 2000

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on settlerism

Yes, often young anarchists or socialists here do use the words {racism and settlerism} in an uncertain way, as though they mean the same. Settlerism, as we know, is a very specific type of capitalist colonialism. It is the most complete colonialism. A conquest society, where a loyal national population was brought in to both economically populate and be the permanent garrison for capitalism over the conquered territory.

Settlerism has within it the broader phenomena of racism, but is importantly different. The culture is capitalist but twisted further. Sometimes you can see the cultural mark of being a garrison population, like the American white “gun mania.” The ruling class has always supported a heavily armed white citizenry to keep colonized people under the boot. This is their neurotically guilty culture of would-be conquerors and genocidists. Settlerism means that we are always fighting “Americanism” itself, not just some extreme nationalistic form.

Entscheidend ist die Besatzungsmentalität: What’s crucial is the mentality of conquest and occupation, 2017

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Think of settlerism as having its own shape but being co-terminus with fascism, its kith and kin. To sum it up, believe that fascism is much more widespread among settler Americans than anyone admits. The unspoken key to Trump’s victory was certainly fascism, although no one wants to say it. Instead, we get all this liberal capitalist coverup about how resentful white workers and others in their backward “loser” post-industrial communities are to blame.

What the real deal is: Between 1963 and 1968, as violent and massive Black ghetto “riots” spread, the u.s. ruling class made two critical decisions. That Civil Rights would be made national law as an “airbag” to cushion the crash of repressing Black revolution, and that the real costs of any “integration” would be shifted completely onto the euro-settler working class.

People who weren’t around then can’t realize how bitter and explosive this was. Before, euro-settler workers may have gotten their hands dirty, but they had all the good paying jobs, it was that simple. Suddenly it was the same but different. About that time was graduating from the u.s. government mechanics school, trying to find a job. The state employment office sent me to the mechanics department at the big railway freight yards. In the office, the supervisor leaned back in his chair and said unhappily: “We heard that the government was going to pass this law, so we figured it was better you than a nigger!” That was still in the old days, when we always knew what white men were thinking, because they felt free to say out loud whatever crossed their minds. Of course, the white mechanics had gathered nearby in the garage to see the “new hire”, and together serenaded me with the then popular toothpaste commercial: “You’ll wonder where the YELLOW went/When you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.” (Starting the daily harassment on the job.)

The point was, the white working class never had any “democratic” vote or say over this social tax on their communities. For two generations the u.s. ruling class solidified government, political parties, media and elections into an iron wall, enforcing this unpopular strategic concession. For the euro-settler working class communities shifting from being very privileged to less privileged. There never was any plebiscite or national popular vote on civil rights—which wouldn’t have passed. When the rare candidate to major office appeared who dead-on opposed civil rights, the establishment united to shoot him down. Famously, when Ku Klux Klan and neo-nazi leader David Duke ran for governor of the state of Louisiana in 1991, both parties united behind the Democratic candidate to block Duke, who still won 55% of the white vote. That was a signal flare of shipwreck sent up by settler communities, including but no means limited to their working class.

Entscheidend ist die Besatzungsmentalität: What’s crucial is the mentality of conquest and occupation, 2017

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on amerikkka

The key to understanding Amerika is to see that it was a chain of European settler colonies that expanded into a settler empire. To go back and understand the lives and consciousness of the early English settlers is to see the embryo of today's Amerikan Empire. This is the larger picture that allows us to finally relate the class conflicts of settler Euro-Amerikans to the world struggle.

Chapter 1, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

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The imperialists even concede that their standard "U.S. history" is a white history, and is supposedly incomplete unless the long-suppressed Third-World histories are added to it. Why?

The key to the puzzle is that Theirstory (imperialist Euro-Amerikan mis-history) is not incomplete; it isn't true at all. Theirstory also includes the standard class analysis of Amerika that is put forward into our hands by the Euro-Amerikan Left. Theirstory keeps saying, over and over: "You folks, just think about your own history; don't bother analyzing white society, just accept what we tell you about it."

Introduction to Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

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So when we hear that the settlers "pushed out the Indians" or "forced the Indians to leave their traditional hunting grounds", we know that these are just codephrases to refer politely to the most barbaric genocide imaginable. It could well be the greatest crime in all of human history. Only here the Adolph Eichmanns and Heinrich Himmlers had names like Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Jackson.

The point is that genocide was not an accident, not an "excess", not the unintended side-effect of virile European growth. Genocide was the necessary and deliberate act of the capitalists and their settler shocktroops. The "Final Solution" to the "Indian Problem" was so widely expected by whites that it was openly spoken of as a commonplace thing. At the turn of the century a newspaper as "respectable" as the New York Times could editorially threaten that those peoples who opposed the new world capitalist order would "be extinguished like the North American Indian." Only a relative handful of Indians survived the time of the great extermination campaigns. You see, the land wasn't "empty" after all — and for Amerika to exist the settlers had to deliberately make the land "empty".

Chapter 1, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

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The life of European settlers — and the class structure of their society — was abnormal because it was dependent upon a foundation of conquest, genocide, and enslavement. 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. It is the absolute characteristic of settler society to be parasitic, dependent upon the superexploitation of oppressed peoples for its style of life. Never has Euro-Amerikan society completely supported itself. This is the decisive factor in the consciousness of all classes and strata of white society from 1600 to now.

Chapter 1, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

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on euro-amerikan life

Most importantly, Euro-Amerikans share an exceptional way of life. What is so exceptional about it is that almost all get to live in a bourgeois way, "quite Philistine in the mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook..." Thus, the mass of the lower middle classes, the huge labor aristocracy, and most workers are fused together by a common national way of life and a common national ideology as oppressors. The masses share a way of life that apes the bourgeoisie, dominated by a decadent preoccupation with private consumption. Consuming things and owning things, no matter how shoddy or trivial, is the mass religion. The real world of desperate toil, the world of the proletarians who own nothing but their labor power, is looked down upon with contempt and fear by the Euro-Amerikans.

Chapter 13, Klass, Kulture and Kommunity, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat

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No matter where we look, the mass, extra-proletarian privileges of Euro-Amerikans have structurally insulated them within their exceptional way of life. "Problems" like high mortgage rates for homes are problems of a particular way of life. The full extent of what the Euro-Amerikan masses get from their special relationship serving imperialism cannot be measured in dollars alone. Everyone in the Empire understands the saying: "If you're white, you're alright." To the settler garrison goes the first pick of whatever is available - homes, jobs, schools, food, health care; government services, and so on. Whatever security is available under imperialism is theirs as well. This is taken for granted.

Chapter 13, Klass, Kulture and Kommunity, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat

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In Amerika this bribery, this bourgeoisification, took place within the context of a settler society, which has its own history, culture and traditions - based not on class struggle, but on their material role as the privileged garrison over the continental Empire. The immigrant European proletarians were bribed by being absorbed - "integrated" if you will - into this specific society.

Chapter 13, Klass, Kulture and Kommunity, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat

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The Euro-Amerikan community is not just a conglomeration of stores and residences. It is a physical structure for settler life, in which the common culture of the Empire garrison still lives on. These garrison communities are enforcers of the oppressor nation way of life among its citizens, demanding social conformity and ideological regimentation. They have certain specific characteristics: the most glaring of which is that colonial subjects are generally barred out. Why should the settler garrison let the "Indians" live inside the walls of the fort? There is an arrogance but at the same time an underlying feeling of being threatened or besieged by "those people" - which occasionally breaks out in collective hysteria (during which guns are flourished and the laggards rush to buy out the local gunshops). The confining, boring and philistine way of life of these communities is one reason Euro-Amerikan youth "dropped out" of them in such numbers during the 1960s.

Chapter 13, Klass, Kulture and Kommunity, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat

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We can see in such garrison communities, urban "ethnic" enclave as well as suburb, how the shared exceptional way of life materially and ideologically fuses together the masses. There, on the same block and street, the families of electricians and small retailers, truck drivers and schoolteachers, policemen and grill owners, bookkeepers and telephone repairmen, white-collar supervisors and factory workers, computer programmers and legal secretaries grow up together, go to the same schools together, and intermarry. Nominal class distinctions on the common level pale beside their supra-class unification as a settler mass, most characterized by the labor aristocracy.

Chapter 13, Klass, Kulture and Kommunity, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat

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Here also is the home of the State labor force. Policemen and firemen are quite common, and in some communities almost everyone is related to, friends or neighbors with police. Literally thousands of "all-white" voluntary organizations criss-cross settler communities. Tens of millions of settlers are organized into special reactionary groupings of the most diverse kinds. Some, such as the KKK or the Moral Majority, are overt. Far more respectable and wide-reaching are reactionary organizations such as the AFL craft unions, "ethnic" organizations like the Sons of Italy, the "all-white" Roman Catholic parishes, the "Right-To-Life" groupings, the Mormon Church, the NRA, the Betar and other Zionist-fascist groups, sports leagues, thousands of neighborhood "Improvement Associations," ranchers associations, military reserve units, and on and on. The list of special "all-white" organizations with reactionary politics is endless.

Chapter 13, Klass, Kulture and Kommunity, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat

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The most significant fact about the real consciousness of the Euro-Amerikan masses is how anti- communal and private it is. Settlers recognize no common bond with the rest of humanity. That is why everything they build is perverted: why settler trade-unions are anti-proletarian, and settler "Women's Liberation" is happy to exploit the women of other nations. It means nothing to Euro-Amerikans that the winter fruit they eat was really paid for by the lives of Mexican or Chilean or Filipino children. For them the flavor is so sweet. Euro-Amerikans don't even really care too much about each other. Lower taxes are more important than food for their own elderly. This is a diseased culture, with a mass political consciousness that is centered around parasitism.

Chapter 13, Klass, Kulture and Kommunity, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat

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On the white worker and the euro-amerikkkan “left”

The post-World War II collapse of the Communist Party U.S.A., the main organization of the Euro-Amerikan "left," was an important indicator of disappearing working class consciousness in the oppressor nation. It is not true that the Euro-Amerikan "left" was destroyed by the McCarthyite repression of the 1950s. What was true was that the anti-Communist repression effortlessly shattered the decaying, hollow shell of the '30s "old left"—hollow because the white workers who once gave it at least a limited vitality had left. The class struggle within the oppressor nation had once again effectively ended. Mass settler unity in service of the U.S. Empire was heightened.

Chapter 10, 1950s Repression & the Decline of the Communist Party U.S.A., Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

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McCarthyism reflected a power struggle within the imperialist ranks between liberal and conservative forces, as well as being part of the general move of the Empire to tighten up and prepare for world domination. In no sense was this 1950s repressive campaign directed at crushing some non-existent revolutionary upsurge within settler society. At the same time—on fronts of battle outside of Euro-Amerikan society—U.S. imperialism was conducting the most bloody counter-insurgency campaigns against the colonial peoples. This had little to do with the CPUSA and the rest of the oppressor nation "left."

Chapter 10, 1950s Repression & the Decline of the Communist Party U.S.A., Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

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Parasitism is still the principle characteristic of the Euro-Amerikan society. Only now the crude parasitism of the early settler conquest society has grown into and merged with its blood the greater parasitism of the world imperialism. The imperialist oppressor nations of North Amerika, Western Europe and Japan have in the post World War II years reached a mass standard of living unparalleled in human history. These nations of the imperialist metropolis are choked in an orgy of extravagance, of fetishistic "consumerism," of industrial production without limit. Even now, in the lengthening shadows of imperialism's twilight, in the confusion of the U.S. Empire's decline, the settler masses still can hardly believe that their revels are drawing to an end.

It must be emphasized that Euro-Amerikan society is not self-supporting. The imperialist mythology is that factories simply multiply themselves, that trains beget airlines and mines beget computers. In other words, that the enormous material wealth of the imperialist metropolis is supposedly self-generated, and supposedly comes to birth clean of blood.

The unprecedented rise in the wealth of the oppressor nations is directly and solely based on the increased immiseration of the oppressed nations on a global scale. The looting and killing of early colonialism continue in a more sophisticated and rationalized system of neocolonialism. But continue they do. It was Karl Marx, a century and a half ago, who first defined the accumulation of world capital as rising out of an accumulation of world proletarianization, oppression and misery.

Chapter 11, This Great Humanity has Cried 'Enough', Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

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We need to talk about how people unthinkingly objectify the working classes. It never occurs to anyone to believe that the metropolitan middle classes are going to overthrow the system that privileges them. No one says, “The white doctors and professors and managers are the revolutionary class.” Yet, without any big fuss or posturing, middle-class radicals just organize in those classes when and where they can, all around themselves. Students just form issue groups in even the most elite universities. Teachers try to open minds to social justice, while even some doctors volunteer to serve in refugee camps or argue with the majority of their criminal profession about being healers not rip-offs or stock market addicts. For better or worse, success or defeat. No big political deal, it’s just living the life, the meal that’s set before us.

But when it comes to the working classes, whoa, then it’s all this ideological ca-ca. To believe what we’re told, no one should want to organize or educate workers unless they can be sure that the entire class is “bound for glory” as the main force for revolution! (which you won’t see here in this lifetime, trust me). So the white workers as a whole are either the revolutionary answer–which they aren’t unless your cause is snowmobiles and lawn tractors–or they’re like ignorant scum you wouldn’t waste your time on. Small wonder rebellious poor whites almost always seek out the Right rather than the left.

There’s an underlying assumption that revolutionary movements worldwide share, that’s always there for us, that we are part of the working classes. That we live our lives in these communities, hold those jobs, try to live productive lives not just do capitalist bullshit, struggle within these class situations. We’re talking in a wide arc here, maybe, but to a point: to how we need to build movements that have the learned skill of the recognition of reality. That understand revolutionary politics as more than abstract ideology, in more than an academic or reform movement way.

If radicalism can build small counter-currents of liberation in the overwhelmingly corrupt middle classes, why should similar work be questioned in the white working class communities? What i am fighting is the slick “Marxist” or “anarchist” opportunism, which sees aligning with the white settler majority and reform politics as the absolute necessity.

When Race Burns Class: Settlers Revisited (An Interview with J. Sakai), 2000

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If you could skip ahead in time only a few years to the start of the 1960s, There would be many more people, but the old white trade unionists would be gone. The white side of the left was mostly young, university students or drop-outs. The many workers and poor street people in the struggle would be Black, and had their own movement. Almost everyone in the young left mixed in the civil rights movement or the student anti-war movement—or often both. It was easy for the u.s. white left to become dominantly middle-class, and the full future implications of that were never faced. This New Left would constantly attract a small stream of white working class kids, but almost as migrants from across a national border.

Once the u.s. left became allies and activists with the Black freedom movement in the 1960s-1970s, white areas even working class ones became enemy territory for us—those were places where you worried about physical attacks and violent mobs. Remember that America was always divided into oppressor territories and oppressed colonial territories—called the rez, barrios, and ghettos—and the white settler population were constantly engaged in daily social policing. Informally, a low-level war by whites of beatings and terrorism and killings happened every day to keep the angry colonies inside their social prisons.

But there was a real division in the white working class communities in the 1960s-70s. The white labor aristocracy, like hard-hat construction workers and over the road truckers, were used as patriotic shock troops by the government, politically and in attacking anti-war protests. On the other hand, we worked with many white working class youth who were being drafted to fight in Vietnam, and were anti-government and sharing a rebel youth culture. Many white working class GIs became antiwar in Vietnam, and some joined us in the resistance.

After Washington’s Vietnam pull-out in 1973, though, this contact with white working class rebels sharply dropped off. Recall, for a while was working in a major parts factory in the far South Side. A crew of young white guys there, who were mostly ’Nam vets and dope smokers, invited me to join their clique and come party at the Indianapolis 500 auto race with them. They even supported me for being night-shift union shop steward. The only thing they warned me about—is that i had to stop hanging with the young Black workers or else they wouldn’t even say hello. The euro-settler/Black divide was and is everything here, really.

Entscheidend ist die Besatzungsmentalität: What’s crucial is the mentality of conquest and occupation, 2017

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The metropolitan elite, university-educated, residing in major urban areas, dominates the computer industry and global corporate sectors like finance and media. While backing Hillary and LGBT human rights for public politics and all that, in their own worlds they live in apartheid racial/gender discipline. In the futuristic Silicon Valley, computer firms like Twitter and Pinterest are each coincidentally 92% white and Asian for tech employees. Google is right there, too, with tech employees being 94% white and Asian. Same at other computer corporations. It isn’t hard to guess that there are ethnic quotas or near-blanket exclusions secretly agreed upon between these outspokenly liberal corporate leaders. It’s ironic that conservative white factory workers and small industrial employers in the Midwest may be for Trump, but have much more integrated workplaces. Incidentally, the liberal icon New York Times, where Paul Krugman’s columns appear, has 6 White House reporters, but none of them are Black. It has 21 sports reporters, but none of them are Black (although basketball and American football, for instance, are heavily Black). Their lifestyles section has no Black writers, although Black people do have real lives. So who is more racist and backward?

Entscheidend ist die Besatzungsmentalität: What’s crucial is the mentality of conquest and occupation, 2017

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the women's movement and euro-amerikan settlerism

Even the Women's Movement became a real factor in preserving their exceptional way of life. While the Women's Movement both expressed anger at sexism and greatly improved Euro-Amerikan women's lives, it was largely co-opted as a political movement by imperialism at its birth. The imperialist-sponsored "liberation" of settler women has been a major prop to reinforce and modernize the patriarchal family structure; for that matter, to transfuse the whole settler society. Just as the Empire called out white women from the kitchen during World War II, to be "Rose the Riveter" in war industry, so in the 1970s white women were again freed by imperialism to enter the labor force in new areas and in unprecedented numbers.

First, at a time when the Empire had decided that Afrikans were again too rebellious to be employed in any great numbers in key industrial, commercial and professional institutions, Euro-Amerikan women were recruited to stand by their men in filling up the jobs. "Equal Opportunity" in medical schools, law schools, business, etc. meant a large influx of Euro-Amerikan women - and few Afrikans. This is noticeable even in the blue-collar skilled trades, which have long been male sectors of employment. During 1970-1980 the percentage of women in these restricted crafts rose at a rate 3 times that for Third World workers. This was like a new wave of European immigration to reinforce the settler hold on their job market.

And it was a "breath of fresh air," modernizing settler society. Now, for instance even the New York Times has a very literary "women's consciousness" column (called "Hers"), where feminist leaders and writers can reach a mass audience. The fractures of the sixties are being reconciled and reunited among settlers. Novelist Gail Sheehy wrote in this column: "Behind just about every successful woman I know with a public as well as a private life there is another woman. The dirty little secret is, all but one of the female leaders interviewed here has household help..." Sheehy herself tried Filipino and Argentinian domestics unsuccessfully (too "hostile") before going back to the tried and true Afrikan woman domestic.

While Women's Liberation is an essential part of the world revolutionary future, the struggles of women in various societies have their own national characteristics. In the U.S. oppressor nation the politics of Women's Liberation form but one small current within the much larger, overall Women's Movement. This larger Movement is pro-imperialist, and is concerned only with equality of privilege among male and female settlers. It is opposed to any liberation in general. The revolutionary ideas of Women's Liberation rested lightly upon the surface of the Women's Movement, and some individual women did pick them up.

Chapter 13, Klass, Kulture and Kommunity, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat

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on fascism

Fascism is rapidly becoming a large political problem for anti-authoritarians, but perhaps moving up so close to pass us that it’s in our blind spot. Fascism is too familiar to us, in one sense. We’ve heard so much about the Nazis, the Holocaust and World War II, it seems like we must already know about fascism. And Nazi-era fascism is like all around us still, ever-present because Western capitalism has never given fascism up. As many have noticed, eurofascism even crushed has had a pervasive presence not only in politics, armies and intelligence agencies, but in the arts, pop culture, in fashion and films, on sexuality. For years thousands of youth in America and Europe have been fighting out the question of fascism in bars and the music scene, as a persistent fascist element in the skinhead subculture has been squashed and driven out by anti-racist youth—but come back and spread like an oil slick in the subterranean watertable. It feels so familiar to us now even though we haven’t actually understood it.

The Shock of Recognition, 2002

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existing radical theory on fascism is a dusty relic that’s anything but radical. And it’s euro-centric as hell. Some still say fascism is just extreme white racism. For years many have even argued that no one who wasn’t white could even be a fascist. That it was a unique idea that only could lodge in the brains of one race! Others repeat the disastrous 1920s European belief that fascism was just “a tool of the ruling class”, violent thugs in comic opera uniforms doing repression for their capitalist masters. Often, both views overlap, being held simultaneously. So we “know” fascism but really we don’t know it yet. Once reclothed, not spouting old fascist European political philosophy (but the same program and the class politics in other cultural forms–such as cooked-up religious ideology), fascism walks right by us and we don’t recognize it at first.

The Shock of Recognition, 2002

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Conservative political parties, such as the Catholic German Center Party of the Weimar era or the Republican Party in today’s u.s.a., are pro-bourgeois supporters of the existing capitalist order. Fascism is pro-capitalist but anti-bourgeois, and this is a critical difference. The Nazis called for violently purging Aryan society of everything they considered “bourgeois” (and Hitler explicitly used that word as identifying an enemy order). Bourgiois ment a culture preoccupied with the dirty quest for money; rule by decadent aristocrats and bankers; the swarms of “useless” intellectuals; the blurring of the primary biologically different missions of men & women; and, of course, the “unnatural” mixing of different races and peoples on sacred Aryan land. Keep in mind that fascism didn’t promote capitalists as social icons or role models, but called for society to be ruled by a hierarchical caste of male warriors.

The Green Nazi: an investigation into fascist ecology, 2002

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Fascism has shown that it can gather mass support. In many nations the far right, including fascism, has become a popular oppositional force to the new globalized imperialism. In many countries the far right has replaced the left as the main political opposition . It doesn’t get more critical than this. This stands the old leftist notion about fascism on its head. It isn’t just about some other country. Without a serious revolutionary analysis of fascism we can’t understand, locate or combat it right here. And if you don’t think that’s a serious problem, you’ve got your back turned to what’s incoming.

The Shock of Recognition, 2002

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our present left theories and responses to fascism are actually the same theories and strategies that the European left used with such spectacular lack of success against fascism in the 1920s-30s.

The Shock of Recognition, 2002

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on obama

You got to hand it to patriarchal capitalism. Just when we thought that the Bushites were on the run, and maybe ku klux klan civilization's day is over, they come up with some stunning new maneuver. Like this man of theirs, Barak Obama. A biologically white woman versus a biologically African-American man wrestling live on television for the... white man's big toilet seat of power? This is a mutant, science-fiction moment. So what is it with the Obama Show, anyhow?

PRIMARY LOATHING: Is It Real Or Is It Memorex?, 2008

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Some activists are saying that Obama "sold out", which makes as little sense as saying that Bill Clinton "sold out". Some guys are exercising their right of humor by calling him "50percent". And when Jesse blurted out earlier that Obora thinks he's white, we all understood Jesse's wave. But that wasn't really accurate, either. Obama truly, genuinely is African-and-American biologically if anybody on earth is. And since, as Jesse said a while back, the Black community is a community of inclusion not exclusion, Obama may not be typically Black but he has membership. What Barak Obama is not part of is the historic Black Nation, that was forged in the furnace of centuries of slavery and rebellion, with shared working class communal values, that over centuries developed its own culture of resistance fighting towards liberation.

That's why white people--in surveys, the richer you are, the higher your class, the more you love Barak O.--want him as a public signpost to the future. President Clinton's old main political advisor, Dick Morris, wrote with evil hope that after Obama's triumphal debut, "race is no longer a factor in American politics." Obora projects no grievances against the white power, no angers, no edge, no loyalty to his people, no feeling of any debt owed by the past sufferings of the oppressed, no wild and subversive creativity, nothing that made the color Black so feared by patriarchal capitalism. He's "clean", as one u.s. senator infamously blurted out. He's part of 21st century capitalism's new useful hybrids, who are synthetic people.

So to the corporate and government and political establishment, there are only upsides to pushing Obama the synthetic person. He's an "all-purpose cleanser."

PRIMARY LOATHING: Is It Real Or Is It Memorex?, 2008

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But for the capitalist establishment, most of all there must be New Orleans, standing like a bombed city on the plain, wrapped in towering clouds of shock and destruction, spilling refugees in all directions, visible as a wound from across the world. A year ago, New Orleans was the biggest story about the Black Nation. A story of ethnic cleansing by the u.s. empire, with no right of return by its internal refugees. Like lost Palestine. Today, after the establishment's Operation Obama has seized the headlines and the world's imagination in scripted living color, the u.s. looks so fresh and exciting. It's really diverting. And who can remember about New Orleans, anyhow?

PRIMARY LOATHING: Is It Real Or Is It Memorex?, 2008

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on trump

Donald Trump was today’s more respectable version of {David} Duke. Marketing smarts told him that running on a platform of settler nationalism, of restoring the white nation to power and having a state publically dedicated to only their racial interests, would be the path to his elevation. The key to that would be his “dog whistle”, silently giving the piercing signal to euro-settlers that his was a united front of all whites in their common racial interests. He wouldn’t sell them out. What better way to silently do that than by conspicuously including the neo-nazis and klan haters in his campaign. Promoting the Confederate flag at his campaign rallies. Every Trump sexist vulgarity, every hate message and bullying threat, was only further proof to his enraptured followers that he wasn’t “politically correct” against them. That he would restore the white nation because at long last through him they could vote “civil rights” and the whole establishment agenda down.

Entscheidend ist die Besatzungsmentalität: What’s crucial is the mentality of conquest and occupation, 2017

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“Beginner’s mind” is a zen phrase. It reminds us that when we first took this path as beginners, we approached it almost with awe. Self-conscious of knowing so little—knowing nothing, really—we were open for seeing anything. Aware mostly of how unimportant our own little knowledge was. But as we became much more experienced, even became “expert,” it was different. We could separate useful from scrap, what we judge is good from bad, so automatically we hardly needed to pause over it. Our journey became a polished routine. And now we sometimes ask ourselves, is it still a journey?

Beginner’s Kata: uncensored stray thoughts on revolutionary organization, 2018

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"Settlers caused quite a stir in the anti-imperialist white left and among nationalists of the Third World nations within the confines of the U.S. empire as well as anarchists and Muslims of this hemisphere. In short, among all of us who are ready and willing to smash or dismantle the empire, for whatever reasons, and whatever reasoning. This is in spite of the fact that it is a Marxist work, because it isn't out of the stale, sterile, static, mechanical mode of the vulgar sap-rap that has carried that label."

Kuwasi Balagoon

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further reading


Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain

False Nationalism, False Internationalism

Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat

check out anything by Sakai, Butch Lee, Bromma, Dave Gilbert, MIM(prisons), Robert Biel, Mao

for more technical economics stuff on imperialism try Zak Cope and Torkil Lauesen


2018

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noticed that the version up at trashtree is 20k characters shorter than the printed pamphlet, so i've transcribed the entirety of the 2007 printing of J Sakai's The Green Nazi https://t.co/CXEeRmoFaz

— Den sjungande polisen (@skanskintifada) May 14, 2018