Not that it’s… bad per se.

But I feel that it’s already (I’m almost halfway through the book) covering ground that’s talked about in more depth in other books that have come out since 1983. Which I guess isn’t the book’s fault and it’s a nice overview of US history from a different viewpoint, but its analysis is kinda… Eh, bad, I guess? Marxist thought in general does not recognize slaves as “proletarians” and I don’t think many black Americans even recognize themselves as “New Afrikans,” which I think is a Maoist term.

I also don’t like how it misquotes and attacks people like Herbert Aptheker (who was attacked by the FBI during his day) and communist historian Philip S. Foner. Just seems that the author has an axe to grind, which would make sense if he was indeed a Maoist before Gonzalo turned Maoism in to something more than just a pro-China stance during the Cold War. After all, William Z. Foster, Herbert Aptheker, and Philip S. Foner were pretty staunchly pro-Moscow (originally, being a Maoist usually meant that you had a pro-Beijing stance during the Cold War after the Sino-Soviet split).

Anyways, I know that @muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml loves Settlers and, if I have it right, it influenced him during his more formative years as a comrade. And I get that. So I don’t mean to come off as attacking the book, which is fine as an overview of the atrocities committed by the United States. How many people talk about the genocide against the Asian immigrants along the West Coast of the continental United States? But I do think that it lacks in terms of analysis.

I’m currently halfway through the book, of course, so I’ll continue reading. I like that it gives a who’s who and what’s what of people and events of colonial and United States history. I would recommend it to get a breakdown of the events leading up to the modern-day, but as the saying goes: don’t believe everything you read. Or rather, sometimes, it’s good to read something a bit critically.

Some books I would recommend if you like Settlers (or even didn’t like it):

White Supremacy Confronted: U.S. Imperialism and Anti-Communism vs. the Liberation of Southern Africa from Rhodes to Mandela by Gerald Horne (Author)

Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation by Nicholas Guyatt

Black Worker in the Deep South by Hosea Hudson (Author)

Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis by John Smith (Author)

Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) by Glen Sean Coulthard (Author)

  • Augustus
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    4 years ago

    Settlers was written in the 70s when this labour aristocracy was probably true and scientifically correct

    It was written in a quite bleak period of history

    Todays US though has hungry people lining up at foodbanks, hook worm (a disease of extreme poverty and had thought to be eradicated from usa) is flourishing in places like Alabama

    If you went to these White working class neighbourhoods in the 70s you would have seen an industrial proletariat mostly bought off by the crumbs of imperialism

    That isnt true anymore. They have no jobs and are high on opiods

    • Muad'DibberMA
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      4 years ago

      That’s debatable… even with increasing poverty, the US still is by definition, mostly a labor aristocracy, which has a very specific and concise definition:

      The labour aristocracy is that section of the international working class whose privileged position in the lucrative job markets opened up by imperialism guarantees its receipt of wages approaching or exceeding the per capita value created by the working class as a whole.

      And while its true that wages have gone down in the US (certainly not to the level of the average world working class tho), cost savings from imperialism are more than enough to offset the loss in wages.

      A good section from John Smith - Imperialism in the 21st century:


      Neoliberal globalization has transformed the production of all commodities, including labor-power, as more and more of the manufactured consumer goods that reproduce labor-power in imperialist countries are produced by super-exploited workers in low-wage nations. The globalization of production processes impacts workers in imperialist nations in two fundamental ways. Outsourcing enables capitalists to replace higher-paid domestic labor with low-wage Southern labor, exposing workers in imperialist nations to direct competition with similarly skilled but much lower paid workers in Southern nations, while falling prices of clothing, food, and other articles of mass consumption protects consumption levels from falling wages and magnifies the effect of wage increases. The IMF’s World Economic Outlook 2007 attempted to weigh these two effects, concluding: "Although the labor share [of GDP] went down, globalization of labor as manifested in cheaper imports in advanced economies has increased the ‘size of the pie’ to be shared among all citizens, resulting in a net gain in total workers’ compensation in real terms.

      In other words, cost savings resulting from outsourcing are shared with workers in imperialist countries. This is both an economic imperative and a conscious strategy of the employing class and their political representatives that is crucial to maintaining domestic class peace. Wage repression at home, rather than abroad, would reduce demand and unleash latent recessionary forces. Competition in markets for workers’ consumer goods forces some of the cost reductions resulting from greater use of low-wage labor to be passed on to them.

      In his study of Walmart, Nelson Lichtenstein reports: “Wal-Mart argues that the company’s downward squeeze on prices raises the standard of living of the entire U.S. population, saving consumers upwards of $100bn each year, perhaps as much as $600 a year at the checkout counter for the average family… ‘These savings are a lifeline for millions of middle- and lower-income families who live from payday to payday,’ argues Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott. ‘In effect, it gives them a raise every time they shop with us.’” Lichtenstein, 2005, Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism (New York: New Press).

      Perhaps the most in-depth research into this effect was conducted by two Chicago professors, Christian Broda and John Romalis, who established a “concordance” between two giant databases, one tracking the quantities and price movements between 1994 and 2005 of hundreds of thousands of different goods consumed by 55,000 U.S. households, the other of imports classified into 16,800 different product categories. Their central conclusion: “While the expansion of trade with low wage countries triggers a fall in relative wages for the unskilled in the United States, it also leads to a fall in the price of goods that are heavily consumed by the poor. We show that this beneficial price effect can potentially more than offset the standard negative relative wage effect.” They calculate that China by itself accounted for four-fifths of the total inflation-lowering effect of cheap imports, its share of total U.S. imports having risen during the decade from 6 to 17 percent, and that “the rise of Chinese trade … alone can offset around a third of the rise in official inequality we have seen over this period.”

      • Augustus
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        4 years ago

        Great reply com, can you source the labour aristocracy definition tho?

    • T34 [they/them]
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      4 years ago

      You’re right that the labor aristocracy arose through historical processes and will eventually disappear through them. The disappearance has probably already begun. It looks like the US labor aristocracy is slowly proletarianizing.

      But I disagree about how far along this is. I don’t see real proletarian demands or outlooks from the white working class, such as open borders, opposition to US police and the military, seriousness about global warming, solidarity across race and gender, etc. They’re still acting like a labor aristocracy.

    • Makan ☭ CPUSAOP
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      4 years ago

      The view of the Comintern and Lenin was that the US had a proletariat by the turn of the century though.

      • Augustus
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        4 years ago

        Capitalists were still shooting strikers in the US just before ww1

        They very much were a proletariat but i believe they became a labour aristocracy that began to side with the bosses and imperialism after ww2