The book by J. Sakai, not the type of person, hence the capitalization. There are people who say it’s too divisive.

  • CountryBreakfast
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    2 years ago

    Sakai uses Marxist terms, but how they are used are completely meaningless.

    Engels said the same thing Sakai said, but about England. They were both correct.

    Nowhere a Marxist would declare a whole people, and even, the majority of the Statesian people as irredeemable to the point they would claim it is useless to work with them.

    I dont think Sakai does either. But he doesn’t pretend white people are a product of ideology, but rather class society.

    I’m not even white by your standards

    Superfluous. I stand by what I said that oftentimes criticism of the book amounts to white fragility. Regardless, it was not directed towards you. (Also white fragility isnt limited to people with white skin because whiteness isnt an ethnicity, its a colonial hierarchy and a relation to production in a colonial context. I would say compradores have qualities of whiteness by US standards even when race manifests differently in the global south for example but maybe im just running my mouth too much on this.)

    But I am a Marxist, I understand that these people were not at all born this way, they are conditioned by their environment, by white supremacist bourgeois ideology, and that treating them and the ideology that affects them as one and the same is the purest sample of race essentialism.

    If acknowledging history is now pure race essentialism then I think socialist construction is a doomed project. If I told you socialism is not in the interest of the bourgeoisie you wouldn’t be so resistant. But when someone says socialism isnt in the interest of whiteness/white people who by definition receive colonial spoils, somehow it is not apparent that these statements are basically the same but in a more explicitly colonial context. Its class analysis, not essentialism.

    I think this needs to be said when Settlers is discussed. That people go against their interests frequently. Class traitors are arguably inherent to any revolutionary process. Its just taking the book at face value and with dogmatic notions of class formation to say the book automatically and completely disqualifies white people from a revolutionary process, if not outright obtuse.

    The value of the book is to warn colonized people of the pitfalls of organizing among colonizers. Ive never taken this book to disqualify anyone, but rather is a sober look at the material conditions present and the problems that arise from them when engaging in traditional marxist praxis. It can help us refine rhetoric and praxis to build better organizations and to avoid mistakes that have been made throughout history.