I’ve read it. The takeaway I’m describing is easily the most common among discussions on Settlers:

Like the idea that white people can’t be proles despite their relationship to the means of production seems a bit excessive.

IMO the bulk of white Americans are a lost cause. Not to say white folks can’t be revolutionary (I’m white), but I think we probably should be spending our very limited time and resources on folks outside the imperial core break from western imperialism, and focus on the oppressed within the core.

The thesis, as they state it, is that Americans can’t organize a leftist front because they are Settlers.

Sakai’s position that has so offended these reviewers, is that:

“While there were many exploited and poverty-stricken immigrant [colonizing] individuals, these… Euro-American workers as a whole were a privileged labor stratum. As a labor aristocracy it had, instead of a proletarian consciousness, a petit-bourgeois consciousness that was unable to rise above reformism.” (Sakai, Settlers, 24-25)

Note that the last one references the text itself, where Sakai argues that “Euro-American workers [are] unable to rise above reformism.” People aren’t pulling this interpretation out of thin air.