Marx:
Today’s wage-labourer is tomorrow’s independent peasant or artisan, working for himself. He vanishes from the labour market - but not into the workhouse.
Sakai:
A study of roughly 10,000 settlers who left Bristol from 1654-85 shows that less than 15% were proletarian
many English farmers and artisans couldn’t face the prospect of being forced down into the position of wage-labor.
Is it the difference of time periods? I just noticed now that the time period Sakai is talking would be a pretty early period of colonization, wouldn’t it? So it may be that by Marx’s time of writing (late 1860s-early 70s?) it was proletarians headed to America and had been in recent historical memory?
Id say the reason in difference is just perspective, Sakai is writing from the perspective of someone whos family was in a Japanese interminent camp on American soil and lived thru the jim crow era as an ethnic minority, hes going to have a more cynical (and modern) perspective on it.