I think it is fair to say that it has not been properly conceptualized or theorized. However, solidarity with the global south and well articulated anti imperial politics will be vital.

I think of how unionization is having an upturn in the US. For example, Starbucks now has a union. Generally, this is a good thing for Starbucks workers. However, as revolutionaries we have to think globally and ask ourselves what does it all mean for solidarity with coffee farmers. Is there a way to include more workers in our movements? Is there a way to link labor movements with anti-imperialist political movements? There would almost certainly be legal barriers, but still we must answer this.

There also needs to be a reckoning for metropolitan workers, laboring settlers, and white people. We must understand our social relations and we must face up to the fact that we have not always been helpful in building and maintaining solidarity and this is largely because we have played a key role in empire building. Perhaps then we can correct our course.

I also think there is a tendency for anti imperialism to only organize around the low hanging fruit. It is good that we support Palestine in official capacity, or in the streets, or online. However, we never ask how we can support anti imperialism at the bargaining table, with our labor, or by withholding our labor. Further, we are even less willing to take risks for banana farmers, than we are for Palestinians resisting genocide, but both are important.

We have to be willing to potentially ignore our own needs and take risks that show real solidarity. If we stand against land grabs, unequal exchange, dependency, and imperial aggression, we have to recognize that we are likely disqualifing ourselves from healthcare reforms in the near future. Maybe it won’t necessarily actually mean such dire risks in reality, but we must be prepared for them. Instead, I’m afraid much of the left has gone that way because they believe it should be a simple matter of correcting wealth distribution. If we can problematize our reliance on imperial spoils (which the relevant thesis effectively does) we may be able to shift our collective consciousness toward something better, for our own sake and for others. Reliance on slavery is no real form of dignified sovereignty if you ask me. Maybe others can agree.

Finally, since there is rarely a willingness to take a risk or go further than leftist profile building, I feel that we are exploiting the Palestinian cause to build and solidify coalitions at home which will only help ourselves at the end of the day. I think this is a faux anti-imperialism, a fake solidarity, that must be addressed as well.

I have on more than one occasion seen westerns outright say that they don’t want to fight against imperialism because they benefit from it. I think that’s how a lot of westerners justify supporting imperialism. This kind of narrative ironically cements the power of imperialism.

This is evidence that the thesis is correct. Revolutionary movements are unlikely because of the relationship with imperialism, whether conscious or not. If admitting this works against us, then there is no project to build. We MUST admit this if we are to eventually succeed where others have failed. If the problem with the thesis is that it makes things harder to articulate with our routine rhetoric, then the problem is denial.

It’s a pipeline of consumerism and wealthy debatebros that is deeply intertwined with tech-media corps and relies on donations from impressionable people. It’s all branding and discourse at the marketplace of ideas.

The main problem that I see is that a lot of people on the left are rejecting effective methods for building a movement that have been proven in the past as being authoritarian.

Occupy Wall Street comes to mind. It’s like a natural demobilizing ideaolgy that grows in reaction to neoliberalism. People get focused on grassroots and bottom up approaches, which makes sense and is necessary. But then they get taken over by astroturfing because their leadership is basically unofficial and nothing more than a friend group that got their first. I’m looking at you David Graeber (RIP). And now the whole “99% vs 1%” rhetoric is all but entirely used by the right wing.

This is going to be the last winter.

Where did this “revolutionary” come from?

Revolutionary class consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the proletariat that not every working class has. If a working class has no consciousness and no revolutionary potential, then it is not a proper proletariat even if it performs wage labor.

Not trying to put word in your mouth. Im trying to communicate how we differ in our analysis of class, especially in the US.

Your criticisms dont answer my question on why it is ubiquitous that such a class must exist among colonizers. IMO it is a fundamental question to understanding class in Amerika.

Sakai does define the nation by emphasizing that the Afrikan nation, and others, have their own internal workerings for sustaining themselves. Enslaved people had their own internal economy as did the Indigenous nations. This is seperate from the greater settler empire although it is exploited not unlike how peasant economies provide food for metropolitan centers in the periphery.

Taking that into consideration, what is the common territory and economic life of this “Afrikan nation” that is distinguished from the “Euro-Amerikan nation” so that the “Afrikan nation” can achieve its liberation? The more you question it, the less sense it makes.

I like this question because of its difficulty, but the difficulty is moving forward with the national question instead of accepting that there is a Black nation. If you kidnapped millions of people with completely different languages and lifeways, and then tried to systematically eradicate their languages and cultural bonds to ensure servitude, would you have added to your nation? Or would you just have slaves? I dont think it actually works to use the national question to justify settler colonial nationhood here when the entire “national” situation was currated out of violence instead of a sovereign melding of national bonds. Rather the sovereign formation of nationhood within the Black nation as well as many Tribal confederations was forged through surviving colonialism, not through integration and assimilation.

If we consider the Marxist understanding of the nation, we can easily notice how the “Afrikan” and “Euro-Amerikan” nations have in common a language, territory, economic life and culture, perhaps with a few particularities on the culture one. But both constitute a single nation according to Marxist theory of the nation, especially because of the shared economic life.

II feel like what you are saying is that because someone’s language was stolen or murdered, that said group of people must now admit they are part of the colonizer nation. Also, “shared economic life” is another white washing of the reality, because slaves and Indigenous people were not even seen as humans for a chunk of history, were legally barred from entire portions of the economy, and have only ever been included among the settler nation for completely cyinical, racist political reasons. I dont think you are properly applying Stalin’s ideas of nation.

It’s very clear throughout the whole book how Sakai treats white workers as inherently racist, as if the racist elements weren’t conditioned by racist ideology.

Racism and bigotry are not merely ideological. They are expressions of class society and shared economic interests. White people are by definition inherently racist. This is only a problem if you moralize racism as a personal failing and assume it is merely and only conditioning instead of a material expression of colonial hierarchies and economic interests within class society. Sure conditioning exists too, but it is preceded by colonial, capitalist social relations. White people do not cease to be racist upon realizing that racism is mean or upon breaking conditioning, they cease to be racist when the racist system is dismantled and those social relations are impossible.

Then in the last paragraph, Sakai advocates that considering all of that, white people cannot constitute a proletarian class. This is outright anti-Marxism, because be it a black person or a white-supremacist racist piece of shit, it doesn’t change the relations of production.

Its not anti marxism and the relations kf production are different. Allow me to explain by pointing to China for a moment. I will use ideas from Roland Boer’s book Socialism With Chinese Characteristics: A Guid For Westerners, especially chapter 4.

Western marxists oftentimes get China wrong because they assume a universal mode of class formation; very basically, that the bourgeoisie developed in the cracks between fiefdoms, won many revolutions against aristocracy, and of course a proletariat, a class that has revolutionary potential due to the internal condradictions of capitalism developed alongside.

But the Chinese revolution took place before a bourgeoisie class ever established a dictatorship and did not develop in a way like Europe. In fact, the “bourgeoisie” in China was developed under the guidance of the CPC, owing much of its place in the world to proletarian revolution and proceeding politics. This is why China has no proper class of bourgeoisie, despite a casual observer raising alarm over an increasing number of wealthy entrepreneurs and despite such developments being reminiscent of class formation in western Europe. The bourgeoisie in China lacks the class consciousness of a traditional bourgeoisie, which makes it qualitatively different thatn that of the western, colonial bourgeoisie.

In Amerika perhaps we can say the same thing about the settler proletariat as we can about the Chinese bourgeoisie. It lacks a traditional class consciousness, which oight to be an inherently revolutionary class consciousness. This is because of its social relations to production, wealth, land ect etc. It is a colonial relation, an exploitative relation that also fundamentally alters its relation with the settler bourgeoisie. Just as the Chinese “bourgeoisie” is dependent upon the liberation of the means of production and a project for socialist construction led by the CPC, the settler “proletariat” is dependent upon colonial spoils and a colonial project led by the bourgeoisie and their political institutions. This fundamentally alters class antagonisms and relations to production.

How can you say a class of working settlers that are routinely given incredibly cheap stolen land and relatively high wages has the same relationship to production as a slave? Even white slaves, indentured servants, typically recieved land within a few years after their servitude, as wages were higher because of slavery and genocide than back in Europe, and they were granted the right to, ya know, not be enslaved for their entire lives and the right to own property. That is a massive difference in relations to production.

The Rainbow Coalition was a successful example of racial solidarity among different ethnic groups, and avoided the co-optation of leadership by poor whites, and was only ended by the assassination of Hampton. It was so successful and threatening to white supremacist ideology that the FBI planned and executed the assassination of Hampton in the matter of 8 months after the Rainbow Coalition was founded

I dont disagree that the rainbow coalition was a productive thing. I couldn’t tell you exactly why it isnt mentioned. There certainly is literature that sheds light on how wealthy whites perceive poor whites that makes points that are relevant to the discussion of colonial class society and could have been included in the book (although this relationship is still qualitatively different that the relationship between colonizer and colonized). But maybe the book isnt really about that as much as it is about how the history of settler-colonialism has benifited white people, even workers, at the expense of and the exploitation of the colonized.

While I disagree with some excerpts of the book, such as when Sakai affirms there is no “white proletariat” in the US (sometimes he even affirms there is no proletariat at all), I still think that everyone should read it.

This is what detractors say but it is never substantiated as a criticism. By what natural law of capital is it so ubiquitous that a revolutionary proletarian class must exist among colonizers? This criticism usually amounts to disappointment or frustration that the processes of class formation in Amerika differ from that of Western Europe. Settlers is not a description of the moral quality of white people but rather the material process of class formation in settler colonial Amerika and its consequences for labor organizations and for colonized peoples. I read the book and I have yet to see any successful criticism of the book among its mkst common criticisms, I have, frankly, only seen strawmen and white fragility.

It essentializes white people as irreparably racist, and it conveys a defeatist message altogether, implying there’s nothing to be done to fight it, and that white people cannot be allies.

Looks like someone forgot to read the book.

I think those who defend this work to be of utmost value to the US radical left should address those critiques.

Those critiques have to exist first. All the links you provided are exactly the people spreading strawman representations of the book. They don’t engage with it at all. They just make up an argument based on what they think the book is about or they read it they way a Christian reads the Quran.