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 @[email protected] 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)
I’ve never seen anyone call Sakai a racist.
Also, thousands of poor white proles didn’t say yes. Marx/Lenin never defined whites as a labor aristocracy and Sakai hardly accounts for the fact that there were many black or brown labor aristocrats. Also, Settlers has essentially been done better in terms of history and analysis since 1983. Also, you didn’t really account for my issues with the book, such as the misquoting and attacks on big-name communists like Herbert Aptheker and Philip S. Foner, who were attacked by figures like the FBI.
The issue here, is that everyone in US is pretty much a labour aristocracy. The wrong of Sakai is seeing it throught race, and the civil rights movements and the follow up rainbow coalition politics followed by the then-black nationalists proved him incorrect.
The labour aristocracy is not the ‘whites’. It is almost the entirety of the people in America, black and whites included. America is not ‘Amerika’, and leftists should start understanding this small truth which is being more and more evident by Holywood.