But saying that u.s. industrial workers are not as a whole revolutionary or "class conscious" – and check out that Boggs and Hocker, who worked in the Detroit auto factories that were Black-majority, are definitely not just exposing the "whitetariat" alone but Black workers as well – isn't the end of the road. i'm not saying that we should forget about working class organizing. What i am suggesting is that radical working class politics here needs different strategies than the traditional left has understood. Everything that we've discussed just clears away all the middle-class left underbrush, so people can see the actual path before us and get down to work. Settlers didn't directly deal with all this, naturally, since it's historical analysis of the oppressor class structure and history .

EC: Would you say that organizing within the present-day white working class is hopeless?

JS: We need to talk about how people unthinkingly objectify the working classes. It never occurs to anyone to believe that the metropolitan middle classes are going to overthrow the system that privileges them. No one says, "The white doctors and professors and managers are the revolutionary class." Yet, without any big fuss or posturing, middle-class radicals just organize in those classes when and where they can, all around themselves. Students just form issue groups in even the most elite universities. Teachers try to open minds to social justice, while even some doctors volunteer to serve in refugee camps or argue with the majority of their criminal profession about being healers not rip-offs or stock market addicts. For better or worse, success or defeat. No big political deal, it's just living the life, the meal that's set before us.

But when it comes to the working classes, whoa, then it's all this ideological ca-ca. To believe what we're told, no one should want to organize or educate workers unless they can be sure that the entire class is "bound for glory" as the main force for revolution! (which you won't see here in this lifetime, trust me). So the white workers as a whole are either the revolutionary answer – which they aren't unless your cause is snowmobiles and lawn tractors – or they're like ignorant scum you wouldn't waste your time on. Small wonder rebellious poor whites almost always seek out the Right rather than the left.

There's an underlying assumption that revolutionary movements worldwide share, that's always there for us, that we are part of the working classes. That we live our lives in these communities, hold those jobs, try to live productive lives not just do capitalist bullshit, struggle within these class situations. We're talking in a wide arc here, maybe, but to a point: to how we need to build movements that have the learned skill of the recognition of reality. That understand revolutionary politics as more than abstract ideology, in more than an academic or reform movement way.

If radicalism can build small counter-currents of liberation in the overwhelmingly corrupt middle classes, why should similar work be questioned in the white working class communities? What i am fighting is the slick "Marxist" or "anarchist" opportunism, which sees aligning with the white settler majority and reform politics as the absolute necessity.

Malcolm X and Women's Liberation, ACT-UP and Wounded Knee II, Anti-Vietnam War draft card burning and radical ecology, were all shocking to the majority of North Americans. Radical threats to "the American Way of Life" – and loudly condemned not only by the majority but more specifically by the white working class – these political offensives by the few turned everything upside down. Because in the metropolis, radical and democratic change can only come against the wishes of the bribed majority. That may be tough to swallow for white folks, but reality is just reality.

This obsession with needing a social majority has nothing to do with being "practical". What it has to do with is bourgeois and defeatist thinking.This is like the left thinking that could not build a practical anti-fascist movement in Weimar Republic Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, although millions hated Nazism and wanted to do something, because that German left was too preoccupied with fantasies of either seizing or getting elected into state power for itself.

That left was too lost in delusions of success almost within their hands, delusions of maneuvering together a majority, to bother even really understanding fascism coming up fast in their rear view mirror. The urgent need was to organize a working minority to counter fascism in a much more radical way. Not by trying to defend liberal bourgeois rule. All the real things that had to be done by scattered German anti-fascists later after the Nazis were put into power – such as to survive politically, to significantly sabotage the war effort, to rescue Jews and Romany and gays, to build an underground against the madness of the Third Reich – all these things were attempted bravely but largely unsuccessfully, because they had to be done too late from scratch. This is a much larger subject, too large to dive into now, but it is on the horizon, like the smoke of a distant forest fire.

stegosaurus posted:

There's an 'extras' page on the site

pro move

stegosaurus posted:

we need a name for the settlers-caliban site webring.

readadamnbook.org

Belphegor posted:

1. Are there any vanguard party leaderships, in the USA or Canada, that are untainted by this settleristic 'I just want to get mine' mentality and have the skills to avoid the pitfalls that Sakai describes?

Work for organizations that are led by actually oppressed people

P.S.: I finished the book three hours ago and I already had an argument about it during Canadian thanksgiving (ironically). My Trotskyite friend didn't seem to think that distinguishing the proletariat into such elements as 'labor aristocracy' or 'settler proletariat' is valid or important !!! ... I'm beginning to see why trots are considered nuisances around here. He was all like "Don't you know what this is implying? Maoism!"

Your trot friend should read Settlers. There's no use arguing about it if they haven't read it.