HenryKrinkle posted:if we're feeling ambitious, maybe we could make an HTML version of the book complete with links to some of the original sources cited?
woah nelly you guys actually went and did it. cool.
glomper_stomper posted:i'm postin my goon project in this thread because every copy is coming with a readsettlers.org sticker
PDF: http://docdro.id/8myj7HK
Printable PDF: http://docdro.id/LHmkJKE
a little light reading for my friends, thanks
looking through the references this is chapter 1 ref 9
(THEODORE ROOSEVELT — The Winning of the West — Vol. I — N.Y., 1900. p. 90. )
from http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11941/pg11941.html
Such a man, though both honest and intelligent, when he hears that the whites have settled on Indian lands, cannot realize that the act has no resemblance whatever to the forcible occupation of land already cultivated. The white settler has merely moved into an uninhabited waste; he does not feel that he is committing a wrong, for he knows perfectly well that the land is really owned by no one. It is never even visited, except perhaps for a week or two every year, and then the visitors are likely at any moment to be driven off by a rival hunting-party of greater strength. The settler ousts no one from the land; if he did not chop down the trees, hew out the logs for a building, and clear the ground for tillage, no one else would do so. He drives out the game, however, and of course the Indians who live thereon sink their mutual animosities and turn against the intruder. The truth is, the Indians never had any real title to the soil; they had not half as good a claim to it, for instance, as the cattlemen now have to all eastern Montana, yet no one would assert that the cattlemen have a right to keep immigrants off their vast unfenced ranges. The settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages. Moreover, to the most oppressed Indian nations the whites often acted as a protection, or, at least, they deferred instead of hastening their fate. But for the interposition of the whites it is probable that the Iroquois would have exterminated every Algonquin tribe before the end of the eighteenth century; exactly as in recent time the Crows and Pawnees would have been destroyed by the Sioux, had it not been for the wars we have waged against the latter.
bleugh
anyway ive been checking what I can but most of this stuff is obscure and difficult to find
http://kersplebedeb.com/posts/the-shock-of-recognition/
thought it was interesting. Like everything Sakai says, it makes a ton of sense for Marxists once the initial shock wears off.
Just like Sakai rescues the Marxist understanding of the proletariat and its inherently revolutionary potential by giving a better definition of the proletariat, he rescues the Marxist understanding of fascism given better definitions of petty-bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat. This is significant for a few reasons:
1. Petty-bourgeois fascism and labor aristocratic settlerism are not the same. Though they are similar enough though that fascism is not necessary when settlerism is the norm. To me this says that while the genocide of native americans (settlerism), the genocide of eastern europeans and jews (fascism) and the regular genocides of Indians by the British (imperialism) are not the same thing, none is 'worse' than the other. They all must be opposed with a scientific understanding of their differences. I am obviously biased towards the comintern but I think the renewal of their analysis of fascism in 'third-worldist' analysis is going a long way into recovering the scientific understanding of the phenomenon in concrete economic relationships.
2. Something that has bothered me is many groups that read Settlers assume that the site of organizing in the USA is in prisons. But this has had very little influence outside of prisons and I'm not even sure how much impact groups like MIM-prisons had on that recent prison strike or the anti-police occupation movement. I think many people assume incorrectly that the lesson of 'labor aristocracy' is that the most oppressed are the most revolutionary. But here clearly Sakai is recovering the essential Marxist principle that it is within the process of production itself that proletarian consciousness is formed. In fact, complete exclusion from production altogether is just as likely to lead to fascism as communism depending on the strength of the communist movement. And despite the polemical value of the 'military industrial complex' and 'for profit prisons', prisons are clearly not labor camps or directly profitable institutions. If anything, they exist to contain the now superfluous third world populations of America who don't even serve the function of reserve army of labor compared to the vast third world labor force in Africa and Asia which is only growing. One could then argue that prisons are more likely to create fascist consciousness than socialist consciousness, though obviously the legacy of black revolutionary nationalism prevents a straightforward reactionary ideology from forming. I think a synthesis of these two concepts in which proletarian still means something rather than generic postmodern concepts like 'oppressed' or 'marginalized' is combined with Sakai's insights that working for a wage is not sufficient to define proletariat and this definition must take into account the entire production process including the realization of surplus value in wages and benefits. What this I'm not sure yet.
3. I think there needs to be a lot more analysis of these questions. For example, while it's true that capitalism does not 'use' fascism in a straightforward way, it is true that capitalism 'unleashes' fascism on uncooperative states and peoples and contains it to the best of its abilities. How do we think about this more concretely? Also, Sakai is right that there is a liberal attitude in 'waiting out' fascism but I also think there is truth in the idea that fascism represents a moment when the choice between socialism and fascism are stark. Even though within Korea Kim Il-sung's guerrillas had marginal influence during the colonial era, after the Japanese left it was never in doubt that the only choice left was socialism with Kim Il-sung in some kind of leadership position or American occupation with the sole intent of preventing democracy in any form. Maybe this question is secondary to the global imperialist system since the relationship between Kim Il-sung and Syngman Rhee was reversed in France between Charles de Gualle and Maurice Thorez.
I'm not sure I agree with some of what Sakai says but I'm waiting until the initial shock wears off to form opinions. Fascism has only grown stronger since this was written, not just the obvious Trump phenomenon but the rise of Indian fascism make Sakai's analysis particularly relevant imo.
Edited by babyhueypnewton ()
babyhueypnewton posted:prisons are clearly not labor camps or directly profitable institutions
i would dispute this and i think that even if prison labor isn't primary in terms of productive labor in the US, it's growing in importance
Edited by ilmdge ()
Sakai posted:Fascism always had to be imposed by the ruling class, we thought. We assumed that it could never be popular, especially in Europe where it had such a disastrous track record in living memory. Yet fascism and the associated far right now has a surging mass base, and is the “democratic” choice of millions of Europeans. In Austria, known fascist elements are now in the ruling government coalition. It has pushed the whole political spectrum to the right in Europe, as the ruling class is forced to experiment Frankenstein-like with transplanting parts of fascism into the body of European bourgeoisie democracy.
im going full eurocentric here but the rise of the far right in europe seemingly without any sort of communist movement which it is in opposition to may be (must be?) tied to imperialism itself and its failings to continue to provide non-productive well paying jobs to (predominantly) the youth in the european core through declining returns inbuilt into capitalism itself. Being confronted with proletarianisation because theres no stolen wealth to keep you in the labour aristocracy anymore while still being ideologically labour aristocracy with it sense of entitlement, with little in the way of proletarian class ideology to substitute it in major part because of the raising of large amounts of the core proletariat into the labour aristocracy in the first place, with the bulk of the global proletariat now kept walled far away beyond borders and seas (physical and mental) means that they will as Sakai was saying in 2001 turn against the ruling class not with communism in mind but with usurping the decadent booj to become the new bourgioisie themselves.
What im really interested in is if this can actually be arrested in the core countries because as u pick out bhpn, sakai draws attention to how proletarian ideology comes from the production process itself and relation to the means of production, and if enough of the population of the core is either petty-booj or labour aristocracy in class nature or entirely declassed, rather than proletarian, then the "masses" within that imperialist country are not the proletarian but the labour aristocracy with their propensity to fascism.
THe whole thing is a great indictment of tepid leftism, moribund march going and doing leftism like your grandpa did it being a primary reason for the effectivemess of radical, active fascist mass movements in europe both in the early 20th C and now, and is a real call for communists to do active radical shit that actually interests people - Im reminded of anecdote told to me about the "Peoples Asssembly" in the UK, a milquetoast lefty "anti-cuts" group and how anyone going along to one other meetings, being confronted by a group of trotskyite retired teachers talking about their next bake sale would never want anything to do with any sort leftism ever again, but really its aplicable to every group in the UK.
i think the white nation still has immense resources, control over police departments and the government (to the extent that either of these can be controlled by any community), the best of what's left in american capitalism basically, and so politics is still sort of a joke. the fundamental security of the white nation is one reason why we had such a stupid election campaign- debating over whether or not to build a wall that we already have, for instance. if there were actually existential threats to the white nation's dominance we'd see a whole set of other issues being discussed, and a more violent campaign. actual 'economic anxiety' on the part of trump supporters would look way different than complacently sitting in a stadium listening to him speak and then driving home in a new truck or whatever. no one in this country that works for a living is less anxious than trump supporters. id bet on that.
optimistically, and i think sakai says this somewhere, i want to just think that america is being irreversibly decolonized. white genocide as the far right understands it, which means living in a neighborhood with a black family and not constituting a demographic majority in the legislature, is on its way. and abroad the united states is going to have a harder and harder time keeping up unequal exchange.
but capitalism can always attempt to rejuvenate itself with another round of "primitive" accumulation through the time honored method of racist colonial exploitation. so i think in the future the likelihood is continued decline, and a much more serious effort from the white nation to really actually take something back once it seems like something might slip away. that's one way the trend could be 'broken.' another way would be for the left to suddenly mobilize and obstruct trump, which would bring the confrontation with the white nation closer but i think that's frankly a distant possibility given the low level of seriousness in the left here. people are gearing up for another anti george bush answer coalition with clueless liberals.
i think the best currently available timeline is, trump bumbles around for a few years, the left gains strength, the nazis continue to trip over themselves and we get some god awful social democrat in 2020 who fails to confront any of the various overlapping crises of capitalism.
But the most important reason that this line of thinking has proven to be wrong is because fascism in general – including the “classical” euro fascism – has proven to be violently radical & dangerously capable of attracting mass support far beyond the left’s complacent expectations. Hitler is still being underestimated by the left. He was a brilliant, exciting leader who yearned for, fought for, dangerous changes far more radical than anything anyone imagined back then. That his radicalism was of the right makes it no less radical. Under his leadership the left was made to look pedestrian, dull, inadequate, as he crash created a shocking techno-culture of mass worship and violent mass re-identification. Hitler made millions of people change who they were. He left the bourgeoisie intact save for the Jews, but diminished its importance. He destroyed whole peoples, relabelled others and even eliminated the old working class. He reshaped Germany as a society for generations to come, and then destroyed an empire in titanic wars of his own choosing.
We forget that fascism has always been mainly a movement of the young. That many youth in 1930s Germany viewed the Nazis as liberatory. As opposed to the German social-democrats, for example, who preached the dutiful authority of parents over children, the Hitler Youth gave rebellious children the power to keep their own hours, have an active sex and political life, smoke, drink and have groups of their own. Wilhelm Reich pointed out long ago that fascism in practice exposed every hypocrisy and internal cultural repression of the old left.
All during the rise of euro-fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, the left dissed & dismissed them as pawns of the capitalist class. Whether in the brilliant German Communist photomontage posters of the artist Heartfield or the pronouncement from Moscow that “fascism is the terroristic dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie”, there was a constant message that Italian fascism and German Nazism were only puppets for the big capitalist class. This has some parts of the truth, but is fatally off-center and produces an actually disarming picture. Not that no leftists saw the problem, of course. In 1922 one German communist writer warned of a “Fascist Danger in South Germany”, and even analyzed the Nazi Party as a highly militarized anti-semitic sect that was based in the petty bourgeoisie but was agitating against big business. 13 These assessments on the ground were soon swept away by dismissive theories from the big left uberheadquarters in Berlin and Moscow.
and
In an unpublished manuscript, R. Vacirca explains this:
“Italian Fascism initially positioned itself to the left of the Social Democracy, denouncing the bourgeoisifaction of the socialist movement. Mussolini and other early proto-fascists like the famous futurist artist Marinelli did this, attracting many radical youth to them as a more radical alternative to the mainstream Marxists. This is why Antonio Gramsci and other student socialists idolized Mussolini until he became pro-war in1914. The bourgeois reformist character of the Social-Democracy played into the fascists’ hands. People in the U.S. have a false picture of the historic euro-left, they don’t realize how big and strong rooted Social Democracy was. How, like our AFL-CIO, the Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement here, how much a part of the establishment it had become. And of course from its beginnings fascism was a fighting force, an armed organization. It emphasized violence and direct, spontaneous action which made them look a lot racier than the broad socialist movement which was de facto pacifist. Just like today the “anti-war movement” Mussolini faced was totally inept and bourgeoisified.
“Up to December of 1920 when the fascists opened up their first big sustained terror campaign against the socialist party, Mussolini presented himself and the fascists as a revolutionary, pro-worker alternative to the increasingly reformist Marxists. Trafficking on his rep as the leader of the most revolutionary faction of the Italian Socialist Party. After all, if he hadn’t broken rightward to made common cause with the nationalists and supported Italy entering World War I to gain more territory, Mussolini would have been the natural leader of a communist revolution in Italy. This is what Lenin himself said at one point! This is how disorienting the new fascist movement was. By the time enough people had figured out what Mussolini was doing he had a lock on power, and gradually washed all the red out of his program.” 24
these bits have great relevance to today. I think what sakai is saying is that u need to be a cool alpha communist, shave off those white person dreads, and start lifting
c_man posted:i would dispute this and i think that even if prison labor isn't primary in terms of productive labor in the US, it's growing in importance
I do agree that prison labor represents a possible future for american capitalism if imperialism was seriously crippled. the fact that we already make a joke out of rape and torture in prison means american liberals are perfectly primed for it without fascism. it's also significant that in the 60s-70s black socialism led the call for the release of all black prisoners because the justice system is fundamentally illegitimate (in fact this was the essence of the Free Huey campaign which is completely different than the campaigns today for the release of political prisoners because of shoddy evidence or racist juries or whatever) while since the black prison population has exploded this is unthinkable and has been replaced by modest advocacy for marijuana legalization and 'awareness' of police violence without any systematic critique of the legal system itself. but my point is that the effort to portray prisons as for profit sounds radical but is not. in fact it takes away from a systematic critique and focuses on certain 'bad' prisons, usually in republican states, that disrupt the normal humanitarian functioning of america's 'justice' system. this is why Obama can make legislation against private prisons and why buzzfeed and john oliver can make funny videos about it.
stegosaurus posted:i wonder what's changed since settlers was written. what power does the white nation possess after formal multiculturalism, the decline of american imperialism (in the financial and military senses), automation and offshoring, and the border regime which has opted for a permanent presence from exploited labor rather than wholesale expulsion.
i think the white nation still has immense resources, control over police departments and the government (to the extent that either of these can be controlled by any community), the best of what's left in american capitalism basically, and so politics is still sort of a joke. the fundamental security of the white nation is one reason why we had such a stupid election campaign- debating over whether or not to build a wall that we already have, for instance. if there were actually existential threats to the white nation's dominance we'd see a whole set of other issues being discussed, and a more violent campaign. actual 'economic anxiety' on the part of trump supporters would look way different than complacently sitting in a stadium listening to him speak and then driving home in a new truck or whatever. no one in this country that works for a living is less anxious than trump supporters. id bet on that.
optimistically, and i think sakai says this somewhere, i want to just think that america is being irreversibly decolonized. white genocide as the far right understands it, which means living in a neighborhood with a black family and not constituting a demographic majority in the legislature, is on its way. and abroad the united states is going to have a harder and harder time keeping up unequal exchange.
but capitalism can always attempt to rejuvenate itself with another round of "primitive" accumulation through the time honored method of racist colonial exploitation. so i think in the future the likelihood is continued decline, and a much more serious effort from the white nation to really actually take something back once it seems like something might slip away. that's one way the trend could be 'broken.' another way would be for the left to suddenly mobilize and obstruct trump, which would bring the confrontation with the white nation closer but i think that's frankly a distant possibility given the low level of seriousness in the left here. people are gearing up for another anti george bush answer coalition with clueless liberals.
i think the best currently available timeline is, trump bumbles around for a few years, the left gains strength, the nazis continue to trip over themselves and we get some god awful social democrat in 2020 who fails to confront any of the various overlapping crises of capitalism.
There is continuity between the old 'dependency theory' third-worldism and the current third worldism of outsourced production but there are also major differences. whereas the old theory caused us to reevaluate the proletariat, who was actually the left, and what the primary and secondary contradictions were regionally, the new theory could basically be a page out of Engels. the conditions of workers in Bangladesh are basically the same as the conditions of irish workers in manchester's "little ireland" and the growth of the global proletariat and inequality between the capitalists and bourgeoisie are straight out of Marx. This is one reason I'm so inclined to read things that recover 'orthodox' marxist analyses of fascism and ideology and why I've been accused of 'determinism' or 'structuralism', the attempts to rethink these categories like 'precariat' and 'multitude' from the 90s and early 2000s now look embarrassing. I think Sakai falls right between the two trends. The old trend of rethinking the proletariat and reasserting the importance of Lenin and the new trend of "yeah the proletariat is obvious, we're just not it." That's what makes him interesting to me rather than seeing him as a seer though his influence is such that he could be argued to be the bridge between the old monthly review monopoly capitalist third worldism and the new empirical return to marx return to the rate of profit third worldism.
you're right that we don't really feel the massive and fundamental changes taking place in the global economy because of our white security. but it's happening nonetheless and the real movement is irreversible. I've given up hope in american liberals but i would like to think that theres a difference between giving up hope and 'waiting to be saved' by the third world or minorities or whatever and realizing that the struggle over Donald Trump's rude way of stating what is already American policy is minor compared to the urbanization of hundreds of millions of people in the China.
Edited by babyhueypnewton ()
swampman posted:the return / increase in scale of slavery for exhaustive domestic resource extraction + the return of child labor, which i predict will surprise us all with an upset performance in short order, I think this mainly because there's this deli near me in Brooklyn that has this 12 year old kid working all day during the day, and nobody seems to give a shit (the deli is right across the street from a hospital so doctors, EMT and cops are always in there) Anyway its probably going to be in response to failing schools, to put kids in more of a labor focused environment to give them job skills. My hope from that point is a massive ungovernable youth movement that the DSA keeps getting blamed and jailed for despite their frantic shrieks of disavowal
probably my best post in my entire mediocre history on this forum was when people were posting things about how various governments had military-looking medals they handed out for women who had the most babies and i posted an article from the IRS, targeted to U.S. military families, that suggested that parents hire their children as wage laborers for small businesses, then deduct their wages on their taxes
wahoopride posted:Lurking this forum and read this thread specifically inspired me to suggest Settlers as the next book for the book club I am a part of. After a dramatic and close vote, Settlers won by a razor thin margin so now we are reading it. If you guys are interested, I will share our experience reading it based on the discussions we have on it each week.
that would be very interesting thank you
shriekingviolet posted:I'd love to hear about it. What kind of reading group is it?
It's nothing specific really. Pretty recreational. We will kind of read whatever, but historically we like to talk about philosophy and politics stuff. I have been slowing pulling the group to the left over time. Hopefully this book with help in that effort 
the horseshoe theory is a brain disease part 23,904 @FareedZakaria https://t.co/eJtpQdHqC8 pic.twitter.com/95MnFpm5Kz
— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) February 10, 2017
toyotathon posted:
i feel like if you show settlers to your average liberal, they'll "get it" better than your average non-thrid worldist marxist will, because of some vague commitment to humanitarianism, 'racial justice', and the lack of ultra-left delusions. doesn't mean they'll become Good Marxists, but y'know it's something i've noticed.
marlax78 posted:toyotathon posted:
i feel like if you show settlers to your average liberal, they'll "get it" better than your average non-thrid worldist marxist will, because of some vague commitment to humanitarianism, 'racial justice', and the lack of ultra-left delusions. doesn't mean they'll become Good Marxists, but y'know it's something i've noticed.
Ive noticed that too. I have a friend who is a Trot and no one has been more resistant to the theses.of the book than him.
http://kersplebedeb.com/posts/conquest-and-occupation/