"While there were many exploited and poverty-stricken immigrant [colonizing] individuals, these… Euro-American workers as a whole were a privileged labor stratum. As a labor aristocracy it had, instead of a proletarian consciousness, a petit-bourgeois consciousness that was unable to rise above reformism." (Sakai, Settlers, 24-25)

Although J. Sakai'swas published in the mid-1980s it has remained at the edges of "acceptable" social theory, just at the threshold of obscurity. Perhaps the reason for its academic neglect can be blamed on its unsober use of language and rhetorical tone: those who study political theory within the polite confines of academia tend to zone out when they read phrases and words that break the implicit rules of intellectual chivalry. Or perhaps the academic dismissal ofis due to the fact that it was published by a fringe press and presented in a somewhat unorthodox manner: the type-setting, use of found images and collage, and 8.5x11 graphic novel size does not fit the acceptable standards of an "authoritative" book.And yet, though it is always tempting to blame the author or the publisher for a book's failure, Sakai'swould have never received normative academic acclaim even if the author and his publisher had chosen to play by certain rules. For it is the content ofitself, like the content of every vital piece of social theory, that breaks the rules ahead of time. If Sakai ahd changed his tone and written the same theory according to academic sobriety,might be read by more academics but it would be met with hostility, derision, and dismissal. And though it is true that the publishers often create audiences––promotion and distribution predestining sales––content is such that it was banned a priori from those academic presses, even the leftwing ones, that could possibly create a larger audience.This is not idle speculation: one only needs to examine howis perceived by those academic leftists who also fancy themselves activists, that academic population who would be, had Sakai's book received "proper" publication and distribution, its niche market. The reviews ofin Upping the Anti and the New Socialist magazine , by Tyler McCreary and Sebastian Lamb respectively, are snide and dismissive. Both reviewers pretend, because they are good leftists, that they sympathize with Sakai's position, but their sympathy is more tactical than substantial. In neither case is the actual content oftaken seriously: they both straw-person the book, making it appear like a flawed and simplistic version of what it actually is, highlighting potential flaws in reasoning to dismiss the larger argument. (In both cases, when I read the reviews, I thought I was reading a review of another book.) These impressionistic readings, both focusing on surface details, allow the reviewers to ignore and reject the overall theory.Here is a sad example of the fallacy of composition: if some of the parts are wrong (they are wrong), then the whole must be wrong as well. I doubt these reviewers would apply the same faulty reasoning to those pieces of acceptable leftwing theory that they study and love. Would they dismiss Marx's analysis of capitalism because some of its abstractions do not accord with exceptional concrete moments? I would hope not! Most probably, if an anti-Marxist told the New Socialist reviewer thatshould be dismissed because of the potential problems in some of its abstractions, the reviewer would probably reply (although one is never sure these days) that the abstractions were necessary in order to establish scientific categories.So why this reaction to? Lenin remarked, in multiple contexts, on "a veritable campaign against the philosophy of Marxism" launched by "would-be Marxists." He often noted, at the beginning offor example, that the academic acceptability of marxist philosophy was often in contradiction with the actual commitments of marxism. Thus vital and revolutionary marxist theories would be dismissed and attacked by the academic elite because they threatened these would-be marxists' privilege.is part of a long tradition of vital revolutionary theory––descendant of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Mao, Fanon and Cabral, DuBois and Malcolm X.The reason whyoffends the academic radicalism of the aforementioned reviewers, I think, is because it attempts to expose historical and material foundations of North American, but most specifically USAmerican, settler-colonial society. Sakai's position, that has so offended these reviewers, is that:And Sakai does not arrive at this position, regardless of language and presentation, in an idealist or spurious manner. He is a dialectical materialist interested in filling in the blank spots of. He is performing the Maoist regionalization of marxism within his social and historical context.is an attempt to answer some of the following questions: how does the history of colonialism and slavery influence class struggle in the United States, what does the fact of ongoing settler-colonialism mean for the composition of the proletariat, how does race intersect with class, why has the white working class most often refused radicalization, and how do we organize class revolution in this context. In order to answer these questions properly and systematically, however, Sakai needed, like Marx with, to look for universal categories rather than become trapped at the level of confused appearance where no scientific conclusions can be drawn. But it is not really histhat is the issue for the reviewers (and the straw-person arguments present the reader with a Sakai who lacks a method), even if they want us to think this is the case when they quibble over details. Lamb dislikes Sakai's use of the concept "labour aristocracy" even though it's unclear whether Lamb actually understands how Sakai, following the entire and ongoing history of non-white and third-world marxism, is using it to begin with (the rejection of this concept is en vogue amongst privileged marxists these days). McCreary's analysis is even cruder because he actually imagines that Sakai believes in racial ontology, and that the world is much more "complex" than the black vs. white reality he believes Sakai is presenting (this is the nadir of straw-personing).That the white working class will not, as a whole, become Marx's revolutionary subject and lead the revolution in North America, that racialization has given itto side with oppression, that we should stop speaking of its historical victimhood and ask how it collaborated with colonial victimization and what this meant for class consciousness… These are not comfortable topics. Rather than do the hard work and actually try to understand what Sakai is saying about class, the reviewers react in a knee-jerk manner: "is he saying that race is the basis of organization and not class? Let's stop reading this now and relegate Sakai to our historical dustbin." And yet Sakai isclaiming that class struggle should be substituted by racial struggle. In fact he goes out of his way at numerous points into argue thatand not racial ontology is fundamental. Nor does he believe that white workers cannot be revolutionary––he just argues that they form a labour aristocracy and, as with every aristocracy, individuals can change sides and consciousnesses. His point is to interrogate how race and class intersect and how the history of settler-colonialism in America has distorted class composition. Any honest reading of Sakai would arrive at this conclusion.In the second edition ofSamir Amin writes that American ideology "delayed the development of class consciousness" amongst the white working class so that "[w]hile in Paris the people got ready to assault the heavens (here I refer to the 1871 Commune), in the United States gangs formed by successive generations of poor [white] immigrants killed each other." (Samir Amin,, 47-48)the members of the white working class were killing each other, as well as participating in colonial genocide, rather than uniting to overthrow oppression, is a question that Sakai is attempting to answer. We need to take both the question and Sakai's analysis seriously.I am not claiming thatshould be accepted dogmatically and exist in some heaven beyond criticism. The best theories invite critique and debate and no theoretical argument is divine. And yethas been banned from theoretical debate and proper critique, dismissed for dubious reasons. The lack of rigour in the aforementioned reviews demonstrates, I believe, an unwillingness to accept Sakai's arguments because of a vested interest and class position––how else can we explain the trite dismissal? How else can we explain the typical euro-communist rejection of "the labour aristocracy––a concept that is not passe in third world marxist circles, but is quickly dismissed by those who do not want to imagine thatworking class might experience a certain level of privilege because of others?So when Sakai argues that the white working class of North America constitutes, within the confines of settler society, a labour aristocracy, a valid counter-argument is not to snidely point out, as if Sakai was historically ignorant, that there is no such thing as a labour aristocracy because these white settlers were actually poor, exploited, and callously used by the colonizing aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Sakai already accepts that this was the case but is tired of the colonial ideology that asks the colonizer to recognize that the settler working class is also exploited. Following Fanon and every anticolonial theorist, Sakai wants to examine the ideology that permits the settler working class to occupy an oppressing position. He wants to answer the question asked by Amin and others: why did this white-working classfail to generally become a class for-itself, what were the terms of its composition in America (it arrived as predatory, Sakai argues with a significant amount of historical data), and what were the historical and materialist reasons for its structural development? It is not valid to cite the sporadic moments in North American history when the white working class "got it right" as evidence against Sakai's position; there are often exceptions to the general rule, and it is not as if Sakai has dismissed these exceptions (he discusses, for example, the IWW).is attempting to map the development of the ideology Sakai calls "settlerism", the material conditions behind its emergence, and its ramifications for class struggle.Of course in any great work of social theory there are always possible errors and blind-spots. For example, I think that Sakai's analysis of A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey is somewhat problematic; I also believe that he often ignores the colonial contradictions between black slavery and indigenous populations. I do not think these problems, however, mean that the general analysis inshould be rejected––just as I do not think that Engels' far more serious oversights inmean that Engels' arguments and insights are garbage.Moreover, it is all too easy to point out the blind-spots of a theory that is trying to account for large-scale historical phenomena. There is a blind-spot, for example, in Sakai'swhen it comes to gender, but this did not prevent Butch Lee and Red Rover from using theanalysis and adding a queer feminist dimension in their book. Nor should the fact that Sakai does not believe in the Trotskyist-inspired notion of "socialism from below," the favourite marginal theory of the New Socialists and its reviewer, mean that his analysis is wrong. (In fact, maybe this reviewer could have learned something about an actually relevant and historically salient theory of organizing, unlike "socialism from below" which is only theorized and talked about by a small group of North American academic marxists, called "the mass line".) If theoretical blind-spots and sectarian differences were the ultimate criteria for a book's acceptance or rejection, no piece of social theory would survive the cull.In the end, perhaps we can say that Sakai's refusal to write and publish according to acceptable academic standards is what demonstrates' vitality. It was never aimed at comfortable lefty academics still enamoured by "the mythology of the white working class." The language of immediacy, the zine-esque presentation, the ability to translate theoretical concepts and arguments to street level discourse––all of these characteristics demonstrate thatis meant to be a revolutionary text. It is aimed at and read by the people who exist at the bottom of capitalist society, though apparently they are not the "socialism from below" that the New Socialist reviewer means.We often forget that Marx wrotefor workers and not the academic elite (otherwise he would have published theinstead), that Mao wrote for peasants, that Lenin was addressing revolutionaries and not marxologists. Ifbelongs in this vital tradition, then it is the job of those of us who are "leftwing scholars", if we truly believe our political principles, to treat Sakai's theory seriously.