A uniquely important book in the canon of the North American revolutionary left and anticolonial movements, Settlers was first published in the 1980s. Written by activists with decades of experience organizing in grassroots anticapitalist struggles against white supremacy, the book established itself as an essential reference point for revolutionary nationalists and dissident currents within the Marxist-Leninist and anarchist movements. Always controversial within the establishment left, Settlers uncovers centuries of collaboration between capitalism and white workers and their organizations, as well as their neocolonial allies, showing how the United States was designed from the ground up as a parasitic and genocidal entity. As recounted in painful detail by J. Sakai, the United States has been built on the theft of Indigenous lands and of Afrikan labor, on the robbery of the northern third of Mexico, the colonization of Puerto Rico, and the expropriation of the Asian working class, with each of these crimes being accompanied by violence. This new edition includes a new essay and an interview with author J. Sakai by Ernesto Aguilar.

Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern (Kerseplebedeb)

History

Sakai, J.

Americas

PM Press

Here are two "live" discussions by radical activists introducing the issues of movement security: u.s. activist and author J. Sakai & long-time Canadian organizer Mandy Hiscocks. There are many books and articles reporting state repression, but not on that subject's more intimate relative, movement security. It is general practice to only pass along knowledge about movement security privately, in closed group lectures or by personal word-of-mouth. In fact, when new activists have questions about security problems, they quickly discover that there is no "Security for Dummies" to explore the basics. Adding to the confusion, the handful of available left security texts are usually about underground or illegal groups, not the far larger public movements that work on a more or less legal level. During Montreal's 2013 Festival of Anarchy, J. Sakai gave a workshop about the politics of movement security, sharing the results of typical incidents of both the movement's successes and the movement's failures in combating the "political police" or state security agencies. He also discussed the nature of those state sub-cultures. This booklet contains a transcript of that talk, and of the subsequent lively question and answer period; along with several after-the-workshop observations by Sakai. As he explains, "The key thing is, to start with, security is not about being macho vigilantes or having techniques of this or that. It's not some spy game. Security is about good politics. That's exactly why it's so difficult. But everyone will say that they have good politics. So this has to be broken down, this has to be explained." Which is what he does in this unusual talk. Mandy Hiscocks comes at the topic from her personal experiences organizing against the 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto. In this in-depth interview, Hiscocks describes how her political scene and groups she worked with were infiltrated by undercover agents over a year before the summit even occurred. These police infiltrators provided information used in the prosecution of anti-Globalization organizers and participants. Hiscocks provides an honest and sobering appraisal of the practical challenge of State infiltration, and of how subsequent decisions played out in regards to the anti-G20 organizing and the repression that resulted. Hiscocks spent a year in prison as a result of these experiences, shortly after this interview was conducted.

Basic Politics of Movement Security

Computers & Technology

Hiscocks, Mandy

Networking & Cloud Computing

Kersplebedeb Publishing

Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement is a series of documents that came out of conversations revolutionaries in and around Anti-Racist Action were having at the highpoint of the previous wave of antifascist organizing in North America. 
 Originally published in 2002 as a collaboration between Kersplebedeb, ARA Chicago, and the anarchist magazine Arsenal, Confronting Fascism is structured around a text by Don Hamerquist, "Fascism &amp; Antifascism." Hamerquist takes a wrecking ball to the mythology around fascism that had been traditionally peddled by the reformist left; against objections that fascists are just a distraction, or are simple-minded agents of the state and capital, he shows how fascism contains a revolutionary and even anticapitalist impulse thoroughly enmeshed with its own deeply oppressive and anti-liberatory politics. Unraveling what this means for antifascists and our strategies is the task at hand, and Hamerquist proceeds to lay down some important preliminary realities that we need to deal with. Almost twenty years later, what is most striking is how prescient so many of Hamerquist's observations were, not only about the ambiguously dynamic appeal of fascism, but also about the specific characteristics of antifascist work and the advantages and disadvantages they confer. 
 J. Sakai follows, arguing against the idea that fascism comes primarily from the working class, just as he extends the point that fascism is not an inherently or essentially "white" ideology. A discussion of different forms of capitalist rule, the class structure of global imperialism, and the history of anticapitalist critique within both Italian and German "classical" fascism, flows into a contemporary contextualization of fascism within the neocolonial context; throughout, Sakai shows that support for fascism comes primarily from middle class men who are losing or being denied their traditional privileges, what many consider their birthrght, as a result of capitalist and imperialist "progress." Shorter texts from the ARA Research Bulletin, Mark Salotte, and Xtn of ARA Chicago place these theoretical insights in the concrete context of the political and physical fight against the far right, while also recovering the connections between this fight and the broader rise of anticapitalist struggle at the time. Confronting Fascism attempts to deal with the questions of fascism and antifascism in a serious and non-dogmatic manner. Attention is paid to the class appeal of fascism, its continuities and breaks with the "regular" far-right and also even with the Left, the ways in which the fascist movement is flexible and the ways in which it isn't. Left failures, both in opposing fascism head-on, and also in providing a viable alternative to right-wing revolt, are also dealt with at length. The lived experiences of anti-fascist activists inform this work, and more attention is paid to actual historical developments and facts than to neat theories that explain everything but only coincidentally intersect with reality. Understanding the relationship of fascism, the State, left reformism and what it means to be revolutionary are priorities in a world where it seems increasingly true that those who do not advance will have to retreat.

Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents For A Militant Movement

Politics & Social Sciences

Hamerquist, Don

Salotte, Mark

Politics & Government

J. Sakai s ground-breaking exploration of this most controversial and least understood non-class in revolutionary politics an attempt to unknot the puzzle. It encompasses the threads of criminality as well as gender, of breaking social boundaries and eating the bitterest of class politics. The author interrogates the forming of left theory on this dangerous class by the highway flare of his own experiences, and more importantly the mass violent liberation wars of the 1950s-1960s. From the day The Communist Manifesto first lit up the dangerous class of jumbled criminals and outcasts on the far margins of society, radicals have been uncertain what their role should be, and even how they should be discussed. In no other area of the class structure has there been such widely divergent anti-capitalist viewpoints. Who are allies, who are enemies? While great 20th century rebels of the capitalist periphery from Mao Z to Huey Newton forced the sharp evolution of left work with the lumpen, the general uncertainty has only persisted, confusing not only our immediate practice but even larger anti-capitalist theory about class politics. Sakai s work comes at a time when there has been renewed interest in politically locating the lumpen as they assume a larger and larger role at the cutting edge of world upheaval. The Dangerous Class and Revolutionary Theory is not only novel for its subject but in its approach. The author shows how the vulgar socialist picture of noble working people on one side of a divide and unsavory criminals and outcasts on the other, has never been true. But, rather, that the emerging outcast lumpen/proletariat and the new capitalist lower working class that they painfully grew out of were both criminalized at birth in the rise of euro-capitalism. In all this, Sakai follows the actual non-class development of the lumpen in capitalism alongside the development of left theory on these declassed elements. The Dangerous Class and Revolutionary Theory starts with the paper of that name, on the birth of the modern lumpen/proletariat in the 18th and 19th centuries and the storm cloud of revolutionary theory that has always surrounded them. Going back and piecing together both the actual social reality and the analyses primarily of Marx but also Bakunin and Engels, the paper shows how Marx s class theory wasn t something static. His views learned in quick jumps, and then all but reversed themselves in several significant aspects. While at first dismissing them in the Communist Manifesto as that passively rotting mass at the obscure lower depths, Marx soon realized that the lumpen could be players at the very center of events in revolutionary civil war. Even at the center in the startling rise of new regimes. Like his was at times almost a post-modern understanding. The second part takes over on the flip side of the book, in the detailed paper Mao Z s Revolutionary Laboratory and the Role of the Lumpen Proletariat. This, too, is ground-breaking work. If the major revolutionary theory we have about the lumpen was first roughly assembled in 19th century Europe, these ideas weren t put to the test then. As Sakai points out, the left s euro-centrism here prevented it from realizing the obvious: that the basic theory from European radicalism was first fully tested not there or here but in the Chinese Revolution of 1921-1949. Under severely clashing political lines in the left, the class analysis finally used by Mao Z was shaken out of the shipping crate from Europe and then modified to map the organizing of millions over a prolonged generational revolutionary war. One could hardly wish for a larger test tube, and the many lessons to be learned from this mass political experience are finally put on the table.

The "Dangerous Class" and Revolutionary Theory: thoughts on the making of the lumpen/proletariat

Asia

Kersplebedeb

Looking at the U.S. White Working Class Historically tackles one of the supreme issues for our movement, the contradiction embodied in the term ""white working class."" On the one hand there is the class designation that should imply, along with all other workers of the world, a fundamental role in the overthrow of capitalism. On the other hand, there is the identification of being part of a (""white"") oppressor nation. Gilbert seeks to understand the origins of this contradiction, its historical development, as well as possibilities to weaken and ultimately transform the situation. In other words, how can people organize a break with white supremacy and foster solidarity with the struggles of people of color, both within the United States and around the world?

Looking at the U. S. White Working Class Historically

Business & Money

Gilbert, David

Economics

J. Sakai is one of North America's most insightful and challenging radical intellectuals, best-known for his work Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat, which remains the essential anti-racist labor history of the united states. Sakai work is grounded in Mao's politics, anti-imperialism, and in a lifetime of hands-on activism; he has consistently focused on the relationship between "race" and "class" in the american context, from a perspective dedicated to abolishing the united states, capitalism, and white supremacy. Beyond Settlers, however, Sakai has authored a number of other works, on subjects ranging from movement security, to the nature of the lumpen/proletariat, to the rise of the far right, and much more. Several of these have been published in book-form by Kersplebedeb, others as zines, while others have only ever appeared on the Internet. Here in this book, for the first time, is presented a selection of writings by Sakai spanning a 40 year period, from 1983 to 2022. This includes three articles initially written anonymously for the anti-imperialist journal S1, and an extensive interview that took place between 2020 and 2022, appearing here for the first time. The Shape of Things to Come: Selected Writings & Interviews is a weapons cache planted for people fighting for liberation in a world that is constantly becoming more dangerous. It provides tools and methodologies, examples both positive and negative, histories and insights, to help us to collectively struggle against a system that "as its most bottom-line autonomic reflex will rather arrange to kill us all than let us remake our lives communally."

The Shape of Things to Come: Selected Writings & Interviews

Social Sciences

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