A good chunk of this is insightful material that is not common elsewhere and seems hard to contest (the U.S. has no feudal or communal past, and a major reason for its founding was to continue the oppression of indigenous and enslaved peoples).
Another good chunk is a lot more contestable, certainly if the argument is that the U.S. is unique among capitalist states (all classes and strata have a preoccupation with petty privileges and property, moreso than other capitalist societies).
A third chunk that seems like a huge stretch (there is no U.S. proletariat).
The support for the latter two groups has struck me as thin and/or unconvincing.
For example, the “no (white) proletariat” argument seems to boil to down to “they are paid too well to be proles.” ArcanePotato cites a passage elsewhere in this thread stating that 18th- or 19th-century U.S. farm workers made more than their European peers, and there’s also a passage in Settlers with figures on how many white households in the U.S. in the 1980s had a variety of modern conveniences (refrigerators, TVs, cars, etc.). I think this ignores that class is traditionally thought of as based more on one’s relationship to the means of production than to any absolute level of wealth – exchanging your labor for wages is what makes you proletariat, even if you make more than the person working next to you. If you’re working a wage labor job and your wage doubles, your interest in class struggle may become less urgent, but your relationship to the means of production doesn’t change. Temporarily placating the proletariat through higher wages isn’t the same as the proletariat not existing.
To add to your criticism of point 3: Dr. Rahman highlights this in his Marxism lecture series. The absolute position of a proletarian may improve over time (I think like… 50% of the world has smartphones)? But our relative position will continue to diminish (the richest people right now are basically running countries within their business and controlling countries outside of it). Even if white proletarian get imperial core treats this fundamental contradiction as a result of the falling rate of profit will remain.
i agree, saying that there is no proletariat in the us would be false, but i guess we could say most of the proletariat is part of the labour aristocracy, which is compatible with his view and marxist leninist analysis. there is a proletariat, but there is one so alienated from itself it will never actually fight for their own class.
I would boldly claim that white people in eastern Tennessee and West Virginia are pretty poor - they don’t even get the „treats“ that are used as evidence of a non-existing American Proletariat - which is as you said not a measurement of the class relations.
It’s a good moment for the adage “oppose book worship”, I think:
Whatever is written in a book is right — such is still the mentality of culturally backward Chinese peasants. Strangely enough, within the Communist Party there are also people who always say in a discussion, “Show me where it’s written in the book.” When we say that a directive of a higher organ of leadership is correct, that is not just because it comes from “a higher organ of leadership” but because its contents conform with both the objective and subjective circumstances of the struggle and meet its requirements. It is quite wrong to take a formalistic attitude and blindly carry out directives without discussing and examining them in the light of actual conditions simply because they come from a higher organ. It is the mischief done by this formalism which explains why the line and tactics of the Party do not take deeper root among the masses. To carry out a directive of a higher organ blindly, and seemingly without any disagreement, is not really to carry it out but is the most artful way of opposing or sabotaging it.
The method of studying the social sciences exclusively from the book is likewise extremely dangerous and may even lead one onto the road of counter-revolution. Clear proof of this is provided by the fact that whole batches of Chinese Communists who confined themselves to books in their study of the social sciences have turned into counter-revolutionaries. When we say Marxism is correct, it is certainly not because Marx was a “prophet” but because his theory has been proved correct in our practice and in our struggle. We need Marxism in our struggle. In our acceptance of his theory no such formalisation of mystical notion as that of “prophecy” ever enters our minds. Many who have read Marxist books have become renegades from the revolution, whereas illiterate workers often grasp Marxism very well. Of course we should study Marxist books, but this study must be integrated with our country’s actual conditions. We need books, but we must overcome book worship, which is divorced from the actual situation.
How can we overcome book worship? The only way is to investigate the actual situation.
And:
V. THE AIM OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC INVESTIGATION IS TO ARRIVE AT A CORRECT APPRAISAL OF CLASS FORCES AND THEN TO FORMULATE CORRECT TACTICS FOR THE STRUGGLE
This is our answer to the question: Why do we have to investigate social and economic conditions? Accordingly, the object of our investigation is all the social classes and not fragmentary social phenomena. Of late, the comrades in the Fourth Army of the Red Army have generally given attention to the work of investigation, [3] but the method many of them employ is wrong. The results of their investigation are therefore as trivial as a grocer’s accounts, or resemble the many strange tales a country bumpkin hears when he comes to town, or are like a distant view of a populous city from a mountain top. This kind of investigation is of little use and cannot achieve our main purpose. Our main purpose is to learn the political and economic situation of the various social classes. The outcome of our investigation should be a picture of the present situation of each class and the ups and downs of its development. For example, when we investigate the composition of the peasantry, not only must we know the number of owner-peasants, semi-owner peasants and tenant-peasants, who are differentiated according to tenancy relationships, but more especially we must know the number of rich peasants, middle peasants and poor peasants, who are differentiated according to class or stratum. When we investigate the composition of the merchants, not only must we know the number in each trade, such as grain, clothing, medicinal herbs, etc., but more especially we must know the number of small merchants, middle merchants and big merchants. We should investigate not only the state of each trade, but more especially the class relations within it. We should investigate the relationships not only between the different trades but more especially between the different classes. Our chief method of investigation must be to dissect the different social classes, the ultimate purpose being to understand their interrelations, to arrive at a correct appraisal of class forces and then to formulate the correct tactics for the struggle, defining which classes constitute the main force in the revolutionary struggle, which classes are to be won over as allies and which classes are to be overthrown. This is our sole purpose.
What are the social classes requiring investigation?
They are:
The industrial proletariat
The handicraft workers
The farm labourers
The poor peasants
The urban poor
The lumpen-Proletariat
The master handicraftsmen
The small merchants
The middle peasants
The rich peasants
The landlords
The commercial bourgeoisie
The industrial bourgeoisie
In our investigation we should give attention to the state of all these classes or strata. Only the industrial proletariat and industrial bourgeoisie are absent in the areas where we are now working, and we constantly come across all the others. Our tactics of struggle are tactics in relation to all these classes and strata.
Another serious shortcoming in our past investigations has been the undue stress on the countryside to the neglect of the towns, so that many comrades have always been vague about our tactics towards the urban poor and the commercial bourgeoisie. The development of the struggle has enabled us to leave the mountains for the plains.[4] We have descended physically, but we are still up in the mountains mentally. We must understand the towns as well as the countryside, or we shall be unable to meet the needs of the revolutionary struggle.
Mao was encouraging revolutionaries to be this meticulous about class observations and noting down the particulars of them in a given region. Then in this thread, we’re arguing over out of context book quotes on the internet - quotes that exaggerate and oversimplify.
I get tired of it in the context of discussion about the US because it is often spoken of in lockstep with a fatalistic attitude about the revolutionary potential of the people there, rather than as a means of better understanding the class makeup of the region in detail, in order to contend with it. It also risks being used as a form of blame-shifting; “we failed because they actually were too comfy as they are and didn’t want to be liberated.” Meanwhile, Mao is like “here’s one of our shortcomings in how we’re going about engaging with people who live a different kind of life than what we’re used to.”
Respectfully, have you read/listened to the whole work? I’ll admit, I had resistance to it the first time I read it, maybe all the way until the end and I considered it as a whole.
I think what is important is understanding that people experience the US (and canada, but I won’t type that out every time) differently. I’m sure there are some details I have a hard time seeing, but I’d like to try and address points 2 and 3.
I believe these statements refer to the history of the USA. I think it’s fair to say that the north american colonies are unique with respect to their relationship with capitalism because of their founding.
The paragraph after the one pictured explains more:
The settler masses of Colonial Amerika had a situation totally unlike their cousins back in Old Europe. For the privileges of conquest produced a nonproletarian society of settlers. The large majority of settlers were of the property-owning middle classes (insofar as classes had yet become visible in the new society): tradesmen, self-employed artisans, and land-owning farmers. Every European who wanted to could own land. Every white settler could be a property owner. No wonder immigration to the “New World” (newly conquered, newly enslaved) was so popular in Old Europe. No wonder life in Amerika was spoken of almost as a fable by the masses of Old Europe. Young Amerika was capitalism’s real-life Disneyland.
I think the disagreement you have might be around definitions, and not fully understanding why the authors claims there is no proletariat class. His argument isn’t that they are paid to well, but that they occupy the class of petit bourgeoisie. I think land ownership is one of the major distinctions.
Some additional passages from that chapter that might help:
Although there were Euro-Amerikan craftsmen and workers they never coalesced into a proletariat because they were too privileged and transitory in condition. It is important to grasp firmly that the mere presence of settler craftsmen and workers doesn’t automatically mean that they were a conscious class. With their extra-proletarian living standard and their future in the propertied middle classes, most settler workmen had no reason to develop a proletarian consciousness. Further, the rapid turnover of settlers in these strata left no material basis for the formation of a class.
And
The special and non-proletarian character of settler artisans and workers (which has been so conveniently forgotten about by today’s Euro-Amerikan radicals) was well-known a century ago by Europeans such as Marx and Engels. In 1859 Marx wrote of “…the United States of North America, where, though classes already exist, they have not yet become fixed, but continually change and interchange their elements in constant flux…”(30) What Marx saw in this class fluidity was the ultimate privilege of settler society — the privilege of having no proletariat at all. He later pointed out: “Hence the relatively high standard of wages in the United States. Capital may there try its utmost. It cannot prevent the labor market from being continuously emptied by the continuous conversion of wages laborers into independent, self-sustaining peasants. The position of wages laborer is for a very large part of the American people but a probational state, which they are sure to leave within a shorter or longer term.”(31) And Marx was writing not about a momentary or temporary phase, but about basic conditions that were true for well over two centuries in Amerika.
The position of wages laborer is for a very large part of the American people but a probational state, which they are sure to leave within a shorter or longer term."
What’s that saying/quote/joke? The typical citizen of the USA views themself as a temporarily indisposed millionaire.
Exactly! I wonder if it was Marx’s analysis which was the origin of this, and how fascinating to see it shift to temporarily indisposed/temporarily embarrassed millionaire from self-sustaining peasants. I imagine that had something to do with the way imperialism was going post WW2: rapid rise in living standards in the USA fueled by exporting all the messy parts
So were the striking miners at the Battle of Blair Mountain not proletarian?
What Marx saw in this class fluidity was the ultimate privilege of settler society — the privilege of having no proletariat at all. He later pointed out: “Hence the relatively high standard of wages in the United States. Capital may there try its utmost. It cannot prevent the labor market from being continuously emptied by the continuous conversion of wages laborers into independent, self-sustaining peasants. The position of wages laborer is for a very large part of the American people but a probational state, which they are sure to leave within a shorter or longer term.”(31) And Marx was writing not about a momentary or temporary phase, but about basic conditions that were true for well over two centuries in Amerika.
Who exactly are these “independent, self-sustaining peasants” in today’s US? A small percentage of large farm owners?
I’m sorry but when I read stats like that over 50% don’t own a home (either are a dependent living with someone who does or are renting), or that somewhere around the same number are living paycheck to paycheck and could easily get taken out by surprise medical costs because of the predatory healthcare system, or that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world and a lot of homelessness, I feel like laughing at an analysis that paints USians as somehow not proletarian. Not out of rudeness or intent to mock, but because the disparity between what the analysis is implying and the real lived experiences people are having is absurd.
That the settler aspect has a negative impact on the revolutionary potential of the US, I’d fully agree on. Where I tend to take issue is talking about the people there in a way that makes them sound more privileged than they actually are, for one, and tends to erase the broader strata of it, for another. Surely you cannot tell me a black revolutionary in prison is the same as a white landowner descended from settlers who came over generations ago and who lays a bogus claim to some land that was never theirs to begin with. Or that a white person who is homeless and struggling to survive, whose privilege in life amounts to probably not getting shot at by cops, lives a decadent, parasitic life. Or even that a white working class person working a dead-end minimum wage job to make ends meet and hoping they can retire someday is going to transition into an independent, self-sustaining peasant any day now.
I’m sure these analyses made some sense within the time period they were made, but part of marxism, as a science, is observing further as time goes on and, if needed, reevaluating a view of what is occurring. Mao didn’t go around talking to the peasantry to learn the conditions because Marx hadn’t written an analysis on the Chinese peasantry from afar yet. At a certain point, we have to dig into the nitty gritty of it and take note of it in detail. Theory is a a paradigm-changing difference for the big picture stuff, but it does not replace digging into what is occurring right now. One of the things theory does do is it helps us engage with what is observably happening within a dialectical materialist paradigm.
I just find it… I don’t know, disappointing? More than anything. The extent to which this complex strata of class and caste, theoretical economic mobility held back by realities of actual economic mobility, incredible exploitation on the one hand and incredible poverty on the other hand, gets reduced to “they’re privileged settlers.” Never mind that the US has had, like many parts of the world, organized interest in communism which was subsequently violently repressed and liberalized by the imperial power. It is one of the most violent powers in history, with no excuse for it, and not once in its history has that spawned from unity of class interests. There has always been disparity, going back to when there was chattel slavery and after that, use of cheap migrant labor (which holds true to this day).
So were the striking miners at the Battle of Blair Mountain not proletarian?
I don’t think Sakai would consider the white miners to be proletarian (as opposed to bourgeoisie proletariat) in the framework he develops in this text. I believe he is making the distinction between euro-amerikan workers as bourgeoisie proletariat and other proletariat groups to draw attention to the structural advantage they had from the start, and how their privilege has been maintained in general. IIRC part of his thesis is that the white american worker has an unspoken agreement to be an obedient servant of capital in exchange for a place of privilege in the world. This exists separate from the actions of individuals or even large groups of individuals such as those at Blair Mountain.
Sakai starts chapter 5 by clarifying that this classification isn’t a condemnation:
… Communists have never believed that the working class was some “holy,” religious object that must be enshrined away from scientific investigation… The political consciousness and material class role of the masses of any given nation cannot be assumed from historic generalizations, but must be discovered by social investigation and scientific analysis.
Sakai is certainly critical of the euro-american settlers. I don’t think the distinction is intended to say they (we?) are hopeless. I strongly agree that there are barriers to achieving class consciousness in colonized north america that are unique, and that can be better understood through the lens Sakai applies.
I took a super quick ctrl-f through the pdf and while the author doesn’t specifically mention Blair Mountain by name, he does discuss UMW and activities in Appalachia.
Selected excerpts:
In the UMW we can examine tactical unity over a 90-year period in a major industry. The fundamental reality was that Afrikan miners and Euro-Amerikan miners had tactical unity, but different strategic interests.
…
While UMW welcomed Afrikan workers as unpaid organizers and militants, when a mining community in the North became organized very often the Afrikan “union brothers” were told to get out. At the 1921 UMW Pittsburgh District Convention an experienced Afrikan delegate, recalling how he and hundreds of other Afrikan miners had taken up rifles to join the union’s “Armed Marches” in West Virginia, complained bitterly:
Those colored men from the state of West Virginia put their shoulders to the shoulders of white brothers, and our newspapers tell us that they have sacrificed their lives for this great movement.
I think it looks very embarrassing when a man would sacrifice his life for this movement, and after the victory is won then his brother would say: ‘We need you no longer.’ A livelihood belongs to every man and when you deprive me of it… you have almost committed murder to the whole entire race.
I believe this is referring to Blair Mountain, which occurred shortly before this meeting.
The author goes on to explain the mechanism by which the privileged position of the euro-amerikan was weaponized to break that unity:
In doing this [driving out the Afrikan worker] the imperialists were merely carrying out their general policy on colonial labor, restricting its role in strategic industries and reserving the best jobs for Euro-Amerikans in order to ensure the loyalty of settler society. When most coal mining jobs were brutal hand-loading of the coal while working in two foot high tunnels, there were many jobs for Afrikan labor. But as unionization and mechanization raised the wages and improved the work, it became “too good” for Afrikans, and the companies and the UMW started pushing Afrikans out.
Who exactly are these “independent, self-sustaining peasants” in today’s US? A small percentage of large farm owners?
I hope in reading the above it is clear that the author isn’t suggesting that the specific privileges the euro-amerikans enjoyed in early colonization have remained materially unchanged. The book explores how it has changed over time, culminating in point 4 of the image in the OP.
Slightly off topic, but I read this article recently and I think a lot of the themes are shared: https://mronline.org/2026/10/08/gill-imperialism-then-and-now/
I wonder if, when presented this way, it’s easier to understand what Sakai is trying to say.
How can wages be suppressed and the market grow at once? There is a paralysing contradiction between profits, the suppression of wages, and the need for a consuming class. This is what generates, time and again, problems of overaccumulation, overproduction, and what the Patnaiks call a threat to the value of money.
This contradiction is historically resolved through imperialism–not as the highest stage, but as the very foundation of capitalism. The capital-labour relation would never have consolidated without an imperialist base. What enables workers to be both exploited and to function as consumers is the ability to draw in cheap inputs from the colonies and the imperialist peripheries. In addition to capital and labour, there are categories of labour and resources outside the core that can be appropriated without accounting for their reproductive conditions. Prices are imposed on peasants in the colonies because they have lost sovereignty–what the Patnaiks call a “price-taking” category of labour. This is not workers and trade unions bargaining for wages; it is the imposition of prices through the denial of sovereignty.
This isn’t explicitly stated but when I read this I thought about how workers in america resist solidarity with because it requires them to acknowledge that their comparative place of privilege only exists because of imperialism and that it is on the backs of colonized people. Achieving worker solidarity that overthrows imperialism means giving up that place of privilege. I’m not going to pretend that isn’t scary to me, comrade. But I have to strive for it.
If you can start in agreement with the above (which it sounds like you do?) I think it’s easier to see Sakai’s connection to the position of privilege settler proletariats have in comparison to colonized workers outside of the US. I think adding in recognition that the labour of enslaved Afrikans was critical to the establishment of the US as a imperial power is natural.
I hope it’s not seen as dismissive that I don’t address the rest of your specific points because I believe you have misunderstood Sakai’s thesis. It’s been a few years since I read it as a whole and I’m honestly running on fumes so I think I did a disservice to the text. I believe a lot of the specific things you bring up are addressed in the text in shockingly similar language but I’m going to struggle to find them right now.
So were the striking miners at the Battle of Blair Mountain not proletarian
I think Sakai is trying to make the point that, on average, those striking miners in the USA can’t be relied on to view themselves as part of the proletariat.
Which is wrong because even the very workers at Blair Mountain viewed themselves as proletarians heavily steeped in socialist thought.
Socialist movements require active repression by the state and mass propaganda efforts. Things the state would not need concern itself with if there was no possibility of workers possessing or gaining a class consciousness.
What I believe the author was trying to address in this framing was how the Black workers were pushed out later by (in his words) the company and the union.
I shared this except upstream in this thread but I’ll use it again:
When most coal mining jobs were brutal hand-loading of the coal while working in two foot high tunnels, there were many jobs for Afrikan labor. But as unionization and mechanization raised the wages and improved the work, it became “too good” for Afrikans, and the companies and the UMW started pushing Afrikans out.
I really like the way D61 put it but I wonder if we shift it a little bit to be more specific that they could not be relied upon to have solidarity with their racialized union siblings.
It isn’t relevant if they viewed themselves as proletariat, the union (and by extension the union members) allowed this to happen.
Every time I read a passage from Sakai I think:
The support for the latter two groups has struck me as thin and/or unconvincing.
For example, the “no (white) proletariat” argument seems to boil to down to “they are paid too well to be proles.” ArcanePotato cites a passage elsewhere in this thread stating that 18th- or 19th-century U.S. farm workers made more than their European peers, and there’s also a passage in Settlers with figures on how many white households in the U.S. in the 1980s had a variety of modern conveniences (refrigerators, TVs, cars, etc.). I think this ignores that class is traditionally thought of as based more on one’s relationship to the means of production than to any absolute level of wealth – exchanging your labor for wages is what makes you proletariat, even if you make more than the person working next to you. If you’re working a wage labor job and your wage doubles, your interest in class struggle may become less urgent, but your relationship to the means of production doesn’t change. Temporarily placating the proletariat through higher wages isn’t the same as the proletariat not existing.
To add to your criticism of point 3: Dr. Rahman highlights this in his Marxism lecture series. The absolute position of a proletarian may improve over time (I think like… 50% of the world has smartphones)? But our relative position will continue to diminish (the richest people right now are basically running countries within their business and controlling countries outside of it). Even if white proletarian get imperial core treats this fundamental contradiction as a result of the falling rate of profit will remain.
i agree, saying that there is no proletariat in the us would be false, but i guess we could say most of the proletariat is part of the labour aristocracy, which is compatible with his view and marxist leninist analysis. there is a proletariat, but there is one so alienated from itself it will never actually fight for their own class.
I would boldly claim that white people in eastern Tennessee and West Virginia are pretty poor - they don’t even get the „treats“ that are used as evidence of a non-existing American Proletariat - which is as you said not a measurement of the class relations.
It’s a good moment for the adage “oppose book worship”, I think:
And:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_11.htm
Mao was encouraging revolutionaries to be this meticulous about class observations and noting down the particulars of them in a given region. Then in this thread, we’re arguing over out of context book quotes on the internet - quotes that exaggerate and oversimplify.
I get tired of it in the context of discussion about the US because it is often spoken of in lockstep with a fatalistic attitude about the revolutionary potential of the people there, rather than as a means of better understanding the class makeup of the region in detail, in order to contend with it. It also risks being used as a form of blame-shifting; “we failed because they actually were too comfy as they are and didn’t want to be liberated.” Meanwhile, Mao is like “here’s one of our shortcomings in how we’re going about engaging with people who live a different kind of life than what we’re used to.”
Respectfully, have you read/listened to the whole work? I’ll admit, I had resistance to it the first time I read it, maybe all the way until the end and I considered it as a whole.
I think what is important is understanding that people experience the US (and canada, but I won’t type that out every time) differently. I’m sure there are some details I have a hard time seeing, but I’d like to try and address points 2 and 3.
The paragraph after the one pictured explains more:
Some additional passages from that chapter that might help:
And
What’s that saying/quote/joke? The typical citizen of the USA views themself as a temporarily indisposed millionaire.
Exactly! I wonder if it was Marx’s analysis which was the origin of this, and how fascinating to see it shift to temporarily indisposed/temporarily embarrassed millionaire from self-sustaining peasants. I imagine that had something to do with the way imperialism was going post WW2: rapid rise in living standards in the USA fueled by exporting all the messy parts
So were the striking miners at the Battle of Blair Mountain not proletarian?
Who exactly are these “independent, self-sustaining peasants” in today’s US? A small percentage of large farm owners?
I’m sorry but when I read stats like that over 50% don’t own a home (either are a dependent living with someone who does or are renting), or that somewhere around the same number are living paycheck to paycheck and could easily get taken out by surprise medical costs because of the predatory healthcare system, or that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world and a lot of homelessness, I feel like laughing at an analysis that paints USians as somehow not proletarian. Not out of rudeness or intent to mock, but because the disparity between what the analysis is implying and the real lived experiences people are having is absurd.
That the settler aspect has a negative impact on the revolutionary potential of the US, I’d fully agree on. Where I tend to take issue is talking about the people there in a way that makes them sound more privileged than they actually are, for one, and tends to erase the broader strata of it, for another. Surely you cannot tell me a black revolutionary in prison is the same as a white landowner descended from settlers who came over generations ago and who lays a bogus claim to some land that was never theirs to begin with. Or that a white person who is homeless and struggling to survive, whose privilege in life amounts to probably not getting shot at by cops, lives a decadent, parasitic life. Or even that a white working class person working a dead-end minimum wage job to make ends meet and hoping they can retire someday is going to transition into an independent, self-sustaining peasant any day now.
I’m sure these analyses made some sense within the time period they were made, but part of marxism, as a science, is observing further as time goes on and, if needed, reevaluating a view of what is occurring. Mao didn’t go around talking to the peasantry to learn the conditions because Marx hadn’t written an analysis on the Chinese peasantry from afar yet. At a certain point, we have to dig into the nitty gritty of it and take note of it in detail. Theory is a a paradigm-changing difference for the big picture stuff, but it does not replace digging into what is occurring right now. One of the things theory does do is it helps us engage with what is observably happening within a dialectical materialist paradigm.
I just find it… I don’t know, disappointing? More than anything. The extent to which this complex strata of class and caste, theoretical economic mobility held back by realities of actual economic mobility, incredible exploitation on the one hand and incredible poverty on the other hand, gets reduced to “they’re privileged settlers.” Never mind that the US has had, like many parts of the world, organized interest in communism which was subsequently violently repressed and liberalized by the imperial power. It is one of the most violent powers in history, with no excuse for it, and not once in its history has that spawned from unity of class interests. There has always been disparity, going back to when there was chattel slavery and after that, use of cheap migrant labor (which holds true to this day).
I don’t think Sakai would consider the white miners to be proletarian (as opposed to bourgeoisie proletariat) in the framework he develops in this text. I believe he is making the distinction between euro-amerikan workers as bourgeoisie proletariat and other proletariat groups to draw attention to the structural advantage they had from the start, and how their privilege has been maintained in general. IIRC part of his thesis is that the white american worker has an unspoken agreement to be an obedient servant of capital in exchange for a place of privilege in the world. This exists separate from the actions of individuals or even large groups of individuals such as those at Blair Mountain.
Sakai starts chapter 5 by clarifying that this classification isn’t a condemnation:
Sakai is certainly critical of the euro-american settlers. I don’t think the distinction is intended to say they (we?) are hopeless. I strongly agree that there are barriers to achieving class consciousness in colonized north america that are unique, and that can be better understood through the lens Sakai applies.
I took a super quick ctrl-f through the pdf and while the author doesn’t specifically mention Blair Mountain by name, he does discuss UMW and activities in Appalachia.
Selected excerpts:
…
I believe this is referring to Blair Mountain, which occurred shortly before this meeting.
The author goes on to explain the mechanism by which the privileged position of the euro-amerikan was weaponized to break that unity:
I hope in reading the above it is clear that the author isn’t suggesting that the specific privileges the euro-amerikans enjoyed in early colonization have remained materially unchanged. The book explores how it has changed over time, culminating in point 4 of the image in the OP.
Slightly off topic, but I read this article recently and I think a lot of the themes are shared: https://mronline.org/2026/10/08/gill-imperialism-then-and-now/ I wonder if, when presented this way, it’s easier to understand what Sakai is trying to say.
This isn’t explicitly stated but when I read this I thought about how workers in america resist solidarity with because it requires them to acknowledge that their comparative place of privilege only exists because of imperialism and that it is on the backs of colonized people. Achieving worker solidarity that overthrows imperialism means giving up that place of privilege. I’m not going to pretend that isn’t scary to me, comrade. But I have to strive for it.
If you can start in agreement with the above (which it sounds like you do?) I think it’s easier to see Sakai’s connection to the position of privilege settler proletariats have in comparison to colonized workers outside of the US. I think adding in recognition that the labour of enslaved Afrikans was critical to the establishment of the US as a imperial power is natural.
I hope it’s not seen as dismissive that I don’t address the rest of your specific points because I believe you have misunderstood Sakai’s thesis. It’s been a few years since I read it as a whole and I’m honestly running on fumes so I think I did a disservice to the text. I believe a lot of the specific things you bring up are addressed in the text in shockingly similar language but I’m going to struggle to find them right now.
I think Sakai is trying to make the point that, on average, those striking miners in the USA can’t be relied on to view themselves as part of the proletariat.
Which is wrong because even the very workers at Blair Mountain viewed themselves as proletarians heavily steeped in socialist thought.
Socialist movements require active repression by the state and mass propaganda efforts. Things the state would not need concern itself with if there was no possibility of workers possessing or gaining a class consciousness.
What I believe the author was trying to address in this framing was how the Black workers were pushed out later by (in his words) the company and the union.
I shared this except upstream in this thread but I’ll use it again:
I really like the way D61 put it but I wonder if we shift it a little bit to be more specific that they could not be relied upon to have solidarity with their racialized union siblings.
It isn’t relevant if they viewed themselves as proletariat, the union (and by extension the union members) allowed this to happen.
I agree and appreciate the assist. I’m rusty 😅