A Materialist Defense of Sakai’s Settlers
J. Sykes’ 2022 article published by Fight Back! News attempted to dismiss the arguments of Settlers by J. Sakai regarding settler colonialism, the labor aristocracy, and the revolutionary potential of the Amerikkkan working class. These critiques present themselves as orthodox Marxist-Leninist corrections, accusing Sakai of overstating settler colonialism, rejecting multinational working-class unity, and abandoning classical formulations of the national question. Sykes relies primarily on assertion rather than analysis; replacing materialist explanation, causal demonstration, or concrete empirical substantiation with polemic denial. Further, Sykes’ critiques misread Sakai, flatten historical materialism into abstraction, and reproduce a strategic line that has repeatedly failed in Amerikkkan history. This article argues the opposite–far from rejecting Marxism-Leninism, Sakai extends its method to the concrete conditions of a settler-imperialist empire.
A central charge leveled against Settlers is that it treats settler colonialism as an eternal or overriding contradiction, and by doing so, replaces class analysis with moral indictment. This is a caricature. Sakai does not argue that settler colonialism exists apart from capitalism; he argues that Amerikkkan capitalism itself emerged through settler colonialism. As Sykes himself writes, “capitalism’s origins are largely based upon ‘primitive accumulation’ – the theft of land and resources during the colonial period. This theft helped to jumpstart the original accumulation of capital. In the U.S., this began with settler colonialism, whereby colonizers from Europe settled in the Americas, bringing with them terrible violence and oppression of indigenous and other oppressed peoples.”
Sykes claims, for example, that “[t]he book is correct to point out that the U.S. is founded on colonialism, slavery, and genocide, but after that it gets a lot wrong. Unfortunately, Sakai’s book is anti-worker and ultra-leftist, and its errors come from a fundamental misunderstanding of the national question in the U.S.” His acknowledgment of settler colonialism undercuts his own critique. He simultaneously recognizes that these violent mechanisms were constitutive for capital accumulation, yet claims Sakai overstates them. To treat settler colonialism as a “secondary” contradiction is to abstract capitalism from its historical mode of development. Marxism is not the study of capitalism in general, but of capitalism as it actually exists. Sakai himself directly addresses the claims of ultra-leftism, rather sardonically reminding his readers, “Engels also wrote that the ‘bourgeois’ sectors [of the working class] were those that were unionized. Sounds like a raving ultra-leftist, doesn't he? (which he sure wasn't). So that this is a strategic and not a tactical problem, that it has a material basis in imperialized class privilege, has long been understood by those willing to see reality.”
Sykes claims Sakai “rejects the possibility of forming a strategic alliance of the multinational working class and the oppressed nationality movements.” In reality, what Sakai actually rejects is the realization of the specific material conditions necessary to create unity within the Amerikkkan working class. Unity is not, and cannot be, a moral aspiration; it is the outcome of struggle grounded in shared interests. In Amerikkka, white workers have historically secured material advantages, higher wages, job monopolies, housing access, citizenship privilege, and political inclusion through their incorporation into the settler project. This is not a question of consciousness alone; it is a question of political economy. A class that materially benefits from the empire cannot be assumed to oppose it simply because it sells labor power.
Sykes insists that white workers share an objective interest with oppressed nations in overthrowing capitalism. This collapses formal exploitation into actual class position. Imperialism fundamentally alters the structure of exploitation. Superprofits extracted from the Global South subsidize social stability in the imperial core. As a result, broad sections of the white working class do not function as an exploited proletariat in the classical sense, but rather as a labor aristocracy integrated into imperial accumulation. This is not a moral claim; it is empirical, consistent with Lenin’s analysis of opportunism under imperialism. Sykes provides no evidence to counter this, relying instead on appeals to Lenin and Haywood without explaining why their analysis would contradict Sakai’s materialist method.
Sykes claims that Sakai abandons the Marxist-Leninist theory of the national question, yet elsewhere affirms Lenin’s principle: “The right of nations to self-determination means only the right to independence in a political sense, the right to free, political secession from the oppressing nation.” Classical formulations by Lenin and Stalin were developed in the context of old-world empires that contained large oppressed proletarian populations within their imperial cores. Amerikkka is structurally distinct; it is a settler empire in which the dominant working class was historically constituted through colonization and exclusion. Applying Leninist categories mechanically, without adjusting for this difference, turns Marxist analysis into dogmatism.
In Settlers, Sakai develops this point more fully, explaining, “Now, there obviously is a white working class in the U.S.. A large one, of many, many millions. From offshore oil derricks to the construction trades to auto plants. But it isn't a proletariat. It isn't the most exploited class from which capitalism derives its super profits” (Emphasis added). Sykes himself seems to, as Sakai wrote "[forget] that there have been many different kinds of working classes in history” and Sykes “[forgets] that Fred Engels himself criticized the English industrial working class of the late 19th century as a ‘bourgeois proletariat’, an aristocracy of labor. … [The] sectors that were dominated by adult men, not women or children. Engels also wrote that the ‘bourgeois’ sectors were those that were unionized.” Sakai’s work represents not a rejection of Lenin’s analysis, but rather its continuation to a different, more contemporarily relevant historical terrain.
Perhaps the most revealing criticism is the claim that Sakai’s framework makes revolution in Amerikkka impossible. Sykes themselves writes that Sakai “argues that white workers are completely bought off by imperialism” and that this view “runs counter to facts and makes enemies of friends, disrupting the most important revolutionary weapon the masses of the people currently have: the united front against monopoly capitalism and the strategic alliance.” Unfortunately for Sykes, history suggests the opposite. What has consistently failed is the strategy that centers white workers as the revolutionary subject. From Reconstruction, to the CIO, to the New Left, white labor has repeatedly aligned with empire, white supremacy, and repression when its material position was threatened. Sakai’s analysis does not deny revolution; it identifies where revolutionary potential actually resides, among oppressed nations, colonized peoples, prisoners, migrants, and surplus populations excluded from imperial stability.
Sykes accuses Sakai of discouraging organizing among white workers, but Sakai rejects dishonest organizing, insisting instead on confronting them with a real political choice: empire or liberation. Many will choose the empire. A revolutionary strategy must be built with this likelihood in mind, not concealed beneath slogans of unity. Sykes’ disagreement is not merely theoretical; it is strategic. Sakai insists that revolutionary politics begin with what people are materially, not with what organizers wish them to be. Sykes prioritizes organizational optimism over historical analysis, recycling Popular Frontist logic that has repeatedly subordinated oppressed nations to an imagined white proletarian leadership.
Rejecting Settlers is not a defense of Marxism-Leninism; it is the defense of an illusory dogmatism–a mirage that conceals mythologies about the Amerikkkan white working class that have already endured rigorous testing and has been soundly defeated by history. Revolutionary theory must be ruthlessly vicious toward illusions; and it is this dispelling of illusions that is Sakai’s enduring contribution to the body of revolutionary theory. Sykes’s piece, by stark contrast, relies on vague assertions, moralistic readings, and appeals to authority rather than a materialist understanding of class, imperialism, and settler colonialism. Ultimately, Sykes falls victim to a facet of the Amerikkkan left that Sakai himself laments: “the fact that we have radical movements here addicted to not seeing reality is a much larger crisis than any one issue,” as Sykes seems to hold dear to the illusion that the white working class is the basis of revolutionary potential within the country.
