The Anti-Marxist Elitism of J. Sakai’s ‘Settlers’
By: Erich Arbor
Tags: Class Struggle, Socialism, US Politics, Communism, Racism

“We are Marxists and Marxism teaches that in our approach to a problem we should start from objective facts, not from abstract definitions, and that we should derive our guiding principles, policies and measures from an analysis of these facts.” — Chairman Mao Zedong

Introduction

Across the history of organizing the masses of the working class, certain forms of decadence and distortions of theories, histories, and tendencies have arisen within Marxism. Typically these bastardizations of historical materialism can be codified as petty bourgeois. We see these organizations, ideas, and figures throughout the history socialist struggle, portraying themselves as in the interest of working-class liberation, yet steeped within utterly bourgeois sympathies and reaction.

Petty bourgeois reaction is present in every single significant revolutionary event in recent history. Whether it be Bourgeois Liberals in the Paris Commune, the Mensheviks in the October Revolution, the Kuomintang in the Chinese Revolution, or the German Social Democrats in the Spartacist Uprising, these forces have continually stood against the interests and revolutionary character of the working class. Each example represents a dereliction to the working class and highlights their subservience to the ruling bourgeoisie.

Currently, a petty bourgeois ideology plagues the Western Socialist zeitgeist, which has largely been spread by the work of writer J. Sakai. It evades a name, but we can refer to it as “First-World Third Worldism” (FWTW). In most circles, it is taboo to present a single criticism of their book Settlers, written in 1983. Virtue signaling towards POC comrades, FWTW’s own guilt has suspended historical materialist analysis, not allowing critique of an ultraleftist, anti-Marxist line. Nevertheless, it must be confronted head-on, why a self-professed anonymous Maoist such as Sakai, with no known connection to organizing nor even academic circles, should be adopted, without question, at face value, by Marxist-Leninists.

The renowned Kevin Rashid Johnson, Minister of Defense of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party, who is currently incarcerated in the Pendleton Correctional Facility in Indiana, has already decidedly closed the case on Sakai’s FWTW infantilism in this piece on the subject. Anyone who has found the time to read Settlers should have no excuse for navigating this text. However, it can be a lengthy read, and this essay will reiterate and summarize Comrade Rashid Johnson’s points, as well as provide further examples of how the FWTW ideology corrupts the workers’ movement internationally, and how we should instead be moving forward.

Trotsky and his Ideology as a Case Study for Petty Bourgeois Reaction

Leon Trotsky had a well-documented disregard, and in many cases, outright resentment for the peasantry of Russia. Growing up in a wealthier Jewish family of farmers in Ukraine, he had refused to learn the language of Yiddish which was spoken across the Pale of Settlement among the Jewish working class, seeing it as beneath him. This made matters difficult in his attempted interactions with the majority of Jewish peasantry, as most were banned outright from being literate in Russian during the Tsarist period.

A Menshevik merely until weeks before the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, Trotsky is a petty bourgeois figure within Soviet history. While he made significant military successes towards the Bolshevik cause in the newly created Soviet Union, his belief in socialism was rooted not in the wants and needs of the Soviet working class, but contradiction-laden, bourgeois, academic, and adventurist ideals. In his theories on permanent revolution, a concept many self-identifying Trotskyists fail to understand themselves, an assemblage of petty bourgeois theory is made crystal-clear.

Trotsky and his followers believe that only in the industrialized world can socialism truly succeed, and while revolutions can experience success in less developed regions, as was Russia in the early 20th century, they can only become outposts for international revolution. This runs counter to Marxism-Leninism’s Socialism in One Country theory put forward by Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin, in which wherever a socialist revolution allows communists to take power, they should be interested in building up productive forces such as industry and agricultural collectivization, rather than prolonged international class war.

Permanent Revolution has effectively proven to be a failing ideology in building socialism, not only against the successes of Socialism in One Country projects that built actually-existing-socialism in the Soviet Union, China, Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam, but because of how void Trotskyism is of a proletarian character.

Soviet Workers Commemorate the October Revolution, 1938.

What do we mean when we say ideology is “void of proletarian character”? We simply mean that the effects of an ideology’s propagation and successive implementation run contrary to the working class as a whole. In effect, it is petty bourgeois; formed in the interests of reactionary elitist liberalism. We see this at first in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Russian, and later Soviet, citizens did not want to be fighting an imperialist war. The phrase “Land, Bread, and Peace” characterized the 1917 Soviet Decrees, declaring the redistribution of land, worker’s rights, and exit from all imperialist wars. Thus, it is naïve, and can only be categorized as petty bourgeois adventurism to declare a permanent revolution necessary. The working class of Russia wanted peace, not further war. Trotsky’s bourgeois character ran in direct conflict with the needs and wants of the working people of the Soviet Union.

To summarize this, one only needs to see which individuals have championed Trotskyism, and thus embodied the class character of Trotskyism. Trotsky himself collaborated with the United States, incriminating Communists who worked to fight Fascist Franco in Spain, during his time in Mexico:

In June [1940], Robert McGregor of the [US] Consulate met with Trotsky in his home… he met again with Trotsky on 13 July… Trotsky told McGregor in detail of the allegations and evidence he had compiled… He gave to McGregor the names of Mexican publications, political and labour leaders, and government officials allegedly associated with the PCM [Mexico and the USSR were the only countries in the world to materially support the fight against Franco’s Fascism in the Spanish Civil War 1936–39]. He charged that one of the Comintern’s [the Communist international’s] leading agents, Carlos Contreras served on the PCM Directing Committee. He also discussed the alleged efforts of Narciso Bassols, former Mexican Ambassador to France, whom Trotsky claimed was a Soviet agent, to get him deported from Mexico.

Max Schachtman, considered the father of Trotskyism in the United States, completely condemned the Soviet Union as being equal to the capitalist west in impeding true socialism, yet later defended the imperialist actions of the United States in Vietnam. Tony Cliff, a similar figure of Schachtman from the United Kingdom, declared a strict position of neutrality towards the Korean War, claiming the Soviet Union and the United States were equal in having imperial motives in Korea. While the USSR was providing medical and air support to the newly-established Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the United States was carpet-bombing Korea indiscriminately, as well as committing war crimes such as the No Gun Ri Massacre in 1950. Trotsky and his disciples should learn from the masses, not the other way around.

J. Sakai and the Western Maoist Bourgeois Ideology

Establishing the petty bourgeois character of Trotskyism, it would be irresponsible not to address more popular forms of similar ideology within the contemporary Left. Trotskyism has been on a steady decline in popularity, as its ineffectiveness has been proven through decades of mediocre political action. Right now, however, well-meaning comrades who identify themselves with scientific socialist principles are falling prey to similar reaction, calling for utopian, albeit materially bankrupt ideas based in what is found in J. Sakai’s Settlers, a book towing what Comrade Rashid Johnson condemns as the “vulgar labor aristocracy line”. Here is a longer quote from Rashid Johnson’s aforementioned essay on the subject:

Settlers cites episodes from the extensive history of “white” racial oppression of people of color in Amerika and the relative privileged status that “whites” at all social-economic levels have enjoyed at the expense of peoples of color, and which has allowed even working class and poor whites to betray the interests of their counterparts of color. The main theme of Settlers is “white” racial treachery, betrayal, brutality and privilege that claims to know no class distinction. The conclusion being that these factors combine to create a uniform class of “whiteness” that has no proletarian sector.

One could easily write off Sakai’s work as an infantile self-projection of what is petty bourgeois in American society. Throughout the book, statistics are left unsourced, and quotes from labor leaders and communists are manipulated in a way to slander these figures as white supremacists. In one of many problematic segments, Sakai is found misrepresenting the quotes of Communist William Z. Foster to portray Foster as a racist. Along with Black Communist James W. Ford, Foster ran in the 1932 Presidential election and made self-determination for the Black Belt a significant part of the Communist Party program. As the first party secretary, Foster helped establish the party as the first and only US political party to be racially integrated in 1919. The CPUSA was one of the first organizations to organize against Jim Crow lynchings, calling for a death penalty for lynchers. Knowing this, it becomes far less likely that Sakai is in good faith of his usage of Foster’s words. Yet online, far too many Marxists are regurgitating Sakai’s anti-Marxist rhetoric. If we are seriously invested, dedicated, and determined to build a socialist society in the United States, we need to cast off these ultraleftist analyses void of all materialist outlook.