Permanently Deleted
Pretend to be italian. :AyyyyyOC-big:
The problem with Sakai is that there’s basically no evidence that he exists outside of the book and like one other article he wrote.
Ehhh he’s probably a real person. Here’s a phone interview with him and here’s some other stuff he wrote.
Is it sketchy as hell that he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page? Absolutely. But what’s more likely:
- Feds created this persona to write a super-niche leftist book in the 80s, fleshed out his bibliography a bit despite the book not catching on even among most leftists, and then got someone to do an interview as the persona in 2003, when the feds had all sorts of other shit to worry about and when American leftism might have been at its lowest point? Or,
- Some leftist activist wrote a book in the 80s, occasionally put out a few other publications, but never really put any effort into making it as an author?
I won’t say it’s obvious one way or the other, but I’m leaning towards Option 2.
Lots of good stuff in there:
What to make of this? It depends on who we’re talking about. If a black revolutionary group took the “Settlers” view of European-Americans, and concluded from it that nothing good could ever be expected from them, I would not argue, for it is undeniably true that no black movement ever failed, no black person was ever lynched, for underestimating the good faith of white folks.
But for people attempting to intervene politically among European-Americans, this stuff is a dead-end. I will not here dispute the “Settlers” version of history: it is admitted that so far neither white workers nor any other sector of white society have separated themselves categorically from the entire infamy. Perhaps they never will. As many people have pointed out, class is not a listing of individuals by occupation but a process whereby some people come to see they have common interests in opposition to the interests of others, and that these interests include the building of a new society. In the final analysis only events will determine whether any sector of European-Americans make up a portion of the global proletariat. In the meantime, for the relatively small number of European-Americans who are dedicated to the fight for a better world, and who think that revolution is necessary, what better use of their time, intelligence, and energy is there than the effort to crack open white society? And to do that, they need a theory that will point out the fissures in it, not deny their existence.
This was written in 1996, when the millennial generation that’s eaten so much shit over the last ~13 years wasn’t part of the equation. Shutting so many people – including many white people – in that generation out of the middle class may result in a “sector of white society” distinguishing itself from the mass of deproletarianized European-Americans. It’s no coincidence that people of that generation and younger are so skeptical of capitalism.
This part also struck me as insightful:
[T]he [white] people in the garrison are like most human beings in most times and places, as good as their circumstances allow them to be, willing to do the right thing if it isn’t too inconvenient.
Nothing, you’re a One True Leftist now, and can be really smug when talking about racism!
I just started the goblet of fire
