It is one thing to simply assert as McCreary does, that “ideology is semi-autonomous.” It is another to actually map out what this means in the lives of real human beings – for better and for worse – and this is what Sakai manages to do. Especially chapters VI (“The US Industrial Proletariat”) and XIII (“Klass, Kulture & Kommunity”) deal extensively with just this theme, the former implicitly but the latter quite explicitly. Rather than denying “the semi-autonomous nature of ideology,” a careful reading of Settlers would indicate that this is in fact one of the subjects Sakai is examining. Relying on the materialist assumption that how people live, how they are exploited (or how they exploit), how they resist (or how they submit) are the true “points on which history turns” – and supplementing this with insights into how people are organized into communities and nations beyond the workplace (“the ‘sensuous’ reality of human society”) – Settlers retells the history of White America from the perspective of its victims. It does not purport to be a “cultural history” (don’t we have several bookshelves too many of those already?) or a metaphysical inquiry into “agency” or the “dissonance between belief, location and action” – instead, it provides a class analysis of US history. Settlers is a remarkably easy book to read, a down to earth economic and political history of White America that uses Marxist concepts and “movement lingo” while dodging the twin traps of academic mumbo jumbo and lefty jargon. Sakai’s Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat cover to cover! His review, published in your last issue, raises some interesting questions, but tackles Sakai’s argument in an almost bizarre “apples and oranges” fashion. I am honestly wondering if Tyler McCreary read J.
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