What do I mean by metaphysical view? Engels defines the metaphysical outlook in his criticism of Duhring: The alternative view to Sakai’s racial nationalism is the view that the institutions responsible for upholding white supremacy are the same institutions responsible for upholding capitalism, and therefore the struggle against the two should be united in order to bring as many workers as possible into the struggle against the bourgeoisie. What this article is denying is the metaphysical view of the country held by some communists – the view that white Americans are incapable of revolution, a view most thoroughly explored in the book Settlers by J Sakai. Let it be known that this article is in no way denying the white supremacist nature of the United States of America, a country which was born from slavery and genocide. And in between these two poles we have the semi-formal sector, such as the media and education systems, which are under no direct legal obligation to uphold white supremacy, yet routinely do, and are in fact responsible for reproducing it on a subjective level. On the other end we can theorize about informal, unorganized racism, such as hiring disparities practiced by businesses, opportunist union leadership, individual acts of racism practiced by the populace, etc. At one end we find the overtly white supremacist institutions such as the police, the penal system, the judicial system, the military, the banking system, and the legal system in general, which has built-in prejudices against non-whites, such as sentencing disparity, laws designed to target groups, over-policing certain communities, etc. These institutions exist inside and outside of the American state, with varying degrees of formal organization. Throughout the United States of America, there has been extremely harsh repression of different groups who find themselves the target of its white supremacist institutions. Keep in mind this is written with only decolonial communists in mind: anyone not taking Marxism as their premise can simply ignore this, which is targeted at people who claim to uphold both Sakaist thought and Marxism-Leninism. The interpretations of decolonial thought are as numerous as they are vague, so for this post, I’ve decided to focus on a work specific enough to merit discussion.
I believed this would be an opportune time to address J Sakai’s book Settlers, which has been extremely influential among communists in the US, to their detriment. This controversy has already been commented on by Comrade Rashid of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party. This post is written in English, in light of recent controversy regarding the US-based organization Black Hammer.
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