>>2820232As far as an authentically Marxist critique of the material this group distributed would go: focusing on the material's treatment of the ethno-nationalism within one particular group is a mistake.
Particularly because no one involved in it was a "black ethno-nationalist" and the authors tellingly have a very infantalizing (perhaps typically racist, for wealthy and anarchist asian-american students) view of black americans at a level of political and economy agency. Reading MIM and Sakai gives an impression that they think black people are dolls or dummies animated only by identity, fear and violence. Whereas they treat asians as inherently freer and wiser. This is explicit in Park's later writing where his explicitly incel screeds are targeted at 'strong asian males' being cucked by the 'amerikkkan' feminists.
Instead of being lost in the internet reception of Settlers it is it better to look at how it uses the vocabulary of its time to make it seem like Maoist "national struggle" rhetoric means something that it never meant until after Mao's death and its aestheticization into campus politics and games for intellectuals. I agree with you broadly but the problem is the "nationalism" not "ethno" since the "ethno-nationalism" encouraged by the that part of the New Communist Movement was a kind of revisionism that wanted to make other forms of Marxism seem revisionism by playing word games with the idea of a "national" struggle so that it applied all kinds of spurious things. It is no surprise to me at all that at least one of the authors of Settlers is a sincere admirer of both Mein Kampf and the John Birch Society.
All this goes to show why you cannot understand Settlers unless you know the works that it was rewritten from. Because only then can you see how the authors were being highly selective around the issues of colonialism and imperialism as stages of historical development.
Settlers is not one book and never really was. Isolating it as a single scholarly text is part of a hoodwink - rendering it ahistorical and anachronistic. Instead understand that the "labor aristocracy" writing that it was edited from was one continuous stream. And if you understand that by actually tracing the books origins and the origins of its claims you will see exactly how radically the MIM and Sakai version of 'Labor Aristocracy' departed
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