>>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 from the concept as used by Lenin. Or alternatively people can trust those also claiming that H. W. Edwards was an English Marxist historian and not an insane, bitter ex-communist woman from a wealthy family in Boston.
The vocal minority of course do not care even a little about understanding the history of the ideas that they spout.
The utility of the book for black ethno-nationalists in particular is more to do with intra-group dynamics and certain individuals wanting to thin their ranks to prevent skeptical voices democratizing the discussions.
The American history presented in Settlers is so insulting to the average black american worker that it works well to keep black nationalist groups small and orientated around individual bullies rather than widening their networks. Read as subtext in Settlers and its related works who the authors thought were capable of meaningful compromise and coalition and who they thought would passively get fucked over each time. Afropessimism is a good label for it because its view of black americans aptitude for economic flexibility is on par with Archie Bunker.
I wonder if that in particular was why the original foreword essay was removed from the book (along with other awkward passages) since to me it is strongly suggestive of a hierarchy of oppressed races with asians at the top and africans at the bottom. The version of 'National Oppression' theory MTW inherited from the NCM should be understood relative to that and not to online arguments from seven years ago.
Outside of the Garveyite delirium - how many times in Settlers does a black person make a choice?