>>823359Sakai's position is essentially this:
"There obviously is a white working class in the u.s. A large one, of many, many millions. But it isn't a proletariat."
Settlers is making a much bigger claim than "racism divides the working class." Sakai's basic argument is that The United States was built as a settler-colonial society, and the white working class developed as a privileged component of that society rather than as a straightforward revolutionary proletariat, however Sakai's position is not merely "the white proletariat is privileged. It is that the white working class in the United States is not a proletariat in the revolutionary/Marxian sense at all. in his framework, race and class in America can't be separated. The conquest of Indigenous land, enslavement of Africans, and later imperial expansion were foundational to American capitalism. Sakai doesn't deny that white workers sell their labor or can be exploited by capitalists. His argument is that their position within the American social order historically gave them advantages that colonized workers didn't have. Those advantages included things like access to stolen land, higher wages relative to colonized workers, exclusion from certain forms of racialized exploitation, citizenship, political rights, and eventually incorporation into a specifically white national identity. Sakai's question is "What does a worker do politically when the society exploiting him is simultaneously giving him a material stake in the exploitation of somebody else?" He says the resulting stratum is a labor aristocracy of workers who remain subordinate to capital but receive enough relative privilege that their interests can become aligned with maintaining the existing order.
Sakai thinks the traditional left makes a huge mistake when it says Black workers and white workers are both workers, therefore their fundamental interests are the same. His response is essentially "Not necessarily. Look at the material history. When one section of the working population has historically benefited from another population's dispossession, then simply declaring all workers to be part of an undivided working class doesn't make those antagonisms disappear. He is not merely saying that some white workers are racist. He's arguing that whiteness itself became a racist political/material relationship.
Sakai thinks much of the white American left wants to universalize its own experience. The white American left says: "We're all exploited by capitalism." but Sakai responds: "You're overlooking the fact that some of you are beneficiaries of the system you're claiming to oppose."