Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern

by J. Sakai

(anthropology, for example, had its origins as an intelligence service for European colonialization of the world).

What lured Europeans to leave their homes and cross the Atlantic was the chance to share in conquering Indian land.

The coming of capitalism had smashed all the traditional securities and values of feudal England, and financed its beginnings with the most savage reduction of the general living standard. During the course of the sixteenth century wages in the building trades went down by over half, while the price of firewood, wheat, and other necessities soared by five times. By encouraging this outflow the British ruling class both furthered their Empire and eased opposition at home to their increasing concentration of wealth and power. And the new settlers, lusting for individual land and property, were willing to endure hardships and uncertainties for this prized goal.

I had never though of the enclosure acts as supporting colonization but DUH

The life of European settlers — and the class structure of their society — was abnormal because it was dependent upon a foundation of conquest, genocide, and enslavement. The myth of the self-sufficient, white settler family “clearing the wilderness” and supporting themselves through their own initiative and hard labor, is a propaganda fabrication.

Never has Euro-Amerikan society completely supported itself. This is the decisive factor in the consciousness of all classes and strata of white society from 1600 to now.

Amerika was “spacious” and “sparsely populated” only because the European invaders destroyed whole civilizations and killed off millions of Native Amerikans to get the land and profits they wanted.

Conservative Western historical estimates show that the Spanish “reduced” the Indian population of their colonies from some 50 million to only 4 million by the end of the 17th century.

Genocide was the necessary and deliberate act of the capitalists and their settler shock-troops.

You see, the land wasn’t “empty” after all — and for Amerika to exist the settlers had to deliberately make the land “empty.”

Indian slavery was also important in supporting the settler invasion beachhead on the “New World.” From New England (where the pious Pilgrims called them “servants”) to South Carolina, the forced labor of Indian slaves was essential to the very survival of the young Colonies.

Indian slaves in large numbers were very difficult to deal with, since the settlers were trying to hold them on terrain that was more theirs than the invaders. Usually, the minimum precaution would be to in effect swap Indian slaves around, with New England using slaves from Southern Colonies — and vice-versa. In most cases the slave catchers killed almost all the adult Indian men as too dangerous to keep around, only saving the women and children for sale.

The point is that White Amerika has never been self-sufficient, has never completely supported itself. Indian slavery died out, and was gradually lost in the great river of Afrikan slavery, only because the settlers finally decided to exterminate the heavily depopulated Indian nations altogether.

Historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in his study of The European Discovery of America, notes that after repeated failures the Europeans learned that North Amerikan settler colonies were not self-sufficient; to survive they needed large capital infusions and the benefits of sustained trade with Father Europe.[21] But why should the British aristocracy and capitalists invest in small family farms — and how great a trade is possible when what the settlers themselves produced was largely the very raw materials and foodstuffs they themselves needed? Slavery throughout the “New World” answered these questions.

While the cream of the profits went to the planter and merchant capitalists, the entire settler economy was raised up on a foundation of slave labor, slave products, and the slave trade.

They were not just slaves — the Afrikan nation as a whole served as a proletariat for the Euro-Amerikan oppressor nation.

The Jeffersonian vision of Amerika as a pastoral European democracy was rooted in the national life of small, independent white landowners. Such a society had no place for a proletariat within its ranks — yet, in the age of capitalism, could not do without the labor of such a class.

Amerika had no feudal or communal past, but was constructed from the ground up according to the nightmare vision of the bourgeoisie.

Amerika is so decadent that it has no proletariat of its own, but must exist parasitically on the colonial proletariat of oppressed nations and national minorities.

Young Amerika was capitalism’s real-life Disneyland.

“Every man in this colony has land, and none but Negroes are laborers.” (U.S. imperialism still has this same problem of white military recruitment today.)

It was only possible for settler society to afford this best-paid, most bourgeoisified white workforce because they had also obtained the least-paid, most proletarian Afrikan colony to support it.

Christopher Hill, the British Marxist historian, directly relates the European willingness to enter servitude to the desire for land ownership, describing it as “a temporary phase through which one worked one’s way to freedom and land-ownership.”

Thus did Bacon’s Rebellion define its main program. This was a classic settler liberal-conservative debate, which still echoes into our own times, like that between Robert F. Kennedy vs. George Wallace, OEO vs. KKK, CIA vs. FBI, and so on.

Killing disarmed oppressed people is much more satisfying to Euro-Amerikans than having to face armed foes.

Like Bacon’s Rebellion, the “liberty” that the Amerikan Revolutionists of the 1770s fought for was in large part the freedom to conquer new Indian lands and profit from the commerce of the slave trade, without any restrictions or limitations. In other words, the bourgeois “freedom” to oppress and exploit others.

Almost one-third of the Continental Army deserted at Valley Forge. So enlistment bribes were widely offered to get recruits. New York State offered new enlistments 400 acres each of Indian land. Virginia offered an enlistment bonus of an Afrikan slave (guaranteed to be not younger than age ten) and 100 acres of Indian land.

On Dec. 31, 1775, Gen. Washington ordered the enlistment of Afrikans into the Continental Army, with the promise of freedom at the end of the war. Many settlers sent their slaves into the army to take their place. One Hessian mercenary officer with the British said: “The Negro can take the field instead of the master; and therefore, no regiment is to be seen in which there are not Negroes in abundance…” Over 5,000 Afrikans served in the Patriot military, making up a large proportion of the most experienced troops (settlers usually served for only short enlistments — 90 days duty being the most common term — while slaves served until the war’s end or death).

John Hancock, President of the Continental Congress, may have presented Afrikan U.S. troops with a banner — which praised them as “The Bucks of America” — but that didn’t help Afrikans such as Captain Mark Starlin. He was the first Afrikan captain in the Amerikan naval forces, and had won many honors for his near-suicidal night raids on the British fleet (which is why the settlers let him and his all-Afrikan crew sail alone). But as soon as the war ended, his master simply reclaimed him. Starlin spent the rest of his life as a slave. He, ironically enough, is known to historians as an exceptionally dedicated “patriot,” super-loyal to the new settler nation.[67]

65,000 Afrikans joined the British forces — over ten for every one enlisted in the Continental U.S. ranks.[68] As Lenin said in discussing the national question: “The masses vote with their feet.” And in this case they voted against Amerika.

Benjamin Franklin, for example, not only gave up slave-owning himself, but in 1755 wrote that slavery should be banned and only Europeans permitted to live in North America.

It sums matters up to note that President Jefferson, who believed that the planters should restrict and then wipe out entirely the Afrikan colony, ended his days owning more slaves than he started with.[73]

Abolishing slavery was the commonly proposed answer to this increasing instability in the colonial system. The settler bourgeoisie, however, which had immense capital tied up in slaves, could hardly be expected to take such a step willingly.

One immediate response in the 1830s was to break up the Afrikan communities in the cities.

Throughout the South much of the Afrikan population was gradually shipped back to the plantations, declining year after year until the Civil War. In New Orleans the drop was from 50% to 15% of the city population; in St. Louis from 25% to only 2% of the city population.[83]

The slave system had committed the fatal sin of restricting the white population, while massing great numbers of Afrikans.

But by 1860 the number of journeymen workers compared to masters had tripled, and a majority of Euro-Amerikan men were now wage-earners.[92]Working for a master or merchant was no longer just a temporary stepping-stone to becoming an independent landowner or shopkeeper. This new white workforce for the first time had little prospect of advancing beyond wage-slavery.

Everywhere in the North, the pre–Civil War popular struggles to enlarge the political powers of the settler masses also had the program of taking away civil rights from Afrikans. These movements had the public aim of driving all Afrikans out of the North.

The boom in slave cotton and the parallel rise in immigrant European labor was tied to the removal of the Indian nations from the land.

In 1830 Jackson finally got Congress to pass the Removal Act, which authorized him to use the army to totally relocate or exterminate all Indians east of the Mississippi River. The whole Eastern half of this continent was now to be completely cleared of Indians, every square inch given over to the needs of European settlers.

First as a land speculator then as a slavemaster, and finally as General and then President, Jackson literally spent the whole of his adult life personally involved in genocide.

Time and again Jackson made it clear that he favored a “Final Solution” of total genocide for all Indians.

Detailed voting studies confirm that in both the 1828 and 1832 elections, Jackson received the overwhelming majority of the votes of immigrant Irish and German workers in the North.

To millions of Euro-Amerikans in the North, the slave system had to be halted because it filled the land with masses of Afrikans instead of masses of settlers.

The start was to confine Afrikans to the South, to drive them out of the “Free” States in the North. Indeed, in the political language of 19th century settler politics, the word “Free” also served as a code-phrase that meant “non-Afrikan.”

Lincoln himself said over and over again during his entire political career that all Afrikans would eventually have to disappear from North America.

By 1860 half of the populations of New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis were new immigrant Europeans. These reinforcements were immediately useful in new offensives against the Indian, Afrikan, and Mexicano peoples.

The ideology of white labor held that as loyal citizens of the Empire even wage-slaves had a right to special privileges (such as “white man’s wages”), beginning with the right to monopolize the labor market.

Immigrant European workers proposed to enter an economy they hadn’t built, and “annex,” so as to speak, the jobs that the nationally oppressed had created.

During the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s the all-too-familiar settler campaign of mass terror, assassination, and land-grabbing was used against the Mexicanos.

The full extent of Chinese labor’s role is revealing. The California textile mills were originally 70–80% Chinese, as were the garment factories. As late as 1880, Chinese made up 52% of all shoe makers and 44% of all brick makers in the State, as well as one-half of all factory workers in the city of San Francisco.