Settlers is weird in some places - and I still haven’t read most of it, just skipped around - like scoffing at college education as essential, but i think there is a lot of interesting stuff in there too
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Gerald Horne’s The Counter-Revolution of 1776 is all the good parts of Settlers and none of the bad. It has a very similar thesis, but Horne has the academic credentials a skeptical person can’t immediately write off (we don’t even know who J. Sakai is), it’s not actively hostile to readers who aren’t already a very specific type of leftist, and it’s just better scholarship and writing.
On the last point, a bunch of stuff jumps out just in this short excerpt:
- Highlighting the percentage of homes that have AC or a washing machine is indistinguishable from the famous Fox News graphic that claims you’re not poor if you have a refrigerator. Communism is not a vow of poverty; we want to raise people’s standard of living.
- Characterizing eyeglasses of all things as “hoarded” medical supplies makes no sense. Hoarding is stocking away more than one needs – how many people even have multiple pairs of eyeglasses? Wide access to basic medicine is another thing communists don’t criticize, but prioritize.
- Sakai at least addresses the idea that Americans largely view cars as a necessity, but there’s zero analysis of whether or not they actually are. Maybe 10 major U.S. cities have anything approaching decent public transit. The rest of the country (including enormous metro areas like DFW and Houston) has been purposefully built around cars. In those areas not having a car is an enormous impediment to working, getting groceries, recreation, raising a family, and all sorts of other basic things.
- Similarly, Sakai never stops to interrogate how important telephones are to modern life, how sleeping pills are generally taken in response to a medical need, or how education is another thing communists actually think is good. They even blast dry cleaning as a luxury not even a full page after calling washing machines a luxury, too! An iron must be the height of decadence.
I think a decent amount of this can be explained by that Settlers was originally published in 1983. A lot of these ‘luxuries’ had really only come into prominence throughout the 20 years before that, and the white flight suburbia car hell project was just coming into its stride.
And I definitely took it as its not that these things are ‘bad’, bourgeoisie ‘luxuries’, etc. But to highlight the shear amount of extra wealth that was concentrated into the American labor aristocracy- in comparison to the rest of the world.
