“The key to understanding Amerika is to see that it was a chain of European settler colonies that expanded into a settler empire. To go back and understand the lives and consciousness of the early English settlers is to see the embryo of today’s Amerikan Empire.“

“the mythology of the white masses holds that those early settlers were the poor of england, convicts and workers, who came to north amerika in search of ‘freedom’ or ‘a better way of life.’ factually, that’s all nonsense[...] they came in search of less work and more money.”

“what made north amerika so desirable to these people? land. euro-amerikan liberals and radicals have rarely dealt with the land question; we could say that they don’t have to deal with it, since their people already have all the land.”

“what lured europeans to leave their homes and cross the atlantic was the chance to share in conquering Indian land. at that time there was a crisis in england over land ownership and tenancy due to the rise of capitalism.”

“these were the principal reasons given on the emigration lists of 1773–76 for settling in amerika. so that participating in the settler invasion of north amerika was a relatively easy way out of the desperate class struggle in england for those seeking a privileged life.”

“this drew so many europeans to colonial amerika: the dream in the settler mind of each man becoming a petty lord of his own land. the tradition of individualism & egalitarianism in amerika was rooted in the poisoned concept of equal privileges for a new nation of conquerors.”

“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’ & supporting themselves...”

“...through their own initiative and hard labor, is a propaganda fabrication. it is the absolute characteristic of settler society to be parasitic, dependent upon the super-exploitation of oppressed peoples for its style of life.”

“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.”

j. sakai on the myth that europeans settler societies didn’t “really conquer and dispossess other nations,” but that they just “merely moved into vacant territories”:

“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.”

“when we hear that the settlers ‘pushed out the indians’ or ‘forced the indians to leave their traditional hunting grounds,’ these are just code-phrases to refer politely to the most barbaric genocide imaginable. it could well be the greatest crime in all of human history.”

“the point is that genocide was not an accident, not an ‘excess,’ not the unintended side-effect of virile european growth. 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.”

“the second aspect of colonial amerika’s foundation was, of course, slavery. what is necessary is to underline how universally european capitalist life was dependent upon slavery, and how this exploitation dictated the very structure of euro-amerikan society.”

“without slave labor there would have been no amerika. it is as simple as that. long before the cotton economy of the south flourished, for example, afrikan slaves literally built the city of new york. their work alone enabled the original dutch settlers to be fed & sheltered...”

“the early settlers were not just the passive beneficiaries of a far off afrikan slave trade — they bankrolled their settlements in part w/the profits of their own eager explorations into native slave trading. the point is that white amerika has never been self-sufficient.“

“the essence is not the individual ownership of slaves, but rather the fact that world capitalism in general and euro-amerikan capitalism in specific had forged a slave-based economy in which all settlers gained and took part.”

“all sections of white settler society — even the artisan, worker, and farmer — were totally dependent upon afrikan slave labor: the fisherman whose low-grade, ‘refuse fish’ was dried & sold as slave meal in the Indies; the New York farmer who found his market for surpluses...”

“walter rodney, and others have shown how european capitalism capitalized itself for industrialization and world empire out of afrikan slavery. all classes of settlers were equally involved in building a new bourgeois nation on the back of the afrikan colonial proletariat.”

“the colonized Afrikan nation, much more than the new Euro-Amerikan settler nation, was a complete nation — that is, possessing among its people a complete range of applied sciences, practical crafts, and productive labor. both that colonized nation and the Indian nations were..”

“...self-sufficient & economically whole, while the euro-amerikan invasion society was parasitic. while the class structure of the new afrikan nation was still in a formative stage, distinct classes were visible within it well before the U.S. War of Independence.”

“afrikans were the landless, propertyless, permanent workers of the U.S. Empire. they were not just slaves — the afrikan nation as a whole served as a proletariat for the euro-amerikan oppressor nation.“

—j. sakai, http://readsettlers.org