Is the United States a capitalist country, where bosses exploit workers, or is it a great empire, where colonists exploit subject peoples? American socialists and social democrats were never quite able to decide.
“There are people who are very big into diversity but whose views end up being not particularly sympathetic to working people, whether they’re white or black or Latino,” Bernie Sanders told GQ magazine in 2019. Yet he would also say that: “When you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto. You don’t know what it’s like to be poor. You don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you walk down the street.”
In 2026 Sanders is an emeritus figure, and the “imperial” idea has won out. What distinguishes the new crop of victorious DSA candidates from Sanders is the idea, not new but ascendant, that the white American worker is not really the victim of the bosses, because they too are sharing in the guilty riches of the United States, an imperial project.
In a course she taught at the City University of New York, Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic nominee for New York’s 13th congressional district, describes the United States as a “settler colonial state and – like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel – it remains one today.” A student group she was a part of spoke of the inherent “fascism ingrained in the American consciousness,” with its colonial foundation.
The book of the moment is Settlers by the pseudonymous Japanese-American Maoist J. Sakai, published in 1983, and now a fixture of DSA reading lists. Sakai aimed to expose the “mythology of the white masses,” and declared that white American workers should not be counted as part of the proletariat at all. The initial act of theft involved in the European settlement of north America, land seizures and slavery, generated what Marxists call “super-profits” (a higher profit than one could extract under normal market conditions), which allowed even the meanest settler to set themselves up as a member of the petite bourgeoisie, a petty lord with their own broad acres. White American workers never developed a “class consciousness” because they never needed to: each could reasonably hope to raise themselves up into the ranks of the petite bourgeoisie on the stolen land and labor of the empire’s oppressed peoples.
Sakai goes on to say that cooperation between white workers and the country’s real proletariat – the national minorities and the wider Global South – against the bosses can only ever be tactical and temporary, because the white workers have an interest in maintaining the settler colony that gives them a higher standard of living they would otherwise enjoy.
Indeed, the white labor organizations worked to drive oppressed peoples out of various industries, like dockyards and railways. As a result, according to Sakai, it is impossible to create socialism without first settling the national question, by “breaking up the US Empire and ending the US oppressor nation.”
The idea is a variation on an old theme. So long as there has been a workers’ movement there has been also a “national question.” The bourgeoisie exploited the proletariat by extracting surplus value, but it was also noticed that the two would often combine in joint enterprise to conquer other peoples, and that the profits from these conquests could be used to buy off the proletariat. In the 1880s Engels warned of British factory workers “gaily sharing in the feast” of empire and losing their revolutionary potential as a consequence. Lenin thought this process of buying-off so essential to the survival of capitalism that he declared imperialism its “highest stage.”
Any left-led partition of the US empire would lead to a brutal period of austerity in which the welfare state would largely disappear
In these debates the national principle has usually won out. In 1849 Engels cursed the Slavs as one of the many “reactionary peoples” fated to be conquered and absorbed as part of history’s forward march; but when they came to power the Bolsheviks made common cause with such reactionary peoples at the Russian empire’s fringe, and accused the worker and peasant toilers of “Great Russian chauvinism” against them.
With the rise to eminence of people like Chevalier, the national question returns. It implies a different sort of American left, one that bars the way to another Sanders-style attempt to rouse the white working classes: by Sakai’s lights this simply means petite-bourgeois reformism on behalf of a privileged “labor aristocracy.” It also renders suspect things like free college and universal healthcare – the left-populists’ signature demands in the 2010s. With the Settlers thesis there will always be the feeling, nagging and insistent, that these things could only be paid for with the loot of empire; “Third Worldists” have already made similar criticisms of the Scandinavian welfare states. Of course, settling the national question in the United States does not imply social democracy in the north American continent but its opposite; any left-led partition of the US empire, which would mean the end of the dollar as the reserve currency, would lead to a brutal period of adjustment and austerity in which the welfare state would largely disappear.
The Sakai turn, more than anything else, shows that the American left has given up on the transformation of society – only a dour national settling of accounts remains. The far-left in the 2010s spoke of family abolition and free love in polycules, but now there is a new enthusiasm for the social life of the oppressed peoples – a rigmarole of aunties and abuelitas. Tellingly, one of Chevalier’s main campaign promises was a child tax credit, dubbed “Babies not bombs.” The Sakai diagnosis, in its full meaning, calls for a great cataclysm: the breakup of the United States. But the American left, which now thinks only of “harm reduction,” has never been less interested in one.
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