The Shape of Things to Come: Selected Writings & Interviews

J. Sakai is one of North America’s most insightful and challenging radical intellectuals, best-known for his work Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat, which remains the essential anti-racist labor history of the united states. Sakai's work is grounded in Mao’s politics, anti-imperialism, and in a lifetime of hands-on activism; he has consistently focused on the relationship between “race” and “class” in the american context, from a perspective dedicated to abolishing the united states, capitalism, and white supremacy.

Beyond Settlers, however, Sakai has authored a number of other works, on subjects ranging from movement security, to the nature of the lumpen/proletariat, to the rise of the far right, and much more. Several of these have been published in book-form by Kersplebedeb, others as zines, while others have only ever appeared on the Internet.

Here in this book, for the first time, is presented a selection of writings by Sakai spanning a 40 year period, from 1983 to 2022. This includes three articles initially written anonymously for the anti-imperialist journal S1, and an extensive interview that took place between 2020 and 2022, appearing here for the first time.

The Shape of Things to Come: Selected Writings & Interviews is a weapons cache planted for people fighting for liberation in a world that is constantly becoming more dangerous. It provides tools and methodologies, examples both positive and negative, histories and insights, to help us to collectively struggle against a system that “as its most bottomline autonomic reflex will rather arrange to kill us all than let us remake our lives communally.”

GUIDE TO CONTENTS

• Beginner’s Kata: Uncensored Stray Thoughts on Revolutionary Organization (2018)
• Notes Toward an Understanding of Capitalist Crisis & Theory (2009)
• Aryan Politics & Fighting the W.T.O. (2001)
• The Green Nazi: An Investigation into Fascist Ecology (2007)
• When Race Burns Class: Settlers Revisited (2000)
• Stolen at Gunpoint (2003)
• Beyond McAntiwar: Notes on Finding Our Footing in the Collapsing Stage Set of the u.s. Empire (2005)
• Theory Mao Tossed to Us (2017)
• Pseudo-Gangs (1983)
• From South Afrika to Puerto Rico to Mississippi (1983)
• What Happened to the Zimbabwe Revolution (1984)

+ Never before published: “The Shape of Things to Come” is an extensive (over 100 pages!) new interview with Sakai, conducted between 2020 and 2022, and presented here in two parts. A wide range of topics are addressed, including but not limited to the Trump presidency and the rise of the white far right; the class and national composition of the George Floyd Uprising and Black Lives Matter; the gender politics of both the CPUSA-era Old Left and the 60s New Left; the role of national, class, and gender contradictions in the movement against the Vietnam War; the legacy of anti-war organizing within the u.s. military; the left’s historical confusion regarding the white working class; warlordism in Mexico; why “globalization vs nationalism” is an inadequate way to think about our current situation; the breakdown of nations and capitalism’s “creative destruction”; the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, specifically in terms of the end of capitalism; the nature of the interregnum, and considerably much more...