They think it's not in their class interests because they've been conditioned to see themselves as "temporarily impoverished billionaires" and that any day can be their lucky day to join the Big Boys upstairs as long as they keep standing on the backs of theworking class people who are only beneath them because the shiny dress shoes of some 9-5 middle manager that keeps kicking them in the face as he tries to claw his way up an imaginary food chain.

Sorry if I'm getting overly ranty and/or poetic but I feel this should be a no-brainer and I'm getting passionate.

[–] RedDawn@hexbear.net 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It’s not a no brainer, it’s a point of debate for like over a hundred years and the people who recognize the concept of the Labor Aristocracy as Lenin described it have generally shown to be correct, I don’t have much faith in the revolutionary potential of the people in the imperial core until the empire itself begins failing.

The idea is that superprofits from exploiting foreign workers are distributed broadly enough to the domestic “middle class” to make them comfortable and give them a stake in imperialism and therefore capitalism, so they have little revolutionary potential. And this has mostly been true, though I’d say neoliberalism has been short sighted enough to concentrate the wealth so tightly at the top that conditions have been getting worse for even the “labor aristocracy”, so it may be less true going forward. That and if the third world with the help of China/Russia etc can effectively give imperialists the boot, the imperial core bourgeoisie won’t even have the option of buying off their workers anymore. But that’s something that will take decades to develop.