The classical Marxist schema wherein the industrial proletariat forms the decisive vanguard of socialist revolution must be ruthlessly interrogated and superseded when confronted with the objective reality of advanced settler colonialism, parasitic racist imperialism, and the labor aristocracy that binds large swathes of the so-called "working class" to the reproduction of empire.
The settler working class in America which are predominantly white, but including layers of assimilated non-white labor is not, and cannot be, the leading revolutionary subject in the imperial core. This is not moralism or identity politics; it is materialist analysis rooted in the global division of labor, superprofits extracted from the Third World (and internal colonies), and the bribe of relative privilege that turns potential revolutionary classes into social chauvinists or passive beneficiaries of genocide and plunder.
First, we must consider the structure of imperialism as analyzed through a MLM lens informed by dependency/world-systems insights and the theory of the labor aristocracy. The U.S. is the primary pole of the First World empire, a non-productive, consumption-heavy formation sustained by the superexploitation of the global South and the ongoing primitive accumulation against internal colonies (New Afrika/Black nation, occupied Turtle Island/Indigenous nations, occupied Aztlán, etc.). The "wages" of American workers are not merely the fruit of their labor but a redistributed share of imperialist superprofits via crumbs, cheap commodities, home ownership on stolen land, and the ideological bribe of white supremacy/nationalist chauvinism. This creates a clear labor aristocracy whose immediate material interests align more with preserving the imperialist system than overthrowing it. The "white working class" is not exploited in the classical sense that drives revolutionary consciousness; it is co-opted, bought off, and invested in settler-colonial continuity.
Historical evidence abounds from the 1877 railroad strikes through the New Deal labor accords to the post-WWII suburban boom and deindustrialization's selective pain, white workers have repeatedly sided with empire against colonized peoples (e.g., anti-Black pogroms, support for wars of aggression, rejection of reparations or land return). Even in moments of economic distress, reactionary populism and fascist-adjacent MAGA-ism or its left variants tends to dominate rather than proper
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