Memes

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.