It illustrates how imperialism benefits the poor in the imperial core, but that doesn’t seem novel or controversial, and the use I see most frequently – writing off basically everyone in the imperial core in terms of socialist potential – seems way off base.

I don’t think the main reason socialism isn’t widely popular among the poor of the U.S. is that they’re relatively better off than the poor in the global south. This country had bigger leftist currents a century ago when it was openly imperialistic, after all, to say nothing of the decades following WWII. I think the reason is more along the lines of the intervening century of state repression and propaganda.

Going to copy this here because it’s spot on.

I think the “labor aristocracy” is very real, but the usual reasoning it’s used to defend is (incorrectly) fatalistic. If you read into history you’ll see many, many examples of militant socialist movements inside the US. Actual violence in the name of organized labor was much more common than it is today in the US. Something else happened other than the United States’ imperializing of other countries, because it’s been doing that for ages. It should be our goal to figure out what exactly that is