Worth Discussing

Not my questions, but worth discussing.

We need to do a concrete current analysis of globalized capitalism and its changing effects on Euro-ethnics (especially on the working class) inside the imperialist power centers. Are they really still part of the "nation of the oppressor", as one might credibly argue during Jim Crow race segregation and before mass non-European immigration was permitted?

Are 'white' working class people inside imperialist power countries actually 'second class' status, now more comparable to the social position of the majority of ethnic minorities?

And, if this is so, does this make Euro-ethnic working people (especially the worse off layers) technically oppressed?

Didn’t they basically get downsized and laid off from the "nation of the oppressor” and even if they wish they belonged to the 'privileged' few, the truth is that they can't afford it and aren’t recognized as such ---as fellow 'oppressors'---by the ruling class?

And worth serious answers.

There can be little doubt that the scale of the privileges once enjoyed by significant portions of the middle class and working class within the Global North have been declining in recent decades. Global market relations, compounded by relentless political attacks upon the social safety nets of these respective countries, as well as the general exhaustion of the working class' coping mechanisms (consumer credit, etc.), have all produced a scenario of large scale of proletarianization and unemployment — the likes of which we have not seen since the Great Depression.

Regardless, there can be no doubt that the European ('White') workers of the Global North still enjoy certain advantages within their domestic labor markets. For example, racial minority unemployment rates are significantly higher than those found amongst the domestic Euro-ethnic population. (You can attribute that to any number of causes, but that fact remains unyielding.) At the same time, however, we also see that females are collectively faring better in this economic environment than their male counterparts (see Largest Gap between Male and Female Unemployment Rates since 1948).

Now, while it may very well be interesting to observe these sorts of trends, affording them too much concern within the revolutionary socialist community runs the risk of obscuring the fact that those 'privileged' groups are still being exploited and that they are still subject to capricious market forces. As such, I find socialists who fixate on these (increasingly marginal) forms of inequality to be presenting redundant barriers to the cause of working class emancipation.

Surely this is the sort of intraclass envy the bourgeois establishment is happy to exploit in order to keep labor divided.

It's a common misconception (particularly amongst those of the Maoist persuasion) to think that the proletariat within imperialist nations are always the net beneficiaries of the imperialism conducted by their ruling class. But just take the current neoliberal policy being enforced by the Global North onto the Third World as a counterexample. The bourgeoisie is obviously benefiting enormously from this arrangement, but it's primarily due to liberalization of capital flows, which enables capitalists to offshore in order to take advantage of sweatshop labor abroad. The deindustrialization that ensues in the Global North, as a consequence of this form of economic imperialism, positively harms the Western proletariat.

Furthermore, technically speaking, all laborers are being exploited under capitalism—whether you happen to be a citizen of an "oppressor" or "oppressed" nation is completely irrelevant. If you're a proletarian, you're being denied control over the full product of your labor.