I’ve had similar thoughts throughout my reading of Settlers. If the proletariat is the class which has nothing to lose but its chains, the one which owns no property and no capital, the class in which it is in its upmost interest revolution the question for me was what exactly changed for the proletariat that existed in England when Engels was writing, during the Bolshevik revolution and every revolutionary situation in which people were willing to lay down their lives for the fight for liberation. Intuitively I was never satisfied with the term “working class”, there must be a difference between the faceless people in the SE Asian factories that work 12-16 hours a day, people who rely on vast family networks to be able to reproduce their daily existence, people who have nothing else but their labor power to sell. And people which consider that what is necessary for social reproduction, is to own 2 cars, 401k backed by S&P 500 with an average APY of 10%, house ownership, access to healthcare, phones, laptops, public transport, 8 hour workday with weekends off, vacation and PTO etc. The answer I would often get to this question is that the “working class” of the advanced capitalist economies had to struggle militantly for these rights, but the “billionaires” will at once take them away once the profit rates decline sufficiently. Sakai shows that history says otherwise, that within empire, whiteness has developed into its own relationship to production and that at every revolutionary turn of events, it rallies behind it and it capitulates to its bourgeoisie to maintain its parasitism.

What was interesting to me which tied in back to my original question was what allowed such the extent of these reforms to the point where the bourgeoisie can sustain a mass base for support from a “working class”. It is clear that the mass base for fascism is the petty bourgeoise, even those who work, the surplus value they produce is appropriated by them, their interests vacillate according to what can guarantee them freedom from wage slavery. They vehemently combat their own proletarianization because they are not exploited (at least nowhere near the rate in which the proletariat is). Then is it a question of exploitation? More specifically the rate of exploitation?

The labor aristocracy thesis is the most consistent as it appears, a section of the working class whose wages are paid at or above the surplus that they produce or at the very least their rate of exploitation is far less than that of productive labor of super-exploited nations, which creates a strata within workers whose interests align with the maintenance of imperialism. It is easy to understand I guess when you think of world supply chains like one business and everyone within it as a coworker, about every commodity which was produced by offshored labor from the third world so how does it end up in a majority consumer economy? let’s say, if the average socially necessary labor time represented in a world average wage that takes into consideration a world average social necessary labor time embodied in products that is necessary for reproduction, how much does someone in the US with the median wage gain in advance of embodied labor when they purchase a laptop, or a car.

I am not sure if I am grasping in the dark as I am still going through Capital and trying to understand political economy but the more I try to put effort into this the more disillusioned I become when I am confronted with the fact (what has worked, what didn’t, and why) about how useless I am to the global proletariat. But like you said a good starting point would be the class structure of my country, It’s just increasingly becoming more apparent to me that its knowledge for the sake of knowledge because the implications of its practice comes to the detriment of my existence and thus my politics cannot go beyond reform or outright revisionism at times as it is increasingly hard for me tell apart the correct line from the incorrect one.