05/05/2026
Marx took careful note of the deceptive measures of the lower rungs of capitalist society, of how the capitalist state attempts to “buy out” the revolutionary spirit of the proletariat.
Today, in the world of monopoly capitalism (of imperialism!), large swathes of the population can be and are bought out by superprofits. Imperialist extraction of this extraordinary wealth from enslaved countries and peoples has led to significant chunks of the population to be purchased, called the middle class by liberals and the labor aristocracy by Engel, Lenin, and co.
Many parties now operate on the appeal to this superprofit-based stratum of the proletariat, such as the DSA, the Democrats, etc., and carry the banner of the middle class burden. The reality of the middle class struggle is none other than the nature of empire. We see this as in the last 50 years the American Empire has begun to shrink. In the last 50 years the charlatan liberal has been lamenting the “shrinking middle class.” What he actually laments in the contraction of empire, leaving a life predicated on the exploitation of the world out of the grasp of the upper strata of workers.
