Marxism-Leninism without a third-worldist corrective is just Trotskyism.

Marxism-Leninism with too much third-worldism is just Maoism.

In all seriousness I think it’s an analytical mistake to assume the proletarian identity or category is homogenous, and the most stark differences you’re gonna find are between imperialist-proletarians and colonized-proletarians. Trotskyists imagine some revolutionary essence that they think exists equally in an Israeli worker as a Palestinian worker, for example.

It would be an overcorrection, though, to then essentialize the category of imperialist-proletarian as homogenous and static. A corporate worker with a home and 401(k) benefits more from imperialism than a service worker that rents. And the first subclass is shrinking while the second is growing.

Maybe the settler-colonial or imperial incentives played a part in revolution failing in the West (for now), but it’s an influence that ebbs and flows among other influences that ebb and flow.

Its a very shrewd and well executed maneuver by the imperialist “Marxist” theory project. By teaching Marxists in the global south to hate workers in the global north they push the left in the global north into either supporting their own death or supporting imperialism. It completely destroys international solidarity. Instead of international capital having one large enemy they have 2 small ones that hate eachother.

I have mixed feelings about all of it. I think on the one hand, it can be helpful for understanding why a western prole can easily be so reactionary in spite of it seeming against their own interests to be that. But then on the other hand, the general tactics the capitalist class uses–encouraging belief in electoral reform, allowing performative concessions through as “proof”, whitewashing local violent struggle as peaceful protest–are worldwide, not confined to any particular nation. Lenin was complaining about misleading reformists back in his day and he was living in a place with far worse living conditions than the “western left” tends to be in.

From this standpoint, I’m inclined to say it is more important to call out the duplicitous tactics of the reformists no matter where they may be than it is to overly focus on what’s different about the conditions of imperial core. Those differences do matter, such as when understanding why patsocs are a thing and why they are a bad thing. But the differences are not all important every time somebody in the west is trying to move the needle at all.

For example, every time a western “leftist” leans toward reformist camps, is it necessarily because they are fully aware of what imperialism is and they want “more of the spoils of imperialism” rather than dismantling it? I’m sure those cases exist, but it can also be more general ignorance; they still believe in the system enough to think the exploiting classes can be constrained through voting, which can happen to proles anywhere; they don’t necessarily understand the dynamic of exploitation in the first place and we need to make sure that they do, not for them to internalize it as shame, but so they understand yet another reason why reform is not enough.

Nazi germany and imperial japan were neither the imperial hegemon, nor neocolonialist. Equating the people of usa with those of nazi germany, just because both are/were fascist, doesn’t make sense.