Labor Aristocracy
""Labor aristocracy today is less the factory than the office — the stratum materially benefiting from imperialism's revenues.
Haz's formulation
From the HASAN PIKER CIVIL WAR | 24hr SUBATHON stream:
> "There are a fucking latte-sipping labor aristocracy who gained from imperialism. The urban petty bourgeoisie sitting in offices materially benefits from the financial revenues of monopoly capitalism... You can't just exclusively compromise with the people who are materially predisposed and incentivized to support imperialism."
The strategic point
The imperial rent now flows through professional-managerial salaries, NGO grants, university sinecures — which is why the online left's base behaves as a conservative interest defending empire and its moral fashions. Hence the inversion: the MAGA base is often more objectively anti-imperialist than the credentialed "left." Historical note (INFRARED RENAISSANCE stream): socialism was always "associated with the professional petty bourgeoisie, and also the labor aristocracy, which is also a kind of petty bourgeoisie" — Lenin's break with them defined communism itself (Class, MAGA Communism).