Sorry about the long post (shortest leftist wall of text be like)
When it comes to the "labour aristocracy" in the first world, I feel like many leftists wildly exaggerate both its size and wealth. This is often done to the point of erasing class conflict in the first world, as this article does. I might be totally wrong here, but i feel like these authors are making anti-marxist errors. The following points are emblematic of what I am talking about (emphasis mine):
The class interests of the labour aristocracy are bound up with those of the capitalist class, such that if the latter is unable to accumulate superprofits then the super-wages of the labour aristocracy must be reduced. Today, the working class of the imperialist countries, what we may refer to as metropolitan labour, is entirely labour aristocratic.
This is just completely wrong when one considers just how many poor people live in the first world who obviously don't receive super-wages. US poverty rates alone are always above 10%, and that poverty line is widely known to be inadequate. The US also is significantly more wealthy than Europe, where the calculus is even worse. And that doesn't even account for the wild wealth disparities that exist in the first world.
When ... the relative importance of the national exploitation from which a working class suffers through belonging to the proletariat diminishes continually as compared with that from which it benefits through belonging to a privileged nation, a moment comes when the aim of increasing the national income in absolute terms prevails over that of improving the relative share of one part of the nation over the other
What it is saying is that when the working class share of national income becomes high enough, they start to want to exploit other nations as that becomes beneficial. However, the expansion of imperialism in the neoliberal era is also the reason for the stagnation of living standards in the imperial core. By accessing a larger pool of labor in the south, the position of northern workers is threatened. That's why Northern workers have fought against outsourcing, the very fundamental imperialist measure.
Thereafter a de facto united front of the workers and capitalists of the well-to-do countries, directed against the poor nations, co-exists with an internal trade-union struggle over the sharing of the loot. Under these conditions this trade-union struggle necessarily becomes more and more a sort of settlement of accounts between partners, and it is no accident that in the richest countries, such as the United States---with similar tendencies already apparent in the other big capitalist countries---militant trade-union struggle is degenerating first into trade unionism of the classic British type, then into corporatism, and finally into racketeering
I am not too familiar with the history of the trade union, but wasn't the degeneration of the unions largely a result of state and corporate action against the unions? They engage in union busting, forced out radical leaders, performed assasinations, etc. This seems like an erasure of the class struggle to the point that the unions are depicted as voluntarily degenerating.
I feel like these kinds of narratives, which are popular amongst liberals as well (liberals will often admit that weak nations are exploited. Example - America invades for oil meme) tend to justify imperialism to westerners. I have on more than one occasion seen westerns outright say that they don't want to fight against imperialism because they benefit from it. I think that's how a lot of westerners justify supporting imperialism. This kind of narrative ironically cements the power of imperialism
I think imperialism and massive superstructural influence has allowed/caused the US working class to develop into a fragmented hierarchy, largely along racial and other social lines. So if someone has a simple or single-faceted conception of the US working class, their analysis of class character is going to be polarized around who comprises that platonic ideal.
To assume all workers in the imperial core are equally devoid of revolutionary potential is certainly obfuscating the internal class conflicts, as you say. As far as class consciousness goes, I think there's more potential within the hourly service industry subclass than the shrinking suburban management/salary subclass. And in my personal experience I think even the service subclass still very much influenced by social factors: race, gender, etc. Most of the straight white male workers I've tried radicalizing still seem hopelessly reactionary, like it takes disproportionate amounts of effort to radicalize them, and even then they still usually maintain their nihilistic, reactionary, unempathetic social views. So I struggle to be optimistic about people who don't have at least one intersecting aspect of social marginalization.
Worsening conditions should increase radicalization potential. But poverty is weird here, it doesn't always manifest in a blatant, radicalizing, unifying manner: many of the working poor have access to an excess of calories, they're just highly processed and devoid of nutritional value. We have access to relatively cheap treats/circuses, but no healthcare or retirement. A lot of capital's contradictions seem to be encroaching on our lives in indirect, intangible ways: shaving years off the end of our lives, increasing precarity, reasserting old hierarchies. The various avenues of escapism created by consumerism seem to eclipse the growing precarity. We're one missed paycheck away from financial catastrophe, but the escapism keeps that thought out of focus. And when a person's precarity manifests and they're plunged into poverty, they lose what little power they may have had, losing economic and social and political influence. People with nothing to lose should be the most radical, but we're so worn down that I dont know. My homelessness helped radicalize me, but it also zapped me of my energy and mental/physical health. It's easy to lose weeks and months to escapism.
The last paragraph veered off topic into a personal rant. Tldr in reply to your post, I think the effect of "labor aristocracy" or imperialism can't be understated, but it manifests unequally and differently within various social and economic subclasses. It broadly softens and dissipates revolutionary potential, but less so in demographics that have less access to its benefits. But even within these more marginalized demographics, there are effects of imperialism that we need to take into account, both in the form of benefits/escapism as well as in capital's increased access to violence, suppression, cultural manipulation, and alternative markets.
There's definitely better sources than this (it's primarily focused on the CPUSA), but from my recent reading Faith in the Masses goes over communist participation in labor organizing and the civil rights movements, as well as the internal and external anti-communist currents that they faced. But the long and short of it is there was massive anti-communist pressure on the unions and movements from all levels of government, but also pressures within many of the orgs from protectionist, racist, imperialist, and/or anti-communist currents. And they're materially intertwined both because the external pressure influenced the internal currents, but also because of the incredible number of psyops and infiltrations that were carried out by the feds. So the development of imperialism created a fundamental material incentive for certain workers within these orgs to be anti-communist or whatnot, and the violence and cultural control of the state effectively allowed those material influences to manifest rather than the common material interests of the global proletariat. Superstructure influencing base to maintain class relations at any cost.