The thing about maintaining a non-productive class like that (or at least a class that draws more from the social surplus than they provide) is that it can only be maintained by constant extraction and accelerating extraction at that.

The middle class of today is the imperial version of the "poor whites" who supported confederate slavocracy. They didn't directly benefit from slavery any more than they would a wage slavery system, but they were invested in it's perpetuation and expansion because they were receiving the tailings of the slave oligarchs.

Much like the confederate slave system, the modern imperial system is only sustainable as long as new markets of labor can be violently expropriated. What's happening in Ukraine is exactly that. A shoving down of an entire nation of workers into sub-poverty wages to maintain enoigh surplus to service both the Western "middle class" and the bourgeois profit. They will do the same with Taiwan and all of East Asia too. If at any point these republics are able to reform themselved either along revolutionary socialist lines or nationalist lines, it will pull the rug out from under the expropriation that is necessary to maintain the global "liberal order".

I've never even read maoist third worldist theory, but I'm feeling like I might need to soon.