Those in the Imperial Core will never understand that what they consider unbearable hardship and boredom is actually a life of luxury that the vast majority of people on Earth cannot even imagine.
The international division of labor is 1000x more important and impactful than the domestic one.
Originally, the American settler-colonial class structure had a fluidity to it which allowed the underclasses to adopt a petit bourgeois character throughout the course of their lifetimes. As American capital’s ability to prop up this fluidity via genocide, slavery, and imperialism has faded, what was once labeled the American Dream has become increasingly performative and hollow, and the American class structure has calcified much like the Old World before it. People who would have previously been able to leave a meaningful inheritance to their offspring now find themselves struggling to not simply leave behind debts. The culmination of this process in the superstructure is social media, a place where the performative aspects of celebrity and wealth can be imposed on us, acting both as consumer and producer in a constant fractal loop, all without providing a material base for the wealth being hinted at. This is the re-proletarianization of the American economy.