This comes up so often when discussing Welsh, Scottish, Cornish etc. secession from the Westminster state. Liberals often conflate the often coercive and dominating force that England has on the politics of the union to colonialism, when in fact this is more akin to the exact same stratification that develops within all bourgeois societies.
The development of a reserve army of labour entails the oppression of the proletariat of the imperial core, because the goal of imperialism is NOT to sprinkle treats amongst the workers to keep them suppressed, it is to create the gradient boundary necessary for the accumulation of capital.
The fact we have treats to buy and the means to do so is part of the process, not a byproduct. Yes, it also has the benefit of suppressing our efforts in class struggle, but no less do bullets, bombs, and hunger suppress the workers at the imperial periphery. The treats are not a reward.
The point being, colonialism isn’t when one country is annexed by another and develops a stratified hierarchy within its borders, it is when that system is exported and maintained through its military. The struggle between the imperial and colonised world powers does not negate the importance of class struggle within the imperial core; both produce the social and material relations to produce the other.
At least this is how I’ve come to critique this misinterpretation of the relationships of the UK’s inner states. I should probably read more theory.
Well, there’s a racialized system within the core, right? There’s a privileged caste of workers that gets to enjoy imperial superprofits and work in cushy imperial make-work jobs and benefit from financial superexploitation and is rewarded with treats. Not just treats either, but financial investments (properties, stocks, securities, bonds, etc) that actually give them every incentive to support the empire. We can call this group the “middle class” and this group of workers is intensely loyal to the empire, and as long as the empire is ascendant it is essentially impossible to have solidarity with them in the class struggle.
But, when the empire is in decline, the privileged caste of workers shrinks. While this makes it possible to organize this cohort against empire, it also makes them prone to reactionary and backwards ideology. Instead of correctly blaming the decline of the empire on its own internal contradictions, they’ll blame the lower castes within the racial caste system: nonwhite immigrants, then nonwhite citizens, then white immigrants, then different white ethnicities, and around and around the circular firing squad goes.
We’re in for a rough time.