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.
A sustainable and extremely real valuation that surely will just keep going up! 👍