I've been seeing a bad line of thinking in leftist spaces and in myself and I feel the need to call it out.
The western left's demonization of the class unconscious proletariat is a symptom of idealism that seems sadly acceptable in leftist social media spaces. Class consciousness is not an achievement to be proud of, you didn't do it, it happened to you.
Labor aristocracy is not a "sin" of the western working class it is a weapon of the bourgeoisie. Unique material conditions are what lead each of us to class consciousness not some sort of moral/intellectual/educational supremacy. The limited class consciousness in the west's working class is not an inherit flaw in the masses but a failure of the class conscious to conduct effective agitation. (the word "failure" is not a condemnation but recognition that we have been unable to succeed against the overwhelming power of the imperialist bourgeoisie.)
This extends to demonization of the troops. Yes members of the western armed forces actively benefit from imperialism and do horrific things supporting imperialism but they do this out of a response to their material conditions not because they are evil. That is not to say they are absolved of their crimes. It means many of them could be redeemable.
We have all had liberal and imperialist ideas that we now recognize are wrong. We must be willing to accept those who admit the faults of their past who are willing to fight for a better future. Anyone refusing to forgive comrades who admit to a flawed past is being dishonest about their own flaws. They are engaging in ideological moral supremacy. It is not a dialectical materialists position to refuse something changing into its opposite.
Again this is not a call to absolve the complicit but instead a call to remind us that we have all been complicit in some way and we are the proletariat not above them.
Two main thoughts come to mind for me:
I think of the story of the "last emperor of China" who the CPC put to the challenge of reeducating (and succeeded): https://bsky.app/profile/poppyhaze.bsky.social/post/3lea2lmvmg22j
It demonstrates just how far you can go in changing a person sometimes. That is, when you have the power to do so and I think that is the main obstacle, as you touch on when you say "we have been unable to succeed against the overwhelming power of the imperialist bourgeoisie."
It brings me to another, related (partly self-crit) of western thought, which is that of speaking as if we have power we don't. So like, yes, the western imperial institutions have a lot of power and have had for a long time. But your average everyday liberal will tend to be at most possessing some minor influence over one minor organization or another. The majority of the power is concentrated in the hands of a minority of the population.
When one of us says some shit, it can influence some people, but it's not the enacting of a broad policy or something. Same with when some random liberal mouths off. However, the type of thinking that goes with colonialism and imperialism instills in westerners a sense of power even when they materially have little (as we see with the bizarre behavior of a declining EU at times). Like a "believing your own lies" type of thing. This idea that the western is actually superior somehow and this means westerners just kinda wake up with smarter and brighter brains than the rest of the world, and this enables them to impact the world through that superiority alone. Instead of the reality: the guns, brutality, and mass murder campaigns that have fueled the actual power, which is, again, policy directed and power concentrated among the few, not the many, no matter how smug some of the many sound at times.
I agree that moral superiority is not what got us there. We aren't imbued with some kind of special trait that makes us better than others and that's why we got where we did. However, I'd also caution against it sounding too close to a mechanical materialist view, that we didn't have agency in the decisions but were led only by our material conditions. I don't believe that's what you intend to say. I just want to make the point out of caution for readers. Our choices do matter at some stage of it, but I would say, the more collectivist rather than faulty individualist view would be that many of our choices are more enmeshed in the choices of others than is sometimes comfortable to acknowledge (but we cannot possibly figure out how to enact change if we don't recognize it). That we are not standing at the shore, looking out upon the sea, and deciding what the ocean is like. We are constantly in the ocean, the waves are real and immediate, and yes, we can swim and push and pull, but it is delusional for us not to acknowledge the heaviness of that.
Even cynical marketing campaigns understand this on some level. Word of mouth recommendation is one of the most powerful forms of sales. And notably, it is people speaking to each other and influencing one another, not people lining up at a booth for a marketing team to try to convince each of them individually, one at a time. Social ties are powerful and social fragmentation, both incidental as a result of capitalist development and purposeful as a tool of control, has reduced people's effectiveness to rally together for getting needs collectively met.
Beliefs of moral superiority, intellectual superiority, hell superiority of preference for mundane things, can all exacerbate fragmentation and contribute to enforcing class/caste divides. We have to figure out how to transform society, not just analyze it as it is right now. That's what fills me with awe about what China demonstrated in the story I mentioned. The transformative power that they had and continue to demonstrate in so many ways in the decades since.
(This went on a lot more than I thought it would when I said "two main thoughts" lol. It's probably a bit more than two...)