I had to split up my lengthy response, sorry.

While imperialism is the primary contradiction globally, settler-colonialism is one of the class structures it uses to stratify the world and encourage class collaboration between the special privileged classes and the transnational bourgeoisie.

No argument here aside from calling settlers a class!

Obviously the struggle against settlers is not as relevant in other contexts, but in the settler-colonial context it is essential. The struggle against settler-colonialism is an anti-imperialist struggle, representing settler-consciousness as false consciousness is ignoring the very real material relations of the settler-colonial situation.

I don’t see how it ignores it. I’ve been talking about the material rewards for settlers this whole time and I disagree with your conclusion that settlers are a class.

False consciousness through marginalization often comes in a form where there are real, direct material benefits and therefore interests for the high-status group(s). But their purpose, as maintained through the bourgeois actions that create and maintain these systems, is to prevent a class conscious understanding that could form the basis of working class solidarity and opposition to the ruling class. Usually something very simple, a divide-and-conquer strategy that is a simplistic reactionary step that is entrenched because it works.

Southern working class whites could see a real material benefit to the oppression of black people as well. They saw jobs and property options for themselves that could be denied to others. Whether they consistently received them did not change the accurate perception of a privileged status nor whether they would fight and die to continue the enslavement of black people. Overall, working class whites would have benefitted far more by shedding this false consciousness and working in solidarity to foment revolution against the ruling class, but they were short-circuited by both he immaterial and material bribing of white supremacy. Virtually every form of false consciousness through marginalization for the benefit of capital looks like this. I am unable to come up with exceptions off the top of my head. They all offer both material and immaterial reasons for the higher-status groups to maintain the system. That does not make them all classes despite how it modifies relationships to production, as it is working around the margins of the dominant system.

The Israeli working class is both working class and settler and colonial and imperialist, with the latter three buying them off and making them absolutely worthless as “allies” in any strugglr against the Zionist occupation. They still have a working class relation to production despite receiving the boons of their status, as most of those boons are not received through any direct relation to production, but via larger bourgeois apoaratuses, with the imperial machine as the dominant material force.

Many people make the mistake of thinking if people are working class, they will be the main engine of change in any given issue if only you can give them enough pamphlets or form enough international “relationships”, etc. I think the characterization of settlers is, in part, a reaction to this error in thinking, of correctly knowing that this simplistic understanding of class is false and absurd, and pointing to the settler projects as an example where this has always failed to materialize, and in fact often has the literal opposite, like settler trade unions fighting to maintain apartheid.

The understanding I would add to this is that there are material interests and forces that have massive impact. They emerge from the capitalist system, but they are not all directly class relations nor are they directly about a given group’s immediate relation to production. In the cases we are looking at, they are used to infuse some bourgeois character into a subset of the working class while still maintaining overall class relations. There is not a new major class called “settler” that has a distinct relation to production. They are made up of the spectrum of working class, petty bourgeois, higher bourgeois (etc) people (all can be settler). A subset of the lower classes is carved out on a basis other than class and pitted against the rest with material benefits while maintaining their fundamental class relations. This process is mediated by the ruling class itself for its own interests, namely the “divide and conquer” strategy. It is no surprise that this has been the most common strategy for disrupting Palestinian liberation at the level of Palestine itself (compradors, stoking infighting, killing off organizations, etc) and neighbouring countries. It’s their main tool for maintaining power.