So after posting this I decided to look up the median annual incomes/salaries by country because I was curious of the actual degree to which we benefit and. Holy fuck. I knew it was bad but the degree to which even other Western/imperial core countries are worse off than the US is unhinged.
For reference, median is the average when discarding outliers (such as billionaires). Exact median incomes vary by country/year/survey, and racial poverty rates can vary heavily by locale. The 2026 federal poverty level is $15,960 for a single person.
- Asian: $70,002
- Non-Hispanic White: $60,601
- Pacific Islander: $50,000
- Black: $45,050
- Mixed: $45,001
- American Indian: $42,691
- Hispanic or Latino of any race: $40,000
Now I want you to take a look at a comparison of median annual salaries per some countries using most recent available data. This is an outtake of 43 countries, I chose it because it represents solely in USD and doesn’t require conversion, but it does show 2023 instead of 2025 US median for comparison.
First, let’s look at the very top, where the US sits at 5th highest.
Now I’d like to show you the point in the list where the overall median income for each country is lower than the lowest US median salary by race.
Like, France? FRANCE?? We have almost twice the median salary of fucking France, one of the biggest historical colonizers and exploiters of Africa’s wealth and resources??? The lowest median incomes by race in the US are still 10k higher *minimum* than Italy and Spain too???
And now I’d like to show you from the point on the list where the median annual income is below the US federal poverty level.
Mind you, this is from a website that gives comparisons for places workers predominantly from the imperial core may want to move to, this does not include many periphery countries that imperial core residents consider not worth moving to either due to standards of living, political or military issues, climate change destruction, or more.
“But Anonsee, the median isn’t every person, plenty of USians are poor and suffering!”
Comrade the conditions we consider the most horrible and inhumane in the US are just the standard of living (sometimes even higher than!) for portions of the periphery, often explicitly due to the exploitation, intervention, or genocide from the US or other imperial core countries.
Our poor and homeless often still are able to get or maintain access to resources such as phones, cars, medical supplies, etc. explicitly because the positionality of being the heart of the empire makes such supplies so comparatively cheap and the constant flow of goods enable us to access them secondhand. The conditions in places such as reservations that we point to in order to prove not everyone in the US benefits from the current empire are often still better than in many places in the periphery where we suck every resource dry for our benefit, and often don’t have the benefit of relying on diaspora or being within a day’s trip of accessing resources at the empire’s benefitted rates.
Our charity, our mutual aid, our earned income, our suffering, our hellscapes, everything here in the heart of the empire in this modern age is tainted with the blood and the enslavement and exploitation of the periphery from the richest capitalists down to the poorest among us. Every single piece of it, from our joy to our sorrow to our deaths. The fear of losing privilege is not unique to the whites, the rich, the cishet. It is also core to those within the empire who have reaped its benefits through their very survival.
To act like in 2026 any of us within the bounds of the US experience no benefit from living in the empire is a laughable negation if material reality, based on a reactionary assumption that there must be innocents left here. The continued existence of the US empire is proof of our collective complicity.
This is why it is the prerogative of those of us within the US to work in any way we can to end the stranglehold the US holds on the world, even though it means losing the benefits we have lived with our whole lives. Because things can’t stay the same, and the world is dying because of us. Living in perpetual guilt and inaction is useless, and you will not save the world alone, but we cannot keep pretending we are innocent rather than complicit, and we must find ways to take action even if it is “only” on the local or community scale.
Something should’ve started years ago, but it didn’t, so what we have is now. We cannot reform this without maintaining the enslavement and exploitation of the periphery, and that is untenable. We must act to create something new. We cannot wait for someone else to liberate us all.
