The white [amerikan] workers literally demanded their traditional settler right to be petit-bourgeois - "little bourgeois," petty imitators who would annex their small, individual plots each time the real bourgeoisie annexed another oppressed nation. It should be clear that the backwardness of white labor is not a matter of "racism," of "mistaken ideas," of "being tricked by the capitalists" (all idealistic instead of materialist formulations); rather, it is a class question and a national question.
This stratum came into being with its feet on top of the proletariat and its head straining up into the petit-bourgeoisie. It's startling how narrow and petty its concerns were in an age when the destiny of peoples and nations was being decided, when the settler Empire was trying to take into its hands the power to decree death to whole nations.