I really appreciate this comment. It basically puts my general direction into words. I have constant discussions with healthy white folks with a bachelors degree and nearly six figures who say socialism is a nice idea but... It makes my skin crawl. I have lived through starvation and homelessness. it is incredibly hard to stay friendly in the face of such privilege.

Western marxists feel personally attacked for this position and end up rejecting it and discrediting it.

This is certainly part of it, but there are at least three other reasons western marxists hold some reservations:

1. Inside the imperial core, it's often framed as essentially a defeatist position. If a leftist from the U.S. accepts the idea that pretty much everyone around them is inherently reactionary, what are they supposed to do? You can't decide at the start that there's no way to win.
2. While the material conditions of a poor person in the imperial core are better than poor people in the imperial periphery, the imperial machine rarely ties its exploitation directly to that benefit. A key part of modern imperialism (especially in the U.S.) is denying that you're an empire at all. When that's combined with obscene inequality in the core, you have the basics for building class consciousness even if on paper your imperial working class is better off than working people in the rest of the world.
3. It occasionally veers into determinist/essentialist arguments, which have all sorts of problems.

I've read Domenico Losurdo, but honestly, I've also read Hinterland, and frankly, most people in China aren't "good comrades" either; most aren't communist and neither was it with the Soviet Union.

You don't need everyone to be a communist and anti-imperialist; there are more anti-imperialists in the USA, judging by the orgs, than there are outright anti-imperialist communists (excluding the fucking PatSocs).

From what I've heard though, Perry Anderson's work on Western Marxism is a good read and I have it on my list.

I have never considered it that way. Although, to be fair, Stalin did comment on the need for each country to have their own revolution done by themselves without direct intervention from socialist states.

"You see, we Marxists believe that a revolution will also take place in other countries. But it will take place only when the revolutionaries in those countries think it possible, or necessary. The export of revolution is nonsense. Every country will make its own revolution if it wants to, and if it does not want to, there will be no revolution. For example, our country wanted to make a revolution and made it, and now we are building a new, classless society. But to assert that we want to make a revolution in other countries, to interfere in their lives, means saying what is untrue, and what we have never advocated." —Joseph Stalin, Interview Between J. Stalin and Roy Howard

While I partly agree I think you are underestimating the importance of agitprop. Most western leftists can't do much other than agitation and doing so online is a valid method.

Much of the global north is still a long way from popular uprising and at this stage the actions that are needed often don't look much like work compared to the situation in usa where there are physical direct actions are needed.

Pushing the "correct positions" is an important job to avoid people falling to ultras or social fascists.

I would believe it when i see it, when the working class of the imperial core decide it's enough and overthrow the goverment instead of joining the army to get their share of spoils abroad that is.

Hinterland is a good book on this, though biased against China.

There hasn't really been a labor aristocracy since the 1970s; everything changed then.