Whiteness isn’t fundamentally about having white skin, which is what I assume you mean by referring to Caucasian ancestry.

The simple equation of whiteness and having light skin might be approximately true inside the US because of the whole slavery thing. The influx of African slaves prompted the Europeans to reconcile their ethnic differences on that superficial basis alone. But that didn’t erase racism between nominally white ethnicities. For example, Italians and Irish people have not always been accepted as white in the US.

The basis of racism is the categorization of certain peoples into pseudo-scientific races, and Europe has a long history of excluding Slavic peoples as a distinct race from the “civilized” western Europeans.

It is a good demonstration of the limitations of our own thought. We understand new concepts in terms of familiar concepts. If there is no direct analogy to something familiar, the human mind is utterly lost and has to trust in rigorous analysis while only half believing what it proves.

It has more to do with acquiring a stake in the neoliberal status quo. Those who say life makes you more conservative are almost always older white people who stand to personally lose if their privilege goes away.

A worker who spends 40 years throwing their retirement into the stock market (401k) will be less willing to throw that away for a better future for the next generation. Earlier in their career, they may have been more willing to challenge the status quo and their own ideas because they had less to lose.

The bourgeoisie has a strategic interest in keeping western workers in a petty-bourgeois or labor-aristocratic mindset.

Correct, there is not much of a difference. It is a question of translation. A translation into English may opt to use the word “liberal” in certain places because of the precise connotations of that word to an English-speaking audience. In other languages they may opt to translate the concept of bourgeois/liberal ideology into a word that does not specifically refer to the classical liberal movement.

Is this true in the non-English-speaking world?

Mao wrote the notorious “Combating Liberalism” essay, but I don’t speak Chinese, so I can’t verify how direct that translation is. It is possible that the original text referred more generically to bourgeois ideology, and not specifically the classical liberal movement in western Europe.

The poster is confused why the term liberal is used so often in English Marxist contexts, so it seems plausible that non-English Marxists do not often refer specifically to liberalism.

are they adding extra ethanol or something?

Yes. 88 has up to 15% ethanol. You should check your manual before using it.

Perhaps the difference is just that the term liberal has more historical relevance in English-speaking countries. The specific ideology was invented by British and French thinkers, especially influencing the leaders of the American Revolution.