Do all Left Communists reject notions of a "labour aristocracy" or just the ICC?

[Palingenisis]

The Internationalist Communist Group seem to accept that there is a "Labour aristocracy" and the implications of its existence at least in certain places but I may be picking them up wrong.

What about other Left Communists?

Did the first generation of the German and Italian Lefts debate the issue with Lenin?

Thanks.

[A.R.Amistad]

I really don't see why anyone would be so passionate about rejecting the theory anyway, but what happens will happen. I'd like to know why they do reject the theory, especially in this day and age?

[Palingenisis]

I really don't see why anyone would be so passionate about rejecting the theory anyway, but what happens will happen. I'd like to know why they do reject the theory, especially in this day and age?

I think they reject it for two reasons. One to my mind good and the other to my mind silly.

The good reason is that all wage labour under capitalism is essentially alienating and so in that way all members of the working class are in the same both...And that the goal of the Communist movement is not an improved capitalism as such but to fundamentally change the relationship of humans to their activity.

The reason that they reject it that I find silly is that they say such a theory divides the working class...Well no its doesnt, Imperialism has already done that...The "Labour aristocracy theory" is just accepting the reality of the situation.

[Palingenisis]

But Im not sure that all Left Communists reject the "theory" which is why Im asking if they do.

[A.R.Amistad]

I don't think anyone rejects that even the labor aristocracy has the same class interest as the rest of the working class. I have a hard time rejecting this theory because I'm pretty sure I personally fall under the labor aristocrat category.

[Devrim]

The Internationalist Communist Group seem to accept that there is a "Labour aristocracy" and the implications of its existence at least in certain places but I may be picking them up wrong.

I don't know what the GCI think on it nowadays. You could always write to them and ask them.


I am virtually sure that other left communist groups reject it.


What about other Left Communists?


Did the first generation of the German and Italian Lefts debate the issue with Lenin?

Not as far as I know. I will ask somebody for you who knows a bit more about the period.


I really don't see why anyone would be so passionate about rejecting the theory anyway, but what happens will happen.

I don't think that we are that 'passionate about it'. We did write an article about it nearly thirty years ago, but not much more than that. I think when it comes up it is used to justify two things, either Maoism, or not supporting workers' struggles in the so-called 'first world'. Actually I heard it used about the recent TEKEL strike in Turkey, somebody saying they were rich and didn't support them. These were the sort of 'labour aristocrats' who earned about €400 a month.


I'd like to know why they do reject the theory, especially in this day and age?

Here is our take on it:

http://en.internationalism.org/node/3101


I don't think anyone rejects that even the labor aristocracy has the same class interest as the rest of the working class. I have a hard time rejecting this theory because I'm pretty sure I personally fall under the labor aristocrat category.

Just out of interest, what do you do?

Devrim

[A.R.Amistad]

Just out of interest, what do you do?

I'm 17 and a student. My dad is an epidemiologist for the state and technically sells his labor, as does my mom, who is a Spanish professor at a university. Overall, we make about $100,000 a year all together, which far surpasses the median income of most proletarians in the US. My parents both have somewhat high ranking positions in their jobs, but they still sell their labor.

[Palingenisis]

I don't know what the GCI think on it nowadays. You could always write to them and ask them.


I did send an email to them not so long ago asking them their stance on this and other questions aswell as asking them to come on here and present their case against you lads...No reply.

[Alf]

These are a couple of quotes from articles on the Bordigist 'library', Sinistra.net. If you do a search on that site you will probably find others. They are from articles by the International Communist Party, which follows most of Lenin's ideas regarding imperialism and in other areas as well.


The first is the imperialist puppet Israel, which has imported lock, stock and barrel, a capitalist agriculture and industry and the classes associated with these, a European bourgeoisie, petty-bourgeoisie and labour aristocracy - the ashkenazim Jews. These categories enjoy exorbitant privileges in comparison to the Arab population, now totally expropriated and hunted off the land in the territories conquered before 1967 and subject to a rapid expropriation in Gaza and the West Bank. But at the same time they enjoy a social and political superiority over the oriental Jewish petty-bourgeoisie and working masses, the sephardim Jews, not to mention the immigrant workers now coming in considerable numbers from the Transjordan and soon from Egypt.

This is a history that tells of the clash between Marxism and anarchism (a petit-bourgeois and prebourgeois doctrine), between Marxism and social-democratic reformism (the ideology of a labor aristocracy born in the era of the «peaceful» development of capitalism), between Marxism and anarcho-syndicalism (a manifestation of an instinctive, yet sterile and inadequate, reaction and disgust to the political betrayal of reformists), and between Marxism and counter-revolutionary Stalinism (a veritable reversal of Marxism).

[Palingenisis]

I also saw one quote by Lenin there...

" Possessing remarkable oratorical talent, a man of seething Irish energy, Larkin has performed miracles among the unskilled workers - that mass of the British proletariat which in Britain is often cut off from the advanced workers by that cursed petty-bourgeois, Liberal, aristocratic spirit of the British skilled worker". :)

[Palingenisis]

But on a serious note I read in an old copy of The Starry Plough that Larkin was in lengthy correspondence with Herman Gorter and that his Revolutionary Workers League (or was it Group) was in some way attached to the Communist Workers International...Does anybody know anything about this?

[Palingenisis]

James Larkin was a very important syndicalist leader here in the early part of the century who is still very much a working class hero. He was involved in the setting up of the Communist Party of Ireland but broke from them because of their centrism...They later went on to call on people to vote for DeValera in the late 1920s and continued on that course as far as I know until the 50s.

[Jacobinist]

State communists in general believe in some type of heriarchy, regardless of what they claim. That's what a bourgeois state apparatus is all about. LeftComs however might also believe in a similiar structure, albeit a democratic one. There's a lot of tendencies, so pick your favorirte!

[Palingenisis]

State communists in general believe in some type of heriarchy, regardless of what they claim. That's what a bourgeois state apparatus is all about. LeftComs however might also believe in a similiar structure, albeit a democratic one. There's a lot of tendencies, so pick your favorirte!

If only things were so simple....

"Bordiga saw the relationship between the party and the working class under capitalism as analogous with that of the brain to the other parts of a biological organism. Similarly, he envisaged the relationship between the scientifically organised central administration and the rest of socialist society in much the same terms. Indeed, Bordiga saw the administrative organ of socialist society as the direct descendant of the party in capitalist society:

When the international class war has been won and when states have died out, the party, which is born with the proletarian class and its doctrine, will not die out. In this distant time perhaps it will no longer be called a party, but it will live as the single organ, the 'brain' of a society freed from class forces. [1956-7][15]
In the higher stage of communism, which will no longer know commodity production, nor money, nor nations, and which will also see the death of the state. . . the party. . . will still keep the role of depository and propagator of the social doctrine giving a general vision of the development of the relations between human society and material nature. [1951][16]
Thus the scientifically organised central administration in socialism would be, in a very real sense for Bordiga - who was a firm partisan of the view that human society is best understood as being a kind of organism - the 'social brain', a specialised social organ charged with managing the general affairs of society. Though it would be acting in the interest of the social organism as a whole, it would not be elected by the individual members of socialist society, any more than the human brain is elected by the individual cells of the human body."

http://libcom.org/library/bordigism-adam-buick

[zimmerwald1915]

I don't think that we are that 'passionate about it'. We did write an article about it nearly thirty years ago, but not much more than that. I think when it comes up it is used to justify two things, either Maoism, or not supporting workers' struggles in the so-called 'first world'. Actually I heard it used about the recent TEKEL strike in Turkey, somebody saying they were rich and didn't support them. These were the sort of 'labour aristocrats' who earned about €400 a month.
Interestingly, it also comes up in the first world, though not labelled as such, when the bourgeoisie is trying to impose cuts in living standards on the working class. During the media circus involving the US health care bill, there was a whole hooplah about how workers with employer-provided health plans were "priviliged" and that they'd have to "sacrifice" some "benefits" in order for the plan to both succeed economically and have any chance of passing politically.

I think Jerry's articlep (http://en.internationalism.org/inter/153/lead) has good things to say on the subject.

[soyonstout]

I haven't yet read the ICC's article on the labor aritstocracy, but to be honest, one of the best arguments against the idea of the labor aristocracy (as defined by Lenin--I think this definition is hazy at best and far from universal in the early ComIntern--for example Bukharin, Fraina, and others associate it with the union leaders, but I think that confuses the issue even more) was in one of Loren Goldner's longer pieces called The Remaking of the American Working Class (home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/remaking.html)



Today, as the factories close in Detroit, Manchester, Alsace and Bochum, we would like to see the Leninist left come and explain to the "labor aristocracy" how it "benefits" from imperialism; we would like to see it call for "nationalization under workers' control" of decrepit 70-year old factories.

...Throughout the epoch stretching from 1890 to 1973, the importance of the falsity of Lenin's theory of imperialism escaped virtually all Marxists. It is true that Luxemburg, in 1913, had already anticipated the trajectory of capitalism for the 20th century much more clearly (cf. her Accumulation of Capital, Chs. 29-32). She had seen, on one hand, that imperialism was the necessary extension of a valorization of capital which was partly ficticious, and on the other hand that arms production and the taxation required to finance it could become a source of accumulation by driving wages below levels required for the reproduction of labor power. Those who took over Luxemburg's analysis, like her disciple Sternberg, saw clearly that the analysis of the "labor aristocracy", the idea that the Western working class was drawing a wage above those determined by its reproductive needs (whereas, much of the time, it was belowthem) was a moralizing ideology completely alien to Marxism.

Let us consider the history of Lenin's theory of imperialism. Between 1917 and 1945, the theory could scarcely be tested, because of the transition crisis of world capitalism that paralyzed production in the metropolis. With the founding of the new world order represented by the Bretton Woods system, the Marshall Plan, the IMF,the World Bank and the GATT, i.e with the unification of the international financial system under the auspices of New York and Washington, what had occured? Between 1945 and 1962, the "Third World" was more marginalized than super-exploited: its share of world trade was lower than in 1890-1914 or 1919-1938. In this fact is all the difference between extensive and intensive accumulation, for in the latter phase capital devotes itself more to the recomposition of the worker and the work process than to transforming peasants into workers through primitive accumulation. The major investment of world capitalism after World War II was not in Brazil or India; it was in Canada, Europe and Japan.(5) This new world system, as we will see momentarily, had nothing to do with the imperialism which Lenin had already misconstrued in his analysis of the 1890-1914 period. There is of course no question that the Third World was important as a source of raw materials, and these were the sectors that drew Western investment.

Beginning in 1965, the post-war boom had played itself out in the U.S., and the European recessions of 1965-1967 signalled that it was nearing its end in Europe. It was at this moment that investment in actual production in the Third World began in earnest. From this point onward, Lenin's theory of imperialism, which had always been wrong, and completely contradicted by the specific nature and location of accumulation in the 1945-1965 period, was refuted in the Third World itself. Once Brazil, South Korea and Taiwan were clearly launched on a road to serious industrialization--a situation which has modified their relations with the now de-industrializing Western countries--the theory of "monopoly capitalism" and the analysis of imperialism which flowed from it was finished. This industrialization of the Third World, as we will see momentarily, is a world-wide rationalization movement which has as its goal the reduction of the total social wage, like any rationalization of a single factory. Because the two major imperialist powers of the 20th century, England and the United States, have the most decrepit capital plant of all the so-called advanced capitalist powers, it is clear that "the export of capital" constitutes a de-industrialization of the imperialist metropolis which, far from "benefiting" the "labor aristocracy" of the country in question, undermines the material basis of its self-reproduction.


...Imperialism, in no way benefits the working class of the metropolis. It represents, rather, a deindustrialization, which aims at reducing the total wage bill of the region or country of origin. This process invariably brings about a stagnation in the reproductive basis of the imperialist nation's domestic sector; productive capital stagnates, the total social wage declines. The international hegemony of the national financial sector of origin lasts from the moment when the country becomes a first-rank industrial power, with the highest labor productivity, to the moment when the new, more productive plant which it builds abroad reaches a competitive level which overwhelms the now backward and obsolescent plant. In the interim period, the national bourgeoisie, because of its international rentier function, is able to afford a "welfare state" to cover over the rough edges of stagnation and the end of the self-reproduction of the working class; when the moment arrives where the obsolescence of national industry no longer allows the financial sector to maintain its international position, the welfare state is dismantled and the bourgeoisie moves to the final phases of "rationalization", the massive devalorization of the backward fixed capital and above all of the total wage bill which the original shift into ficticious forms (financial and real estate) and investment abroad was always intended to bring about. It is a logic which begins with Disraeli and Theodore Roosevelt, and ends with Thatcher and Reagan.

This article really made me think although I think Goldner's wording could be a lot better in many places. The 1st world working class is told to accept wage cuts and threatened with the moving of the plant to the 3rd world--this dramatically represents not that 1st world workers benefits from low wages in the 3rd world--on the contrary--ALL workers suffer from low wages anywhere, because they are pitted against each other by capitalist competition. This is the basic principle of the workers' movement and of the 1st International actually, to prevent the driving down of the wages by the poorly-paid by agitating for higher wages for everyone and the unity of the class internationally.

[Kléber]

A lot of confusion comes from the fact that, this term was originally used to refer to just that, an aristocracy or elite caste within the proletariat, which profits from imperialism and tries to tame and control the struggle of other workers by misleading the labor movement. Ordinary workers can be bought off by reforms paid for by imperialist super-profits, but they are still workers. The "aristocrats" are the union and left-party bureaucrats whose job is to defuse social tensions, and get filthy rich doing that. Even Mao never said the ordinary workers in imperialist countries had become counter-revolutionary.

The notion that the entire working class of the imperialist countries is not proletarian, but aristocratic, is just misanthropic bullshit, popular only with self-loathing Western petty bourgeois radicals of the MIM type, or petty-bourgeois demagogues like Pol Pot who drove around in a limousine while his regime murdered workers for the crime of living in a city. As comrades have noted, global capitalism is impoverishing Western workers and making this perversion of Lenin's theory more and more bankrupt each day. Is a penniless British worker who freezes to death in Winter an "aristocrat?"

[Devrim]

Interestingly, it also comes up in the first world, though not labelled as such, when the bourgeoisie is trying to impose cuts in living standards on the working class. During the media circus involving the US health care bill, there was a whole hooplah about how workers with employer-provided health plans were "priviliged" and that they'd have to "sacrifice" some "benefits" in order for the plan to both succeed economically and have any chance of passing politically.

Yes, I remember during the News International dispute in London in 1986-87 people saying they wouldn't support the printers because they were overpaid. I used that example because it was absurd. €400 a moth is not the 'labour aristocracy'.

Devrim

[Devrim]

State communists in general believe in some type of heriarchy, regardless of what they claim. That's what a bourgeois state apparatus is all about. LeftComs however might also believe in a similiar structure, albeit a democratic one. There's a lot of tendencies, so pick your favorirte!

Are the ICC 'state communists'? I thought that we rejected the idea of a 'workers' state', and have been consistently more anti-state than most anarchists over the years.

But hey what would I know? I am only a member.

Devrim

[Jacobinist]

Are the ICC 'state communists'? I thought that we rejected the idea of a 'workers' state', and have been consistently more anti-state than most anarchists over the years.

But hey what would I know? I am only a member.

Devrim

Did I say the ICC were state communists? You have got to stop assuming you can read people's minds based off of one sentence posted on the internet! But Im in total agreement with Klebers post above ^

[Devrim]

Did I say the ICC were state communists? You have got to stop assuming you can read people's minds based off of one sentence posted on the internet! But Im in total agreement with Klebers post above ^

Sorry, my mistake.

Devrim

[MilitantWorker]

Did I say the ICC were state communists? You have got to stop assuming you can read people's minds based off of one sentence posted on the internet! But Im in total agreement with Klebers post above ^

Homie. Show some respect.

Devrim has nearly 5,000 posts! And that's just on these forums.

If you were on the internet pushing class lines half as hard as Devrim does you'd make simple mistakes like that, too. And he's outside talking to workers too, take my word for it.

Kids these days, sheesh.

[Jacobinist]

Homie. Show some fucking respect.

Devrim has nearly 5,000 posts for christ sakes. And that's just on these forums! If you were on the internet pushing class lines half as hard as Devrim does you'd make simple mistakes like that, too. And he's outside talking to workers too, take my word for it.

Kids these fucking days, sheesh.


Homie, mind your own fucking business. Take that for respect chump! On the reals though, I couldnt care any less about Dev's cyber reputation. I simply responded.

[MilitantWorker]

The business of the class is my business, fool!

:lol:

Mwm_0HbczDQ

[Palingenisis]

The business of the class is my business, fool!

:lol:

Mwm_0HbczDQ

"Sorry, my mistake.

Devrim"

Little bit of a different approach...

[MilitantWorker]

Little bit of a different approach...

I don't know where the Jacobinst is from but around my way, we don't talk to our elders that way. My problem is here:



I couldnt care any less about Dev's cyber reputation. I simply responded.

Well think twice before you hit the "post" button next time, buddy.

I have a pet peeve for kids who don't take the class struggle seriously enough. Sorry if I lost it. I apologize.


No offense to a player, but yo, I don't play
And if you take offense, fuck it, got to be that way


Now, back to the discussion...

[Jacobinist]

I don't know where the Jacobinst is from but around my way, we don't talk to our elders that way. My problem is here:



Well think twice before you hit the "post" button next time, buddy.

I have a pet peeve for kids who don't take the class struggle seriously enough. Sorry if I lost it. I apologize.


Lolz. You sound ridiculous. Hehe. Kids, 1988, hehe.:rolleyes: