Labor aristocracy

[Comrade #138672]

Is the labor aristocracy, as defined by Lenin, a valid and useful concept? Marxists don't always seem to agree on this. You don't have to be a Leninist to accept the labor aristocracy. It makes sense to me.

I definitely observe a labor aristocracy here in the Netherlands, composed of mainly white workers, who are a little better off than average. Because of Imperialism and Colonialism, the upper class in our country can afford it to 'buy off' the loyalty of a significant part of the white workers. They can then be used to convince other workers that they can work themselves 'up', to create the illusion that there's such a thing as class mobility for everyone.

What do you think? Why is there so much disagreement?

[robbo203]

Is the labor aristocracy, as defined by Lenin, a valid and useful concept? Marxists don't always seem to agree on this. You don't have to be a Leninist to accept the labor aristocracy. It makes sense to me.

I definitely observe a labor aristocracy here in the Netherlands, composed of mainly white workers, who are a little better off than average. Because of Imperialism and Colonialism, the upper class in our country can afford it to 'buy off' the loyalty of a significant part of the white workers. They can then be used to convince other workers that they can work themselves 'up', to create the illusion that there's such a thing as class mobility for everyone.

What do you think? Why is there so much disagreement?



The theory is crap - empirically and on grounds of sheer logic

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) by the North in the Global South is a tiny tiny proportion of total capital investment anyway - if I recall about 1.5 per cent - the vast bulk of FDI emanating from developed countries going into other developed countries. So much for the Lenin's "superprofits" from colonialism. Would the capitalists seriously pass up on the opportunity to make a killing in the market if it came their way? In which case why not invest most of your capital in the the Global South? In point of fact as Marx showed there is a tendency for the rate of profit to equalise through competition anyway

That apart , there have been studies that directly contradict what one might expect from the labour aristrocracy thesis. I recall reading something by Tony Cliff which demonstrated quite convincingly the wage differentials within the working class were actually more unequalin countries with little in the way of capital exported abroad and therefore with little in the way of "spoils" from colonial exploitation to "bribe" the so called labour aristocracy with...

In any case the idea is ridiculous on its terms. If capitalists were so amenable to sharing the spoils of colonial exploitation with the labour aristocracy then you would expect them to be equally amenable to any wage claims that the aforementioned labour aristocracy presented. If you believe that then you might as well believe in the tooth fairy

[GoddessCleoLover]

Didn't the "labor aristocracy" concept predate Lenin, going back to Bakunin and Kautsky? It seems to be a concept that over time has been distorted from its origins referring to well-paid and highly skilled artisans to some "third worldist" critique of unionized white workers.

[Comrade #138672]

The theory is crap - empirically and on grounds of sheer logic

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) by the North in the Global South is a tiny tiny proportion of total capital investment anyway - if I recall about 1.5 per cent - the vast bulk of FDI emanating from developed countries going into other developed countries. So much for the Lenin's "superprofits" from colonialism. Would the capitalists seriously pass up on the opportunity to make a killing in the market if it came their way? In which case why not invest most of your capital in the the Global South?You do have a point. But would the 1.5% of the exported capital not be able to generate a disproportionate amount of profit, because the workers in poor countries have to settle for a very low wage?


In point of fact as Marx showed there is a tendency for the rate of profit to equalise through competition anywayCan you elaborate on this?


That apart , there have been studies that directly contradict what one might expect from the labour aristrocracy thesis. I recall reading something by Tony Cliff which demonstrated quite convincingly the wage differentials within the working class were actually more unequalin countries with little in the way of capital exported abroad and therefore with little in the way of "spoils" from colonial exploitation to "bribe" the so called labour aristocracy with...

In any case the idea is ridiculous on its terms. If capitalists were so amenable to sharing the spoils of colonial exploitation with the labour aristocracy then you would expect them to be equally amenable to any wage claims that the aforementioned labour aristocracy presented. If you believe that then you might as well believe in the tooth fairyThen maybe the upper class uses the superprofits to 'bribe' a bigger part of the working class? Perhaps not directly, but because they are more inclined to give in to worker demands when their profits are big enough. They can also 'buy away' a potential workers' uprising. Although this must be limited.

[Jimmie Higgins]

As I understand it, the description in the OP is not how Lenin discussed the idea of a labor aristocracy. I believe he used it not to mean, "well paid" or "bought-off" workers, but Trade Union officials and people in the 2nd International who owed their position to fighting for workers, but also benefited from the need for that fight - and so when push came to shove they would be opposed to revolution, rather than reform, because it made them and their position redundant and unnecessary.

A worker who believes that they benefit from the system is not unusual in non-revolutionary times and in Marxist thinking it's generally been described as "false consciousness" or holding contradictory ideas.

[Positivist]

The suggestion that superprofits are not being extracted from workers of the periphery is both rude and laughable. The overwhelming majority of consumer goods, and even most capital goods are manufactured in the "global south" while standard wages equate to less than one dollar per hour in most countries.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Given the historical behaviour of unionized white workers, obvs. some critique is in order. Anyway, one can point to the differential in relative wealth within developed nations (though even that has some pretty distinct gendered and racial characteristics), but that doesn't address the question in terms of absolute wealth. As Butch Lee illuminates:


The primitive sweatshops of the garment trade in London and New York never disappeared at all, but have only left the white metropolis and expanded a thousand-fold into Chinatown, El Paso, Haiti, Canton, Bangladesh, Morocco, and South Mrika. The concentrated industry that once made Manchester, England the first great industrial hell has now grown up and left its nuclear family home in the metropolis for Bombay, Korea, Jo'burg, Mexico City, and Brazil. And what were then small pockets of capitalist privilege, green and pleasant upper-class and middle-class neighborhoods in a London or a Boston, have grown to the size of parasitic countries and even semicontinents at the center of a patriarchal world empire of a new type.

[. . .]



The central feature of imperialism during the colonial period was that it created entire parasitic societies by forcibly polarizing the world into oppressor and oppressed nations, and this continues to be true under neo-colonialism. Neo-colonialism is, incredibly enough, in some ways even more parasitic in its effects than colonialism was. This is driving world political contradictions to a new level.

In the neo-imperial metropolis, all classes of citizens receive a greater percentage of the world's income than their share in the population, as [Egyptian economist] Samir Amin shows [Amin's chart wouldn't copy/paste properly, but it basically shows that the distribution of labour and wealth disproportionately enriches the imperial metropole, and disproportionately rests on the industrial and agricultural labour of people in the periphery] . An important exception we must note-because Amin's table doesn't recognize it-are those peoples in the metropolis that capitalism has marginalized and set aside from its economy to be exterminated. Capitalists and their upper middle class managers and technicians are only 8% of the world's population (capitalists alone are under 1%), but take 45% of all world income.

This explains why there's an emerging pattern of global yuppie culture: of privileged people who speak the same computer languages, own similar property, have identical financial skills, who wear the same Armani or Perry Ellis clothes to work for the same multinational corporations in different continents, and whose children may well intermarry across old racial, national, and gender lines. "Class is everything."

And, on the other hand, why there's an opposite class pattern emerging of homeless Mrikan street children being targets of violent elimination not only in the slums of Brazil, but around the globe-in Panama City, Nairobi, Kenya, in islamic Sudan, and in Brooklyn, too. This civilization that has space walks above the Page 24 Night-Vision 132 earth and genetically altered cells reinjected to fight tumors, is with equal sophistication setting it up for surplus Afrikan children to be hunted like game animals. Or do you still think it's all coincidences?

When we said earlier that the commodity life of the capitalist system is nothing like we think it is, that's equivalent to saying that the class structure is nothing like we think it is, also. To a remarkable extent, the class analysis of 19th century industrial euro-capitalism done by Karl Marx is still true today, although this can only be grasped by overturning euro-centrism (which in this instance can be discovered as being co-terminus with patriar- chy) and seeing, with fresh eyes, the world as a whole.

As useful as the broad statistical foundation given us by Amin is, suggesting many things, its limitations become evident once we confront Black Genocide or the oppression of women as property. The question is not a mere inequality between occupational groupings, some richer, some poorer, as reformers like to believe. The imperialist class structure is actually a living machinery, of clashing relationships to production, whose essential fuel is capital extracted by genocide, by slavery and dispossession and looting on a mass scale. Not as dead history, but right now.

We have to bring up into full view the hidden center of the capitalist machinery-the processes that Marx first scientifically identified as primitive accumulation and the link between semi-slavery and «slavery pure and simple.»

Our primary question is, who is the modern proletariat and what role does it play as a class? The answer is simple: it is primarily women, children, and alien labor. Those who are colonized. The modern proletariat or industrial working class, which is both among the most oppressed and the most productive class that supports the structure of capitalist society by its labor, is not and has never been gender-neutral or nationally self-contained. No matter how indignantly some men may scream at these words, this is a matter of historical record, of fact.

[Ostrinski]

I thought Lenin's conception of labor aristocracy was of the trade union bureaucracy which had its roots in the working class, gaining a standard of privilege by working their way into managerial or professional strata positions of the larger, moderate, and state approved trade unions and other worker organizations. I believe he also used the term "labor lieutenants" which DeLeon also used.

It seems to only be the Maoists that hold the position of first world workers being privileged as a unit or benefitting from exploitation of third world workers.

I am not very educated on the issue though so I could be off the mark.

[ind_com]

It seems to only be the Maoists that hold the position of first world workers being privileged as a unit or benefitting from exploitation of third world workers.


It is indeed a position of Maoists. But by 'labour-aristocracy', Maoists too refer to the bloc of trade-union bureaucrats, pseudo-leftist power-blocs etc. The difference between the two is that one is just privileged while the other is counter-revolutionary.

[Lucretia]

Didn't the "labor aristocracy" concept predate Lenin, going back to Bakunin and Kautsky? It seems to be a concept that over time has been distorted from its origins referring to well-paid and highly skilled artisans to some "third worldist" critique of unionized white workers.

The theory goes back to Marx and Engels.