Labour Aristocracy

[JacobVardy]

I just read The Iron Heel (Jack London 1902). In it is the phrase Labour Aristocracy. I thought this was a leninist term. Can anyone say who coined the phrase. Anthough now i have type this i gues i should have just STFI.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

I think Engels first used it. But you are right, Lenin also theorised this concept.

The idea is taken apart here:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1957/06/rootsref.htm

[gilhyle]

Engels and Lenin observed that there was a stratification of the working class which led to certain priviledged layers being more conservative than the mass of their working class colleagues.

This was little more than a socliological observation of the evident stratification of the trade union movement in the time they lived.

Tony Cliff, living at a time when material differences within the working class were greatly reduced observed instead that


all historical experience testifies that the fewer the workers’ rights and the more downtrodden they are, the greater are the differentials especially between skilled and unskilled workers.

The observation does not so much contradict as complement Lenin's observation. It can both be true that the greater the stratification of the working class, the more conservative the better-off section, and also be true that those differentials are eroded the more the working class operates together.

BUt there is another point - even as the success of the class reinforces itself, there remains an element of differentiation in the material interests within the class and it will remain the case that the better off layers will continue to advocate a moderated socialism to steer the whole of the class towards the management of the capitalist state rather than the transformation of the state into a tool for the management of capital (and then the elimination of capital) in the interests of the class as a whole.

The more fundamental point about the concept of labour aristocracy is that it is a reflection, at the level of sociological observation, of the Marxist conception of the unity of the working class. That unity is not something which just exists as a common material interest, rather it is something that that is built by the building of the working class movement. As workers act politically together, they effect reforms which reinforce their class unity. As they fail politically when acting as a class, they are pushed back into extreme material differentiation.