A Conceptual History of the Labour Aristocracy: A Critical Review
Introduction
The concept of the labour aristocracy is one of the most hotly debated in Marxism. This paper explores the history of the idea. The labour aristocracy, in general, refers to a privileged group of workers, with the associated view that this group will be prone to conservatism because of said privilege and thus unlikely to support movements towards socialism.
In general, a tension can be observed in Marxism where early Marxists began to produce theory and analysis at a time when the labour aristocracy played a decisive (and non-revolutionary) role in the labour movement. At the same time, we can observe certain inertia in the analysis, the result of early prognoses based on the presumption of a globally homogenous working class whose political interests would converge over time.
It is important to note, however, that the labour aristocracy as a concept is not a rigidly formulated one and is still subject to significant debate. It is very much a living concept, and this paper also demonstrates that the experiences of the 20th century led various Marxist writers to creatively use and develop the idea of the labour aristocracy to help them understand and shape political trends.
In explaining the opportunism of the English labour movement, Engels provides the first attempt to conceptualize a stratum of workers whose objective position in the global class structure has been altered by the benefits brought their country by imperialism. Engels, in 1858, wrote that:
[The] English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world, this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.1
Engels would later more explicitly link the idea of a bourgeois working class with imperialism, and in a letter to Kautsky wrote:
You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general. There is no workers’ party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies.2
Engels, however, was hesitant to draw any far-reaching conclusions from this analysis and remained committed to the idea that the English working class would return to a revolutionary position, even to the extent of reversing his previous comments about the extent of English working class embourgeoisement. In the preface to the second edition of his The Condition of the Working Class in England written in 1892, we can see that Engels refers to an “aristocracy among the working class” or a “privileged minority of the workers” as against the “great mass of working people”.3 In this way, Engels is setting up a dichotomy of class positions within an imperialist country, a split between a layer of opportunism, an ‘aristocracy’ variously defined as either the top level of workers, or just the union leaders, and the majority of the workers.
While Engels conceded that there were elements of the English working class which obtained benefits because of imperialism, he felt that if England’s industrial monopoly were to be eroded a significant number of workers who obtained ‘temporary improvement’ from it would be thrust back down to the proletariat proper. This idea of reproletarianization is a recurring theme in early Marxist understandings of the labour aristocracy and one that reappears in the work of Lenin.
Inconsistencies in Early Marxist Analysis of the Labour Aristocracy
A certain degree of conceptual ambivalence can also be found in Lenin’s discussion of the labour aristocracy. For Lenin, the key historical experience he was attempting to explain was the split in the Second International Workingmen’s Association. He wanted to understand why the socialist parties of the imperialist countries voted along nationalist lines and in favour of war, contrary to the Marxist expectation that they would (and should) unite along class lines. As a direct result of his engaging with this problematic came most of Lenin’s thinking on imperialism, as documented in two principal works, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism and Imperialism and the Split in Socialism.4, 5
It was in Imperialism and the Split in Socialism that Lenin would spend most time theorizing around the question of the labour aristocracy. However, even in this work, there is no internal consistency in how he treats the concept. In the first place, Lenin suggests that the “bourgeoisie of an imperialist great power can economically bribe the upper strata of ‘its’ workers by spending on this a hundred million or so francs a year, for its superprofits most likely amount to about a thousand million.”6 The description of an ‘upper strata’ is a restatement of Engels’ conceptualization of the aristocracy of the working class. Implicit is the idea that the lower strata of a great power are too numerous and, therefore, too expensive to ‘bribe’.
The second thing to note about Lenin’s conceptualization of the labour aristocracy can be found in the word ‘bribe’, and the discussion that follows its usage. To ‘bribe’ a section of the working class implies that the labour aristocracy is a social class actively brought into being by a direct political process. This involves the literal bribery of “labour ministers, “labour representatives”, labour members of War Industries Committees, labour officials, workers belonging to the narrow craft unions, office employees, etc., etc.,.7”
What is interesting about Lenin’s analysis of imperialism is the lack of quantitative analysis around the nature of the labour aristocracy. In basic terms, Lenin was arguing that a minority of workers, the ‘upper strata’ were being actively bought by politically determined bribes which the ruling class afforded from imperialist superprofits. Despite this, Lenin does not indicate in statistical terms what percentage of any imperialist society are office employees, labour officials or craft union workers. Even the vagueness associated with his use of ‘etc’ leaves open the question of just how large this section of society is. Modern Marxists typically employ a decontextualized reiteration of Lenin’s statements to suggest that currently, imperialist superprofits can at best provide for the same minority upper strata of imperialist country workers.8
In addition to this, when writing Imperialism and the Split in Socialism Lenin is ambivalent in his analysis of the implications of imperialist super-profits. On the one hand, he argues along the lines that entire countries can be parasitic entities dependent on imperialist superprofits:
…[T]here is the tendency of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists to convert a handful of very rich and privileged nations into “eternal” parasites on the body of the rest of mankind, to “rest on the laurels” of the exploitation of Negroes, Indians, etc., keeping them in subjection with the aid of the excellent weapons of extermination provided by modern militarism.9
However, Lenin still felt there was a mass base for revolutionary transformation in the imperialist countries, and argued that:
On the other hand, there is the tendency of the masses, who are more oppressed than before and who bear the whole brunt of imperialist wars, to cast off this yoke and to overthrow the bourgeoisie. It is in the struggle between these two tendencies that the history of the labour movement will now inevitably develop.10
In this analysis, there is a contradiction between the idea of the working class in the imperialist countries being advantaged by the economic gains brought by imperialism and the idea that the same working class will be the foot soldiers of anti-imperialism. Read in the context of the First World War during which Lenin wrote, and considering the political message he was trying to convey, this is an argument that the material consequences of war may radicalize even some sections of the labour aristocracy, particularly in the face of defeat. Therefore Lenin anticipated a struggle between social-chauvinism and genuine socialism in the imperialist-country working class.
In examining the charge of inconsistency in Lenin’s approach, it is essential to recognize that his texts are not purely academic, but are political tracts often aimed against the social democratic reformists of the Second International. His remarks on the labor aristocracy are spread out over a long period from 1896 to the early 1920s. At times, he defines the labor aristocracy as the top layer of the organized labor movement and its leaders as deliberately bribed and corrupted by capital. Indeed, this reflected the reality that in the two or three decades before the First World War, the foundations of aristocratic labour privilege had become politically institutionalised.
In Britain, at least, for much of the second half of the nineteenth century, the labour aristocracy had secured its position using its core constituency’s (the skilled and unionised workforce) market bargaining exclusively for its sectional ends. This method of muting the anti-capitalist struggle was no longer tenable by the end of the nineteenth century. Instead, in a situation wherein far higher levels of union organisation prevailed, and anti-capitalist ideology had a foothold in specific areas, the state itself had become a significant battleground to secure broader working-class ascendancy.
This, indeed, “was the logic behind Lloyd Georgism – the growing together of reformism, Fabian state socialism and social-imperialism – which reached its climax during the First World War.”11 In this context, it is easy to see how Lenin might have assumed that ‘buying’ the leaders of the labour movement was the central aspect of ruling class strategy in his time, and that a concerted struggle against such practices would soon bring the broad mass of workers back into the revolutionary fold.
What Lenin to some extent neglected, however, was that the foundation for mass-based social democratic politics was not merely the corruption of the labour leadership, but underlying it was the benefits of imperialist capitalism which came to be enjoyed by a much more significant section of the imperialist country workforce. Social imperialism catered to their short-term interests as much as it thwarted their longer-term ones.
In his later writings, by contrast, Lenin increasingly recognizes that broader layers of the working class receive imperialist super-profits. The extent to which working-class reformism is bribery (a deliberate policy pursued by the representatives of capital) or the result of the national class struggle for the redistribution of imperialism’s wealth remains somewhat unclear in Lenin’s work, as are the mechanisms by which superprofits reach the working class.
It is, of course, crucially important to read Lenin’s texts in the context of the historical situation developing in Europe between 1900 and 1923. During that time, a struggle arose between two lines relatively equal in influence within the socialist movement. Although Lenin never indicates a quantitative measure of the labour aristocracy, it is nonetheless clear that it is significant since it takes so much space up in the debates between these two lines. Lenin perceived the situation in Europe as a fluid one wherein change could occur relatively rapidly. Anti-imperialist struggle, a revolution in Germany, and the World War were all changing the boundaries of the struggle for socialism. With the forces of reform and revolution balanced, the political struggle was decisive.
What is most important to recognize is that Lenin understood what he called, variously, opportunism, social chauvinism and imperialist economism to be rooted in capitalism’s trend towards parasitism, that is, the phenomenon of monopolistic combines drawing ever greater proportions of the surplus value consumed within the great imperialist countries from abroad. For Lenin, where monopoly capitalism was not overthrown, the basis for social democratic politics would become more firmly established and the size of its aristocratic labour constituency concomitantly enlarged. Lenin’s experience in the Russian Revolution did not translate into further revolutions in imperialist countries, with social democracy proving virtually impossible to detach from its imperialist moorings. It is notable that after Russia, all socialist revolutions would occur in underdeveloped countries.
The question arises, therefore, as to where the confusion about the significance of the labour aristocracy comes from in the intellectual history of Marxism. In Marx’s original conception of the transition to socialism, he argued that workers in advanced capitalist societies would be the central social force supporting the revolution. As a result of this analysis, there is an inbuilt Eurocentrism in early Marxism, as argued by Biel.12 This Eurocentrism, as we have seen, was beginning to be challenged by Marx and Engels’ observations on the English working class, and by Lenin in his analysis of imperialism. However, these analyses had not displaced the original paradigm that advanced capitalist societies would be revolutionary societies, and by extension that advanced capitalist country workers would be the vanguard of the revolution.
An example of this theoretical position being applied in practice can be seen in the Bolshevik Central Committee position on the Brest-Litovsk treaty negotiations. While Lenin had argued for a quick settlement with the central powers, his position was a minority one within the Bolshevik Central Committee, which argued that a continuation of the war would lead to revolutionary outbreaks across Europe. This ultimately led to Trotsky’s notoriously catastrophic policy of ‘no war and no peace’ being pursued against Lenin’s admonitions, whereby Russia unilaterally demobilized its front but without agreeing on terms with the Central Powers. After losing large amounts of territory, the Bolsheviks found themselves in an even worse negotiating position and when an armistice was finally agreed upon it was on much worse terms than were originally proposed by the Central Powers. The assumption of rapid re-proletarianization due to war and the associated decline of social democratic forces was decidedly misplaced.
The extension of this reproletarianisation thesis can be seen in various forms of theoretical discussion and debate which followed Lenin. Lenin himself had insisted on the temporary nature of aristocratic labour privileges afforded by imperialism, to the extent of arguing that imperialism was leading capitalism into a crisis stage likely to displace the labour aristocracy from its privileged status. Similarly, the ‘general crisis theory’ adopted by the Comintern argued that imperialist capitalism faced a severe predicament in the late 1920s in which such re-proletarianization was occurring. Consider the following Comintern statement:
English capitalism in its classic period gave rise to the classic type of English trade unionism. Its socio-economic basis was the surplus profit which the English bourgeoisie received from all quarters of the globe, part of which entered into the wages of the English proletariat, which thus steadily raised its living standards and improved its skill. Within the international labour army the English proletariat thus developed as a privileged group, occupying an exceptional position as a labour aristocracy, and to a certain extent bound economically by common interests to its employers.
The beginning of the decline of English capitalism and the parallel decline in imperialist surplus profits have radically changed class relationships, both between the classes and within the working class. The growing acuteness of class contradictions has greatly diminished the political importance of traditional English liberalism.13
Here we can see the Comintern both wrestling with the idea of the labour aristocracy and its significance as a social force, identifying the link between imperialism and the labour aristocracy. Nonetheless, it remained committed to an analysis based on the imminent likelihood of revolution in the imperialist countries. Indeed, there was much truth to the Comintern thesis that class struggle in Europe and the US was intensifying in the late '20s and early '30s. Relative immiseration was indeed occurring, particularly after the Stock Market Crash of 1929. In the UK and all over Europe and the US, Communist membership and influence grew because of the more militant mood of the relatively impoverished and underemployed workers there, as well as that of the Communist Parties themselves.
However, imperialism’s crisis was averted using military pump-priming of the economy, state deficit spending, ramped-up colonialist exploitation and, ultimately, the drive toward the holocaust of WWII. The constituent parties of the Comintern, however, much to the chagrin of the centre, persisted in their refusal to countenance resolute anti-imperialist action. Instead, they colluded with the liberal and social democratic imperialists to sideline the national liberation struggles then raging across much of the colonial world.
Marxists, even those most sensitive to the need for resolute and uncompromising struggle against imperialism, did not correctly understand how the leading capitalist economies could weather the storm with recourse to imperialism. In the highly protectionist and nationalist interwar period, nearly half of Britain’s trade was with its dominions and colonies, and one-third of France’s exports went to its colonies. The Imperial powers (not including a Germany stripped of hers or an Italy largely excluded from the colonial dispensation) could use superprofits to purchase social peace.
Only those monopoly capitalist countries that either did not have an outlet for their increasingly crucial export of capital or that did not have colonial possessions succumbed to fascism, the inevitable product of imperialism thwarted. Liberalism’s decline only encouraged social democracy in its attempt to ally with whatever sections of the bourgeoisie could promise a return to the status quo ante. Following both world wars, indeed, the labour aristocracy saw its living standards rise, and its political aspirations met to an unprecedented degree, a reward for its fealty to imperialism.
As late as 1928, Bukharin argued at the 6th Congress of the Comintern that “…we see certain countries, which (to use an expression that needs to be made more precise) possess a ‘labour aristocracy,’ that is, a proletariat whose standard of living is higher than that of the average world proletariat.” 14 In the same passage, Bukharin also explicitly links imperialism to the labour aristocracy suggesting that, for example, England’s workers were directly benefiting from England’s colonial policy. Despite this argument, we can see that in Bukharin, too, there is wavering around the significance of this reality.
Emmanuel has argued that within the Marxist-Leninist movement there has been a tendency to articulate a ‘false consciousness’ argument to explain the conservatism of the advanced capitalist country workers. Per this view, the leaders of these workers become corrupt and mislead the workers away from the pursuit of their class interests (which are supposedly objectively in favour of revolutionary change), and towards opportunism and conservatism.
Emmanuel argues that the problem with this perspective is that it is not in keeping with any form of historical materialist analysis. The structural differences between the imperialist country workers and the workers of the Third World are long run in nature. Whereas much of the Marxist-Leninist movement has argued that workers in imperialist countries are duped into conservatism by their leadership and by ruling class propaganda, Emmanuel reversed this argument to suggest that it is often the leaders of imperialist working-class organizations who tend to be less conservative than the workers themselves.15 This is based on the realization that they constitute part of a nation that subsists only through the maintenance of a hegemonic position in global markets. It is thus the mass base itself which impels the leaders of working-class parties further down the road of revisionism and opportunism. He argues that:
It is no longer a question of the abstract rhetoric of concepts – surplus value, capital, profit and so on – but of material consumption. It is therefore the great mass of the population of the advanced countries, the wage-earners themselves, who are implicated…The peoples of the rich countries can consume all those articles to which they are so attached only because other people’s consume very few or even none of them. It is this that breaks the solidarity between the working classes of the two groups of countries.16
The response to Emmanuel from Bettelheim was to suggest that despite being beneficiaries of the imperialist process, First World workers were not exploiters:
True, it does happen that the capitalists who exploit the working people of another country relatively reduce the exploitation to which they subject the workers of their own country, in an attempt to corrupt them by creating a ‘labor aristocracy,’ but the workers whose rate of exploitation is thus relatively reduced cannot for that reason be described as exploiters of the workers of the dominated countries, for they are themselves subjected to intensive exploitation. The fact that these workers may, as Engels put it, ‘become bourgeois’ is quite another thing, belonging to the realm of ideological relations, not to that of production relations.17
What this sets up is a debate within Marxism whereby there are three basic positions taken, namely: (1) that First World workers are a labour aristocracy which is a net beneficiary of exploitation; (2) that First World workers are a labour aristocracy but are themselves exploited in net terms; and (3) that the labour aristocracy constitutes a minority of First World workers which may or may not be net beneficiaries of the system. To reach any conclusion around this issue requires historical and economic analysis rather than a reiteration of time-bound conclusions that are in many cases over a century old. It is not possible to determine which of these three positions is correct (and each has been true at given times and places) without such analysis.
Labour Aristocracy and Social Democracy
A critical question for Marxism has been the evaluation of the meaning of social democracy and its significance for Marxist analysis. As an ideology of class compromise, social democracy is the antithesis of Marxism as a theory of inevitably sharpening class conflict. A major theoretical question was posed for Marxism in the 20th century with the rising influence of social democracy across Europe, and the associated failure of revolutionary Marxism to penetrate the developed world in general. Against this, Edwards’ Labour Aristocracy: Mass Base of Social Democracy responds with the argument that social democracy was only possible in the First World because most of the population had gone through a process of embourgeoisement because of imperialism. Indeed, while a major political influence in many First World countries, and even in some oil-rich petrostates, social democracy has never been influential in the Third World. For Edwards, the parasitism of the developed countries has expanded as the imperialist system has become increasingly decadent, and this has ensured that the metropolitan workforce is increasingly distant from the production of surplus value.
Enver Hoxha deployed the concept of the labour aristocracy to explain the direction of left politics in Western Europe. Hoxha linked Eurocommunism and the tendency of Western European communist parties to support social democracy to the growth of the labour aristocracy in Western Europe. Hoxha believed that this was possible because of the infusion of imperialist capital because of the Marshall Plan.18 Hoxha’s analysis is far more clear-cut in its conclusions than many of the previous analyses which apply the concept of the labour aristocracy. Hoxha suggests that the objective existence of a labour aristocracy is a structural force which pulled Communist parties and the general direction of unions and left-wing political forces towards revisionist and opportunist politics and away from revolutionary socialism.
However, even the Swedish social democratic theorist Gunnar Myrdal alluded to the contradictions that open in the working class because of the division between workers. Myrdal wrote that “The improved economic status and security of employment of the working classes have given even the labourer vested interests at home as a professional.”19 The long-run impact of this was that certain specialised workers would have an international labour market,20 the common people were “tied to their land of birth as firmly as in feudal times the serf was tied to the estate of his lord, he could go sightseeing or visit the market but he had to return”.21 In this way, without using the concept of the labour aristocracy by name, Myrdal explores the dynamics which generate a labour aristocracy in the modern imperialist system.
At approximately the same time, Ahmad noted that the Weather Underground organization had analysed the United States using some concept of the labour aristocracy, albeit not using the term explicitly. In the 1968 document, ‘You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows’, it was stated that:
any conception of ‘socialist revolution’ simply in terms of the working people of the United States, failing to recognize the full scope of interests of the most oppressed peoples of the world, is a conception of a fight for a particular privileged interest, and is a very dangerous ideology.22
Furthermore, they stated that,
[v]irtually all of the white working class also has short-range privileges from imperialism, which are not false privileges but very real ones which give them an edge of vested interest and tie them to a certain extent to the imperialists, especially when the latter are in a relatively prosperous phase.23
More recently, Slavoj Zizek has referred to anti-austerity movement in Western Europe as being the result of protests by the “salaried bourgeoisie”. This is the labour aristocracy by another name. Zizek suggests that they are “privileged workers who have guaranteed jobs (teachers, public transport workers, police)” who, “[a]lthough their protests are nominally directed against the brutal logic of the market, […] are in effect protesting against the gradual erosion of their (politically) privileged place.”24
Contemporary Debates on the Labour Aristocracy
In recent times, the major argument about the impact of imperialism on global class structure has come from Cope in Divided World, Divided Class.25 There he has built on a long history of arguments connecting imperialism and the labour aristocracy. The biggest strength of Cope’s account of modern imperialism is in its documentation of the economic aspects of imperialism and its calculation of value transfers from Third World countries to imperialist countries. Both Divided World, Divided Class and Cope’s earlier Dimensions of Prejudice argued that there was a structural foundation to ideologies of racism, and chauvinism more generally. Liberal understandings of racism have typically been centred around the idea that racism is the result of a lack of education or miseducation. Many Marxist theories of racism suggest that racism is a form of ‘false consciousness’, a bourgeois ideology deployed by capital to divide the working class. Against this, Cope has comprehensively developed a structural theory of racism which is inherently tied to world imperialism.
Any argument against this theory would necessarily follow two basic paths. Firstly, an argument could be advanced that workers’ material circumstances have no impact on their political views or class consciousness. This would be to go against the essence of Marxism that social relations of production are a key factor which shape class consciousness. Secondly, it could be argued that First World workers as such do not constitute a labour aristocracy. The primary way that this position can be defended is to take a national isolationist view of the class structure. As leading theoreticians of monopoly capitalism Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy wrote, however:
[Even] today there are many Marxists who seem to think of capitalism as merely a collection of national capitalisms instead of seeing that the international character of imperialism has always had a decisive effect on the nature and functioning of the national units which compose it.26
Such an approach suggests that every national class structure should be seen on its own terms, and not in connection to the global class structure, or the associated globalization of production relations. Cope, by contrast, has argued that:
Whilst most left theorists have for a long time fallen into the habit of gauging exploitation on a national(ist) basis, commonly examining wages in relation to profits in the rich countries (and thereby ‘proving’ that the most exploited workers in the world are those of the developed nations), in the context of global imperialism, value creation and distribution must be examined as an international process.27
The national(ist) approach leads the observer to compare the differences between rich and poor within rich countries and conclude that the rate of exploitation must be very high and that therefore the working class must be potentially revolutionary. At this point, Gramscian or even postmodernist arguments become popular regarding explaining why the working class is not revolutionary. Either the working class is subject to capitalist hegemony and unable to realise its destiny perhaps owing to false consciousness (Gramscian arguments), or the working class is fragmented across multiple identity lines (post-modernist and post-structuralist arguments). By contrast to this, Cope argues that the reality is far more simple: that the working class in the First World is a mass labour aristocracy, and that its ideology of national chauvinism is the natural outgrowth of this material position.
In his debate with US Trotskyist scholar Charles Post, Cope identifies several differences between what he considers to be opposing social-chauvinist and labour internationalist approaches to the global class structure. Social imperialist econometrics typically proceeds by pointing to the alleged paucity of private foreign investment in the less developed countries by those capitals based in the developed countries. In doing so, apart from misrepresentation of the data which even at face value reveals the huge dependence of the global monopolies on investment in the less developed countries, social-chauvinist accounting demonstrates certain features.
First, it neglects to examine the composition of North-South foreign investment. This tends to be largely concentrated in the production of new value as opposed to the nonproduction financial consolidation and administration that foreign investment tends to facilitate in the developed countries.
Second, such econometrics ignore the higher level of exploitation in the countries of the global South. Regarding surplus value, a dollar invested there is much more productive than a dollar invested in Europe, North America or Japan.
Third, such analysis takes it for granted that profits accumulated by the leading Western-based banks and multinational corporations have little or nothing to do with the technological, financial, natural resource, media and military monopolies they possess at the global level.28
Fourth, as David Harvey has pointed out, “the geographical production of surplus value [may] diverge from its geographical distribution, in much the same way that production and social distribution separate.”29 By contrast, nationalist bias inherent to first-worldist apologetics presumes merely that value is created precisely in the country wherein it is consumed.30
Fifth, such economic analysis opportunely gauges productivity in price terms, forgetting that the low prices paid for goods produced in the global South reflect in no small measure the low price of labour-power there. Indeed, in a world where the market price of goods tends to be global while the market price of labour capacity varies because of class struggle – both historical and contemporary – the result is a redistribution of value from countries with a low market price for labour capacity to countries with a high market price for such.31
Sixth, such analysis wilfully ignores forms of imperialist parasitism other than returns on capital export, preferring to regurgitate crude, face-saving criticisms of unequal exchange theory where that is acknowledged at all.
Seventh, some Marxists consider that low-paid labour reduces the incentive for rationalisation and thus hinders economic growth. In the view of this Marxism, low paid labour, and a lack of productivity are synonymous, with the most exploited labour considered to be also the most capital intensive. Such analyses neglect, however, that it is precisely the surplus value wrung from exploited labour-power that is the source for the capital which makes technological change both possible and profitable.32
Finally, and most crucially, many self-avowed socialist intellectuals and organisations detect the persistence of imperialist parasitism in the post-colonial age in new forms. However, there are barely a handful who recognise its logical and empirical corollary, long since admitted by Marx, Engels, Lenin and those pursuing their line of investigation, namely, the rise and expansion of a metropolitan labour aristocracy.
The Labour Aristocracy: Clarification and Classification
As a final point of clarification, we would wish to distinguish our position from those of authors who have utilized the labour aristocracy concept in a far different way than our usage of the term. Various writers have also used the concept of the labour aristocracy to refer to the privileged workers within the Third World itself. Breman writes:
Those who accept the position that the urban system is divided into two sectors have little difficulty in extending this duality to the social structure. In distinguishing the working population into two levels, the members of which are absorbed into the production process in entirely different ways, the contrast made between the formal and the informal sectors parallels that between a labour aristocracy and a lumpenproletariat. It is not difficult to consider the minority, who are employed by regular employment and standardised working conditions and are thus able to lead a relatively secure existence, as a labour elite.33
The labour aristocracy concept has been applied to various situations which fit Breman’s description. For example, Waterman summarizes a debate about the existence of a labour aristocracy in Africa where the various parties to the debate consider the role of higher paid workers across the African continent.34 Davis even went so far as to ignore the history of the labour aristocracy concept and to argue that “the labour aristocracy thesis attributes the political quiescence of industrial workers in many Third World capitalist nations to their relative economic privilege.”35 In this kind of discussion, imperialism is absent from the question entirely. Despite the ahistorical nature of Davis’ analysis, his use of the labour aristocracy concept raises a question which Leninist and Third-Worldist perspectives have not yet answered about relatively privileged strata within Third World countries. In a review of Cope’s Divided World Divided Class, Kerswell raised this as one of the critical missing pieces to what is an otherwise convincing account of the political economy of modern imperialism and its impact on the global class structure.36
Many writers (including Frantz Fanon, John Saul and Giovanni Arrighi) have seen the entire proletariat proper in countries like South Africa as a labour aristocracy. This is because they are a minority earning relatively high incomes (compared with the peasantry and the rural proletariat) in jobs strongly connected to the economic bases of colonialism and neocolonialism.
Relatively high-waged and skilled African, Asian and South American workers in capital-intensive sectors of export-oriented and government industries, as well as white-collar civil servants and clerks, do occupy positions of relative privilege within the labour markets of the global South. Bromma, for example, criticized Kerswell for not paying sufficient attention to intersectoral wage differences between the automobile and garment/textile industries in various countries in the global South. 37, 38 This is in many ways a just criticism, as many automobile workers are formally employed and have relatively better wages and conditions. However, with most of the workforce, particularly in what is currently understood as the informal sector, such a position is far harder to defend. This is the case even in the automobile industry as I have argued elsewhere39.
It is not immediately clear whether the immediate interests of the privileged workers lie in a more egalitarian downward redistribution of national income, or in a global redistribution of income away from the imperialist countries. Hence, the role of these ‘worker elites’ from a proletarian internationalist perspective in the struggle against imperialism and capitalism is unclear and requires further analysis beyond the scope of this paper.40
Economic development is always uneven so that some people everywhere have higher incomes than others. The labour aristocracy, however, arises not from differences in income alone but the receipt by some workers of a share of imperialist spoils. Thus, future analysis of so-called worker elites in the Third World needs to consider the link if any between imperialism, and their relative privilege.
Conclusion
As this article has demonstrated, the concept of the labour aristocracy is both controversial and complicated. Part of the reason it is so divisive is its varied use throughout its conceptual history. The commonality within the concept is its use to imply a privileged economic status and to imply a tendency toward political conservatism with its material root in this economic standpoint. Despite this, the labour aristocracy has been applied to a very diverse group of actors, from trade union leaders, highly skilled workers, the entire First World working class, and even higher paid sections of workers in the Third World.
No less diverse are the array of phenomena which various theorists have used the labour aristocracy to explain. These include support for imperialism, opposition to revolutionary change, support for social democracy, support of Eurocommunism, support of racism, explaining why no advanced capitalist country had a socialist revolution, and implying a concentration of revolutionary activity in the Third World.
In this paper, it has been argued that one of the major early weaknesses of the labour aristocracy concept was a lack of an evidence base concerning its size and significance, both as a class, and of its wealth. In some ways this has been addressed by authors who have considered the transfer of wealth to imperialist countries from the Third World. Despite this, there are certainly gaps in the evidence base which demand investigation. To date, theorists have done better at explaining intercountry transfers of wealth than explaining how this wealth has fallen into the hands of the first world working class beyond general references to higher wages and higher standards of living.
A central aspect of Marxism is the argument of the importance of the relationship that social classes have to the means of production. Wage comparisons such as those discussed in this paper certainly highlight that there are significant wage premiums both between the first and Third World, but also within the Third World itself. One aspect that remains under-researched is the extent to which these higher wages enable savings and capital formation. It is important to investigate to what extent the labour aristocracy translates its position into capital thereby engaging in the active exploitation of labour, as opposed to simply becoming what Veblen would call the ‘leisure class’, beneficiaries of surplus labour through some indirect means. Studies of ‘workers capital’ in various countries, would go a long way to addressing this void.41
As was alluded to in this paper, the other major missing link regards the privileged sections of the Third World, namely the salaried classes and the formal-sector workers. At this point, their material stake in social change is significantly undertheorized. Their progressive role, or lack thereof, is regularly asserted by various people without any real investigation or convincing explanation. These groups, no doubt highly significant in the direction of any future social transformation, require more study.
Despite any weaknesses, it seems for now that Marxism cannot do without the concept of the labour aristocracy. While it may be unwieldy, and in need of significant research to substantiate it as an idea, it remains one of the essential concepts of any materialist analysis of the global class structure. Without the labour aristocracy to explain the higher status of certain workers, any analysis falls prey to a Gramscian/Identitarian logic of false consciousness, and to strategies and tactics directed at awakening social forces which from the perspective of the world’s workers, would be better left dormant.
Notes
1 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. 1965. Letter from Engels to Marx, Manchester, 7 October, 1858. In. Selected Correspondence. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 110.
2 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. 1965. Letter from Engels to Kautsky, London, 12 September, 1882. In. Selected Correspondence. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
3 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. 1962. Selected Works. Vol II. Moscow: Progress Publishers. 406-19.
4 Lenin, V. 1917. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. In, Lenin, V. 1963. Selected Works. Vol 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
5 Lenin, V. 1916. Imperialism and the Split in Socialism. In, Lenin, V. 1964. Lenin Collected Works. Vol 23. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
6 Lenin, V. 1916. Imperialism and the Split in Socialism. In, Lenin, V. (1964). Lenin Collected Works. Vol 23. Progress Publishers: Moscow. 115.
7 Ibid.
8 Post, Charles. 2018. “The Myth of the Labor Aristocracy, Part 1.” Available from: https://www.solidarity-us.org/node/128
9 Lenin 1916, Op. cit., 116.
10 Ibid.
11 Foster, John. 1976. British Imperialism and the Labour Aristocracy. In. Jeffrey Skelley. Editor. The General Strike 1926. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 3-58, 3.
12 Biel, Robert. 2015. Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement. Kersplebedeb: Montreal. 7.
13 The Communist International. 1926. ECCI Manifesto on the General Strike in Britain. Imprekorr. Vol 6, Iss 7, 1111.
14 Bukharin, Nikolai. 1930. Imperialism and World Economy. London: Martin Lawrence Limited. 167.
15 Emmanuel, Arghiri. 1972. Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade. Monthly Review Press: New York. 180.
16 Emmanuel, Arghiri. 1974. “Myths of Development versus Myths of Underdevelopment.” New Left Review. May/June, 79.
17 Bettelheim, Charles. 1975. Appendix One: Theoretical Comments. In, Emmanuel, Arghiri. 1975. Uneuqal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade. London: New Left Books, 306.
18 Hoxha, Enver. Eurocommunism is Anti-Communism. Tirana: 8 Nëntori Publishing House. 1980. 82-83.
19 Myrdal, Gunnar. 1964. An International Economy: Problems and Prospects, 2nd ed. New York: Harper & Row
20 Brolin, John. 2007. The Bias of the World: Theories of Unequal Exchange in History. Human Ecology Division, Lund University., 176.
21 Myrdal, Op Cit, 1967, 97.
22 Allen, Ted. 1967. “Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized?” In, Davidson, Carl (Ed). 2011. Revolutionary Youth and the New Working Class. 184.
23 Davidson, Carl. 1969. ‘Which Side Are You On?’ In, Davidson, Carl. 2011. Revolutionary Youth and the New Working Class, Pittsburgh: Changemaker Publications, 262.
24 Slavoj Zizek, “The revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie”, London Review of Books, 34, 2, 26 January 2012. Cf. Lewis, Dustin. 2016. “Third Worldism and Marxism.” In Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope. Editors. The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 955-967, 960.
25 Cope, Zak. 2012. Divided World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism. Montreal: Kersplebedeb.
26 Baran, Paul and Paul M. Sweezy. 1966. Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press, 178, n1.
27 Cope, Zak. 2013. “Global Wage Scaling and Left Ideology: A Critique of Charlie Post on the ‘Labor Aristocracy’”. Research in Political Economy, 28, 100.
28 Amin, Samir. 2000. Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Contemporary Society. London: Zed Books, 4-5.
29 Harvey, David. 2006. The Limits to Capital. London: Verso, 442.
30 Smith, John. 2012. “The GDP Illusion: Value Added versus Value Captured.” Monthly Review, Volume 64, Issue 03, July-August.
31 Lauesen, Torkil and Zak Cope. 2015. Imperialism and the Transformation of Values into Prices. Monthly Review, Volume 67, Issue 03, July-August, 62.
32 Nichols, Theo. Ed. 1980. Capital and Labour: Studies in the Capitalist Labour Process. London: Athlone Press, 136 n7.
33 Breman. 1976. “A Dualistic Labour System? A Critique of the ‘Informal Sector’ Concept: III: Labour Force and Class Formation.” Economic and Political Weekly. 11 no. 50, 1939.
34 Waterman, Peter. (1975). The ‘Labour Aristrocracy’ in Africa: Introduction to a Debate. Development and Change. 6, no. 3.
35 Davis, Charles. 1986. The Labor Aristocracy Thesis and the Political Quiescence of Labor in Venezuela and Mexico. Social Science Quarterly. 67, no. 2.
36 Kerswell, T. 2015. “Labor Divided.” Monthly Review. 65 no. 7.
37 Bromma. 2014. The Worker Elite: Notes on the ‘Labor Aristocracy’. Montreal: Kersplebedeb. 74, 86
38 Kerswell, Timothy. 2011. The Global Division of Labor and the Division in Global Labour. PhD thesis, Queensland University of Technology.
39 Kerswell, Timothy and Pratap, Surendra. 2015. “Informality in Automobile Chains in India.” WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society, 18 no.4.
40 Bromma Op. cit, 19.
41 Veblen, Thorstein. 1899. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. London: MacMillan.