Labour Aristocracy
노동귀족
In Marxist theory, the upper layer of the working class that enjoys higher wages and better conditions than other workers thanks to skill, trade-union strength and, on a world scale, super-profits from exploiting colonies and underdeveloped countries. Engels first spoke of it with regard to the craft unions of nineteenth-century Britain; in 1915–1916 Lenin tied it to his theory of imperialism and explained it as the economic basis of the opportunism and social chauvinism of the Second International. The concept is contested among Marxists.
In depth
Marx and Engels: the British experience
In chapter 23 of Capital, volume I, Marx examined the effect of crises on the best-paid part of the working class, "its aristocracy". In a letter to Marx of 7 October 1858 Engels wrote that the English proletariat was becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of nations seemed to be aiming at possessing "a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie". In his preface to the second edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England (1892) he wrote that only "a small, privileged, protected minority" had been permanently benefited by Britain's industrial monopoly in 1848–68, and called the skilled workers organised in the great trade unions "an aristocracy among the working class". When that monopoly broke down, he expected, the English working class would lose its privileged position.
Lenin: the economic basis of imperialism and opportunism
During the First World War Lenin tied the idea to his theory of imperialism. In "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism" (1916) he argued that in the nineteenth century only Britain had enjoyed a monopoly, so that the working class of one country could be bribed for decades, whereas now every imperialist great power could and did bribe smaller strata of the "labour aristocracy". The "bourgeois labour party", in Engels's phrase, had thus become inevitable and typical in all imperialist countries. Socialism and War (1915) likewise located the economic basis of opportunism and social-chauvinism in the interests of a privileged stratum of workers receiving crumbs of the profits their own bourgeoisie drew from plunder.
In "Left-Wing" Communism (1920) Lenin used the concept to explain the gulf between leaders and masses: Britain's monopoly position had separated a semi-petty-bourgeois labour aristocracy from the masses, and modern imperialism had created similar privileges in a few advanced countries, producing everywhere in the Second International social-chauvinist leaders who defended the interests of the labour aristocracy.
Debate and later use
Most currents that follow Lenin, including the Comintern, formally accepted the concept, but few organisations put it at the centre of their work. Trotsky and the early Fourth International accepted it, while Ernest Mandel and Tony Cliff held that it rested on mistaken arguments or had "Third Worldist" implications. Critics also object that rising living standards benefited not a minority but the majority of workers and resulted from wage struggles in times of prosperity rather than bribery. In social history Eric Hobsbawm studied Britain's skilled workers with the concept, which has also been criticised as analytically vague.
In the United States the term was popularised in the decade before the First World War by the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World, who used it against the craft unions of the American Federation of Labor that admitted skilled workers and left the unskilled unorganised.