Labor aristocracy
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"Labor aristocracy" (or "aristocracy of labor") has two meanings: as a term with Marxist theoretical underpinnings, and as a specific type of trade unionism.
[edit] Use within Marxism
In Marxist theory, those workers (proletarians) in developed countries who benefit from the superprofits extracted from the impoverished workers of underdeveloped countries form an "aristocracy of labor." The phrase was popularised by Karl Kautsky in 1901 and theorised by Vladimir Lenin. Lenin's theory contends that companies in the developed world exploit workers in the developing world (where wages are much lower), resulting in increased profits. Because of these increased profits, the companies are able to pay higher wages to their employees "at home" (that is, in the developed world), thus creating a working class satisfied with their standard of living and not inclined to proletarian revolution. Lenin thus contended that imperialism had prevented increasing class polarization in the developed world, and argued that a workers' revolution could only begin in one of the underdeveloped or semideveloped countries, such as Russia. This theory of the labour aristocracy is controversial in the Marxist movement.
While this theory is formally shared by most currents that identify positively with Lenin, including the Communist International, few organisations place the theory at the centre of their work. The term is most widely used in the United States, where it was popularised in the decade prior to the First World War by Eugene Debs's Socialist Party of America, and the Industrial Workers of the World. In Britain those who hold to this theory include the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) and the Revolutionary Communist Group. Many Trotskyists, including Leon Trotsky himself, and the early congresses of the Fourth International, have accepted the theory of the labour aristocracy: others, including Ernest Mandel and Tony Cliff, considered the theory to have mistaken arguments or "Third Worldist" implications.
[edit] Criticism of unions
The term was originally coined by Mikhail Bakunin in 1872 as a criticism of the notion that organised workers are the most radical. Bakunin wrote: "To me the flower of the proletariat is not, as it is to the Marxists, the upper layer, the aristocracy of labor, those who are the most cultured, who earn more and live more comfortably than all the other workers."
In the U.S. and Britain, the term "aristocracy of labor" is used as an implicit criticism of labor unions that have organized high-salary workers and have no interest in unionizing middle-income and lower-income employees--even in cases where organizing the unorganized would strengthen the unions involved. These unions, it is argued, are content to remain a "labor aristocracy." Examples might include the unions of professional athletes, which have raised the wages of a certain class of already highly paid workers--professional athletes--but refuse to organize other workers, including other employees of the teams they work for. It commonly charged that the Air Line Pilots Association, the Screen Actors Guild, and a handful of other AFL-CIO unions conform to the labor aristocracy model of trade unionism. In defense of these unions, the AFL-CIO's jurisdictional rules may forbid such unions from organizing workers in certain occupational classes.
