> On Feb 8, 2026, at 11:00, Marv Gandall via groups.io
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> If it will make people happier, I have absolutely no problem at all
> replacing "most privileged" with:
>
> ...the general sense of decline in the American culture which is felt most
> acutely by white workers who have historically been the more secure and
> better paid stratum of the working class than the doubly and triply oppressed
> female and male workers of colour.
Or simply "less oppressed."
>
> We should at the same time cancel the term "aristocracy of labour" which
> Engels and Lenin, among others, used to describe the predominantly white
> working class of the imperialist countries who were the more secure and
> better paid stratum of the international proletariat than the oppressed
> female and male workers of colour in Asia, Africa, and North America.
I belonged to the aristocracy of labor - the 10-20% of workers who are
relatively privileged with respect to the rest of the wage earners. It was
about 50 years ago when I had a job in a machine shop with about 10 white men.
We did the machining to support about 80 women assembly workers on the factory
floor, about a third were women of color. Their work was tedious and
repetitious; ours' was much less so and paid much better. I once asked the
foreman why all the assembly workers were women. He told me that women have
smaller hands and are much better than men at that type of electrical assembly
work. As if they were paid less than we were because they were more dexterous
than we were.
Mark
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