Matthijs Krul writes: > It's quite possible for formerly > developing countries to become imperialist powers themselves and so > create a labor aristocracy in their own country, at the expense of > others - Japan famously did so, and one could say the same thing of the > USSR after 1945, although that is debatable. My view here is that this > is to an extent a zero-sum game; a labor aristocracy on one side can > only exist at the expense of another side, and if China and India are > truly going to become the new labor aristocracies, this will have to > largely destroy the ones in the West. =================================== We could have a lively discussion about the explanatory power of the concept of a "labour aristocracy" -a pejorative term describing the more highly skilled and paid stratum of the working class whose "privileged" status in many countries is the result of a long struggle to form trade unions. It originated as a polemical device employed by the disappointed left wing of the labour and socialist movement to explain the failure of the organized proletariat in the West to move beyond nationalism and social democracy to socialist revolution. Revolutionary Marxists attributed the conservatism of Western trade unionists - in particular, their lack of internationalist solidarity with workers in other countries and with oppressed colonial peoples - to their having grown fat and content on a share of profits from imperialism passed on to them by their employers in the form of higher wages and better working and social conditions.
This is certainly part of the answer, but it's not a settled question that the success of Western capitalism in delivering a steadily rising standard of living to the working class was wholly or even primarily due to imperialism. Dynamic technological change resulting in higher labour productivity has also to be taken into account. In any case, implicit in the notion of the labour "aristocracy" is that material betterment corrupts. It's a moral category, which, IMO, stands in contradiction to the historical materialist premise, generally supported by the historical record, of cultural advance through economic progress. It draws an exaggerated picture of the condition of skilled workers in the West, even after WW II. None of the people I knew were "aristocrats", or perceived themselves to be such. Most didn't pay attention to foreign policy and, when they did, their impulses were more often than not to be on the side of the oppressed. You would think from the theory that their representative trade unions didn't challenge capitalism and imperialism, and instead eagerly promoted both. That may have been true of American unions at the height of the Cold War, but it was not the general rule, not even in the US. If they only challenged capitalism and imperialism weakly, this had less to do with ideological conviction or the material stake they had in the system, but with a largely realistic appraisal of the balance of forces and limits to their own power in the workplace and political arena. Clearly I don't agree with Matthijs that a "labour aristocracy on one side can only exist at the expense of another side." As Jim Devine earlier suggested, the contemporary "labour aristocracy" includes himself and, by extension, most everyone on this list and their workmates, friends, and neighbours. Matthijs would have to demonstrate that the skilled working class in each country has a material interest in thwarting economic development and the creation of skilled jobs elsewhere, or, more to the point, that concerns about foreign job competition are so pathologically endemic that they lead to support for foreign wars and imperialism. In fact, America's worried "labour aristocrats" are still among the strongest opponents of the Bush administration's foreign policy, and it is preposterous to assert that the growing army of industrial, administrative and professional workers in China, India, and other emergent economies are foreordained to "destroy" their counterparts in the West. Matthijs needs to reexamine the assumptions which have lead him to these - frankly, reactionary - conclusions.
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