Charles wrote: "Labor aristocracy" (or "aristocracy of labor") has three meanings: as a term with Marxist theoretical underpinnings, as a specific type of trade unionism, and/or as a shorthand description by revolutionary industrial unions (such as the Industrial Workers of the World) for the bureaucracy of craft-based business unionism.
[...] ================================================== Charles would be the first to agree that Lenin and the other classical Marxists were influenced by and wrote for the period they lived in, and didn't hand down formulas valid for eternity. They lived at a time when the working class in the West was growing in size and power and a sizeable part of it identified with the revolutionary left. They also witnessed first-hand the great scramble for colonies by the Europeans, the US, and Japan and the brutal misery inflicated on the colonial peoples which Twain, among others, documented in relation to the Belgian Congo and other super-exploited territories. So they properly characterized the period as a revolutionary and the age as one of imperialism. They thought they were on the threshold of capitalist collapse and socialist revolution, and their forecasts seemed to be strikingly vindicated both by the imperialist rivalry culminating in World War I, and by the subsequent wave of unrest in the armies and on the home fronts unleashed by the war which culminated in the Russian Revolution. In these circumstances, it was plausible to argue that the narrow craft unions and reformist leaderships of the workers' parties were running well behind the temper of the working class and delaying and obstructing the world socialist revolution which now looked all but inevitable. The materialist underpinning they gave to their analysis was that the craft unionists who controlled the embryonic labour federations and workers' parties had been effectively been co-opted into supporting the system with the extra profits generated by imperialism. But, as Charles notes, they didn't extend the concept of the "labour aristocracy" to the growing army of industrial workers in the advanced capitalist countries who were just beginning to organize and on whom the revolutionary left pinned its hopes. I won't repeat my arguments except to say that I've balked at the much wider use of "labour aristocracy" to describe the mass of today's workers in the West; that, in general, working class conditions in the West are stagnating or declining while those in the periphery are improving; that the higher growth rates, rapidly developing home markets, and export of capital from the former colonial territories to the West suggests the age of Western imperialism is drawing to a close and that the analytical framework of unequal exchange through which we've understood the world over the past century needs updating; that the "crisis of leadership" theory is inapplicable in a period when the leadership reflects the liberal consciousness of the base, where the socialist left is now wholly absent; that we live not in an age of advance and revolution, but of retreat and counter-revolution, characterized above all by the collapse or transformation of the old anticapitalist states and movements, the contraction of the Western trade unions, and the expansion of capitalism into vast new markets. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
