Can someone give me a quick rundown what labour aristocracy actually means ?
Can someone give me a quick rundown what labour aristocracy actually means ?
Especially in the modern context in the year of our lord 2024. Is it relevant? What do I need to know about it ?
EDIT : Thanks everyone for this really informative thread.
People saying doctors, lawyers, and software engineers are wrong.
The labor aristocracy is essentially the majority of the proletariat in the West. They add very little value to a commodity relative to their wage. Most value is added in the periphery where they extract raw resources from the earth and process it. The labor aristocracy benefits from the exploitation of the laborers in the periphery. If the miners in Congo collected the full value of their labor, the proletariat in the West would lose massively as the cost of their commodities would go up at retail AND their would be very little added value left to justify their salaries.
It's relevant because despite your ideology driving your solidarity with laborers in the periphery, your material conditions world get substantially worse if those laborers had a communist revolution and captured the full value of their labor. That is a major problem for leftists in the imperial core to wrestle with and solve.
I just want to add onto your comment this graph which is also very relevant. from https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5477115
The reddit thread in reaction to that data was hilarious, the amount of cope..
How dare you suggest that I, the prestigious software developer, am not is the backbone of society?
This is a better graph from the same paper
While this is true in the USA and marginally true in some other countries, running the actual numbers show only a small drop in material resources for the median resident, and sometimes an increase.
It's really only the USA that's doing truly extensive looting and redistribution to their workers, which leads to the revelation that countries like France don't even benefit from their regional hegemonies, it all goes to the rich.
I think you're missing the strength of the social welfare systems created in Europe and Scandinavia. That constitutes a substantial portion of distribution to the masses beyond salaries. In the USA salaries are huge but there's little social safety net, so even though the USA is doing most of the looting, it has way more poverty. European hegemonies are used to prop up the social democracies that were created to appease workers and prevent a communist revolution. As Europeans lose their social welfare, the only thing that's going to prevent a communist revolution is convincing the workers to fight another world war against other workers.
Agree, the labor aristocracy in the west has their material interested intertwined with imperialism and stands to lose from revolution in the periphery. Now just add to the picture: if all the countries, including the west, had communist revolutions, including redistribution, average people in some imperial core countries like the US and Germany would still initially be better of. People in Canada, France and Spain would lose wealth. They would only get freedom, security, peace, fullfilment from end of alienation and survival of the planetary ecosystem, but this is all less immediate and less material.
This is from 2019. As global inequality increases, more and more workers might stand to win wealth from revolution.
Disclaimer: this simple calculation doesn't take into account, how supply chains would shift after revolutions. It basically just looks at the immediate effect of a hypothetical redistribution of wealth. The real impact of global revolutions on workers in the imperial core, as well as the periphery would depend on structures of international solidarity forming. Still, a quantitative perspective like this can be helpful.
I have a weird question about this that I've wondered for awhile and haven't asked because it's probably impossible to answer: just how far would the western proletariat fall in that hypothetical scenario?
I'm pretty insulated here in the US, and to me seeing people put in 80+ hour weeks just to scrape by already seems pretty intolerable, but I'm lacking perspective. Does just having reliable access to food and shelter and clean water at the cost of a 16-hour work day still look like luxury to the bottom 7 billion people on the planet?
Roads. Cars. Fuels.
No other nation on the planet lives like we do in the USA. Just imagine gas at $8/gallon. Imagine ALL of the road maintenance, the machines required, the materials required.
Then understand the impact transport has on food distribution in the USA.
Then realize that 46M people in the USA, so about 20%, live with water insecurity. American shoppers spend almost $50Bn on bottled water annually.
Yeah, it's going to be incredibly ugly. Right now, climate change is the biggest threat to the American Southwest. But if the world shut America out of primary economic dominance, cities in Arizona would be abandoned within a few years as no one would be able to secure sufficient water to live there. The climate refugee crisis is going to crush America even if it remains the global hegemon, but if it doesn't and the labor of the global south ends the "free ride", it's going to be horrible for the average American.
Think about those people in Tuscon. Where are they going to go and how are they going to get there? Vehicles. Roads. Gas.
And that doesn't even get into cell phones, computers, industrial equipment, medical equipment, plastics, clothing, SHOES.
It's not that Americans aren't struggling. It's that we're living in an incredibly inefficient setup. And that wording is HILARIOUSLY understating it.
Ah, gotcha. I had seen it used both ways, so thank you! Deleted my comment, this one is much better.
your material conditions world get substantially worse is those laborers had a communist revolution and captured the full value of their labor. That is a major problem for leftists in the imperial core to wrestle with and solve.
I think this is unhelpful zero sum thinking, and is driven by looking at nominal prices instead of what the dollars actually buy. Most of the "surplus" labour value is sucked up by capitalists, and most of the rest is sucked up by developers and real estate ponzi schemes.
It's not zero sum. We could be in relations that multiply our effectiveness. We are not. This is real. Those landlords in the imperial core get their money from rent. That rent comes from salaries. Those salaries come from the value of commodities. The majority of the value in those commodities is not created by spreadsheet jockies, cold email biz dev specialists, social media influences, PR firms, marketing agencies, website design consultancies, logo rebranding exercises, corporate event planning, change managers, business analysts, strategy consulting, and thousands of other jobs and activities that dominate the imperial core.
You could reduce the price of housing to its actual cost, but it won't help if you can't get fuel to travel the scores or miles daily that American life requires.
It wouldn’t be worse if there was also a revolution in the West though. For example, if you buy a pair of shoes made cheap in developing countries, they probably cost more relative to income than they did 70 years ago when most of the material and labour came from within the West. Most of the profit from exploiting the developing world goes to the rich. And the material difference between a minimum wage worker in the West and an average worker in developing countries (outside of things like sweatshop labour or mining) is much less than people imagine.
Part of the reason there is some confusion is the term pre-dates the Marxist use of the term, which Lenin originated. Just like how imperialism was a term, but Lenin used it to refer to a specific phenomena of capitalism. In fact I think he originates it in Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism (though he might have used it earlier, I can't remember)
The original term in the late 19th century was just used for a well paid worker. This is what a whole heap of non-marxist people still use.
The IWW started using it in the early 20th century specifically to refer to professionals like engineers, doctors, skilled craftsmen, who were insulated from the same conditions as other workers. Who would often have guilds, rather than unions. The IWW specifically being Anarchists, Syndicalists, Marxists, DeLeonists and other various socialists, but not Marxist-Leninists. So you also hear it used in some union contexts still. Not that the IWW really is around in any real numbers, but it sort of spread to less radical unions.
Then Lenin uses the term to apply to all workers in the imperial core as is mentioned in other comments here. Despite myself holding to the Marxist-Leninist position I have basically dropped it from my vocabulary due to the ambiguity. I will say well paid proletariat, or imperial core proletariat etc
It's a pretty nebulous term the roots of which are in Lenin's Imperialism in which he describes a class of workers that sides with imperialists because they receive a portion of the superprofits of imperial exploration.
Historically it was used to describe business union leadership or union workers more broadly, especially those in the war industries. Further left tendencies tend to broaden the scope of who is a labor aristocrat including professional workers or even the whole of the white working class.
Personally I think as Marxists we need to reckon with the fact that many workers in the imperial core have petite-bourgeois brain worms precisely because their minds have been thoroughly rotted by debt and consumerism subsidized by the blood and sweat of the global periphery. That doesn't mean we should eschew work among these workers but we should understand it's limitations.
For instance there's a massive naval shipyard near me that employs many people (mostly cis white dudes). They have a militant union and excellent pay and benefits. Unsurprisingly they're all ridiculously conservative and nationalist and I've had multiple employees there tell me war would be good for them because it would mean more work and better compensation. Just because many of these workers are union proles does not mean that they will easily align with the interest of the global proletariat and if we are organizing or agitating them we need to understand that.
war would be good for them because it would mean more work and better compensation
idk why they think their workplace getting hit with a cruise missile or nuke would be good for them but maybe i'm not smart
Because they think USA would never be hit.
Labor Aristocracy - The section of the international working class whose privileged position in lucrative job markets opened up by imperialism guarantees its receipt of wages approaching or exceeding the per capita value created by the working class as a whole. The class interests of the labor aristocracy are bound up with those of the capitalist class, such that if the latter is unable to accumulate superprofits then the super-wages of the labor aristocracy must be reduced.
TL:DR : if you make more than the average ppp-adjusted world wage, then you are in a minority of the world's workers, and part of the labor aristocracy.
Another way of looking at it, would be the house vs the field slaves of a US slave plantation.
The field slaves are the producers of the surplus (via the agricultural commodities they create and are then sold on the market). The house slaves do not produce surplus value, they only produce use values for the masters house, and live off a part of the value created by the field slaves. They aren't part of the ruling slaveocracy, but they live from the same source.
People who sell their labor but enjoy elevated privileges compared to less prestigious jobs
For example, a code monkey making $120k a year is a labor aristocrat compared to a deliveryman making $50k a year despite both selling their labor and not owning the means of production.
Those that fall under LA are usually more aligned and/or closer with the bourgeoisie. Think of middle managers who hang out with the CFO and CEO or a lawyer who has to interact with politicians and businessmen. I don’t know if this counts, but there are also service workers who resist minimum wage laws because they make more with tips and don’t want to be restricted with everybody else, so their politics are aligned with the companies.
The difference between LA and petite bourgeoisie is that the latter owns the means of production on a smaller scale and frequently also sell their labor.
Is it relevant? I mean, yeah. A lot of working class people don’t want to be shoving boxes or pumping shit out of toilets for a living if the pay and conditions are terrible. They will either aspire or have their kids aspire to do “better”. Once you reach it, you will probably become more out of touch just by the nature of being separated from the ground. Many industries like STEM are notorious for being anti union. And many unions seek to keep their labor aristocracy status and not exactly have solidarity with all labor. Some theorists propose that western LA will resist any attempts from outside the imperial core to improve its conditions because that would inherently mean living standards in the west lowers as exploitation is evened out. We can see this play out in places like France where it seeks to deploy the military in Niger to secure its uranium after the new government became anti-French, and you don’t see many protests against it despite everyone fetishizing the French’s labor protesting.
Essentially, Proletarians bought off by Capitalists enough to side with the Bourgeoisie despite lacking Capital.
Think Software Engineers and Lawyers, Doctors, etc.
Edit: This is more true outside of Marxist circles, while Lenin used it in the following manner:
Addendum: Primarily used to refer to Workers in the Imperial Core that enjoy some of the fruits of Imperialism so as to side with Imperialists.
Edit: ignore me, @freagle@lemmygrad.ml explained it much better, and I added part of their explanation to my own comment regarding the Imperial Core so as to not lead to confusion.
Anyone who makes more money than me