Labor aristocracy
The labor aristocracy is the best-salaried and most privileged grouping of the proletariat which largely emerges in capitalist-imperialist societies. Labor aristocrats often belong to highly skilled professions and are able to exert far greater power in collective bargaining, particularly when organized in trade unions, as a result of their relative irreplaceability to the bourgeoisie compared to less privileged workers. The labor aristocracy is able to expand from wealth extracted from imperialist exploitation, and for the bourgeoisie serves to pacify and weaken a section of the working class movement, with many labor aristocrats consequentially being supportive of the capitalist system.[1]
See also
References
- ↑ Vladimir Lenin (September 11, 1913). Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 19, p. 369-371. Available on the Marxists Internet Archive.
"This aristocracy of labour, which at that time earned tolerably good wages, boxed itself up in narrow, self-interested craft unions, and isolated itself from the mass of the proletariat, while in politics it supported the liberal bourgeoisie. And to this very day perhaps nowhere in the world are there so many liberals among the advanced workers as in Britain."
