In Marxist-Leninist spheres of thought, there is often a back and forth of ideas (or just all-out debate) between those who tend to align themselves with Third Worldism or assiduously with the concept of a ‘labour aristocracy’ to make the case that there is no real proletariat to be spoken of in the West and those who believe there is a distinction between principled anti imperialism and in effect claiming that Western workers cannot be organized.
The history of imperialism committed by colonial nations like the USA, Australia and Canada is clear and these nations are clearly made up of large swathes of super exploited labour in the form of indigenous and Black people. So, why wouldn’t a Marxist Leninist align themselves with Third Worldism instead?
Well, lets travel through some of the most common arguments in favour of the idea that there is no proletariat in the first world.
The Global South subsidizes the Global North
In laymen terms, one of the most common arguments made by third worldists is that the third world produces commodities on the cheap for export to the first world and because they are made using cheaper labour they can be exported for cheaper and the first-world comes out on top.
While its true that this means I can buy an iPhone for $500 or rent an iPhone for cheaper than I would be able to were it produced at home, is the West actually benefiting from this set up in the longer term?
Well, Trump in his never-ending quest to shut down the Chinese economy at all costs could tell you himself exactly why this set up has never really benefited the West. During the Dengist reform period, China cleverly used outside investment as a tool for not just building up their own manufacturing base but producing more sophisticated good as well. This meant that living standards would rise as wages slowly did. An export-lead economy was nothing short of an ingenious solution to the challenges of requiring a massive climb in GDP to sustain the gains of the Cultural Revolution. To imply, that China was merely a victim of imperialism in this situation not only takes away the agency of the Chinese people and the millions-strong Communist Party but it also detracts from the fact that this was a part of the plan. Now, the US is heavily-indebted to China while believing that their own economy (one in which the majority of commodities are imports) would be sustainable forever simply because they could maintain a policy of driving down competitor nations currencies and controlling the petrodollar.
But this brings us to how workers actually “benefit” from this policy regime. Does a worker in the Mid West or a worker from Adelaide in the 70’s benefit because auto manufacturing or steel production moved to South Korea or China? Technically, yes our access to a never-ending supply of cheap electrical goods and supplies is subsidized by the Global South but workers would benefit MORE from this manufacturing returning home. Offshoring of manufucturing is a cold and calculated decision on the part of multinationals, they aren’t doing so because they believe it will be in the interest of the “people” to guard against inflation or anything else. And even so, inflation of commodity goods would likely only be a short term response, if at all, and raised wages from the reserve army of labour shrinking, would follow-on.
So, of course, a worker does not benefit from the jobs leaving the nation and from being pushed into an ever expanding reserve army of labour or service sector held up almost entirely by debt. Similarly, while clothes and electrical goods stay cheap, the actual basket of goods increases drastically, and some of the most important aspects of survival like food and housing inflates exactly because of this above phenomena. So, we are being asked to believe that the Western working class are not proletarianised because a family living pay-check to pay-check which is 4 in 5 US workers and 1 in 2 Australians, because they can rent a TV? There’s something distinctly detached from real-world struggles about such a claim.
The Labour Aristocracy
Lenin writes on the labour aristocracy:
“On the one hand, there is the tendency of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists to convert a handful of very rich and privileged nations into “eternal” parasites on the body of the rest of mankind, to “rest on the laurels” of the exploitation of Negroes, Indians, etc., keeping them in subjection with the aid of the excellent weapons of extermination provided by modern militarism. On the other hand, there is the tendency of the masses, who are more oppressed than before and who bear the whole brunt of imperialist wars, to cast off this yoke and to overthrow the bourgeoisie. It is in the struggle between these two tendencies that the history of the labour movement will now inevitably develop. For the first tendency is not accidental; it is “substantiated” economically. In all countries the bourgeoisie has already begotten, fostered and secured for itself “bourgeois labour parties” of social-chauvinists. The difference between a definitely formed party, like Bissolati’s in Italy, for example, which is fully social-imperialist, and, say, the semi-formed near-party of the Potresovs, Gvozdyovs, Bulkins, Chkheidzes, Skobelevs and Co., is an immaterial difference. The important thing is that, economically, the desertion of a stratum of the labour aristocracy to the bourgeoisie has matured and become an accomplished fact; and this economic fact, this shift in class relations, will find political form, in one shape or another, without any particular “difficulty”.”
Lenin believed that there was a forming ‘labour aristocracy’ arising from the expansion of the British Empire into India and the African subcontinent. And no doubt the Industrial Revolution was subsidized by the extraction of raw material from these formerly wealthy nations resulting in the famine of millions. Lenin saw that this set up was resulting in a phenomena where “the political institutions of modern capitalism — press, parliament associations, congresses etc. — have created political privileges and sops for the respectful, meek, reformist and patriotic office employees and workers, corresponding to the economic privileges and sops.”
But who are the sops today? And is it a clear-cut definition for use in the twenty first century due to the realities of modern imperialism?
Well as Gareth Stedman Jones, a Marxist historian at the University of London puts it, “In most Marxist writing, the use of this idea has been ambiguous and unsatisfactory. Its status is uncertain and it has been employed at will, descriptively, polemically or theoretically, without ever finding firm anchorage.”
And he’s really on to something — that something being that its quite hard to actually narrow this categorical description down as one would with other Marxian class analysis, for example worker, petty bourgeois and bourgeois because the labour aristocracy is not a class that sits on its own self-reflexively it must be a description for the working class.
Lenin’s “sops” were those who had not been convinced to break with the propaganda of the British Empire and that could ultimately be anyone from a factory worker to a book keeper for the Dutch East India company. But the problem with categorically defining a whole group of people by the ideas they hold is that ideas are forever changing and we are almost admitting a teleological resigning of large hoardes of the working class to the impossibility of being convinced of revolutionary ideas, not because someone tried to put these ideas to them and failed but because of an arbitrary classification.
In the modern era, who would we assign the characteristic of the ‘labour aristocracy?’ Would that be the professional middle classes? What about the thousands of university graduates who go on to work for free in university internships that pay nothing or very little? In the US, 53% of college graduates are unemployed, so like many Western Marxists tend to claim, it is arguably not the more educated in the West who necessarily make up the least exploited or more pliable to being “bought.” So then who? Well, the next largest industries outside of white collar work in the US is manufacturing and education and in Australia is healthcare and retail. Manufacturing workers in the US are facing the looming threat of automation and teachers in the US are perpetually on strike over poor wages and conditions. In Australia, nurses and paramedics are similarly perpetually on strike over wages and conditions and the freezing of their wages in the middle of a pandemic and Deliveroo & Uber drivers, and Woolworths workers are working for the lowest pay and most insecure conditions in the country.
Is it really, when looking at the modern material conditions, so easy to determine from the above who belongs to the purported ‘labour aristocracy?’ Of course, workers can be bought off either literally in the form of for example accepting free pizza for longer hours or ideologically when they take a symbolic statement on women’s equality over a pay rise for the whole workforce but they also struggle with the bosses on a regular basis and plenty know that the bosses pizza party is totally bull shit too. Let alone, the increasing trend towards lumpenization in the West where thousands in the post-Covid economy are lining up on the bread lines after losing their jobs and the Bank of International Settlements, with some of the highest levels of private debt in the West & Japan, declaring that 50% of businesses globally are facing insolvency while China is expected to out perform all advanced economies and India’s growth on parity with the EU.
If we take J. Sakai’s definition of the labour aristocracy we might be lead to believe that the labour aristocracy is the whole white settler working class, which indeed paints quite a bleak picture of a reality where 15% must face off with 75% of the rest of the working class in the US and 95% with 5% in Australia (if we exclude Asian and Indian migration since as an aggregate they earn more than white workers in both countries). You may think this a crude interpretation of his claims but the pacifying result of the conclusions he draws are that “POC” are stuck in a cyclical motion of forever beating back a White working class that are only incapable of betrayal, so, again, there’s little hope of revolution in the West.
Of course, imperialism is still a reality, both in the systemic sense where tropical and sub-tropical nations, are often locked into unequal trade partnership that keeps them from diversifying their economies, or in the systematic sense of the US’ ongoing hostile aggression and attempted coup d’etats against independent poor nations. But surely even if we agree that post colonial nations are the only nations capable of progressive communist revolution, then we must also agree that there is a formula for when these nations revolt, since countries like India with a deeply embedded caste system or Brazil who have just taken a strong turn towards fascism also seem long off from communist revolution. If we look at the history of resistance in both formerly colonial countries (Russia or France) and post-colonial nations (Nicaragua, Cuba), we tend to see a more clear scientific pattern forming that James C. Davis once highlighted in his essay on revolutions.
He proffers that what matters most for the conditions for revolutions is, to put it crudely, a significant gap between what people believe they deserve and what they are currently getting.
He writes:
“Revolution is most likely to occur when a long period of rising expectations and gratifications suddenly drop off while expectations continue to rise. The rapidly widening gap between expectations and gratifications portends revolution.
People then subjectively fear that ground gained with great effort will be quite lost; their mood becomes revolutionary. Various statistics on rural uprisings, industrial strikes, and cost of living may serve as crude index’s of popular mood.”
Or as demonstrated by this graph:
So, if we acknowledge that this is a clear pattern among revolutions historically, then we must also acknowledge that this formula, within reasonable bounds, can also be applied to Western nations.
As the West moves into a giant slump in growth and as the contraction of the US empire continues, conditions for working people may finally be beginning to hit this intolerable gap. Promises of social mobility are increasingly no longer a dream that anyone buys into and that lack of faith is most prominent in younger generations. Ultimately, however, even though the working class may be “bought off” in some way, the historical materialist response to this reality is to be looking for the tipping point at which the “crumbs” become less than expected, because this is the historical formula for revolution, anything else is just ideology.
