I’m reading a fascinating book: “Divided World, Divided Class” by Zak Cope that was recommended to me by Justin Wooten (@justinwooten on twitter). It’s completely wrong, but the writer exhaustively lays out the case for a bribed first world working class.
This is the labor aristocracy theory explanation for why the class struggle in the advanced countries is muted. Cope introduces his argument for the theory this way:
“This book began as an attempt to understand the regularity and intensity of racist and imperialist attitudes and beliefs within the working class of the advanced capitalist nations in order to explain the evident disinterest and disdain with which it greets revolutionary socialist ideas.”
You see, if the working class rejects the self-evident truth of ‘revolutionary socialist ideas’, they must somehow be defective. If we could just figure out what this defect is, we may be able to remedy it. If we can’t remedy it, then we should turn our attention to workers who don’t have this defect. Those less bribed workers, of course, are located in the oppressed countries of the world market.
Now, here is the oddest damned thing: Marx and Engels linked communism to the most advanced countries. But this theory suggest we should look to the least (or at least relatively less) developed countries. So we probably need to fix or correct Marx and Engels — who just didn’t quite figure this shit out.
It can’t possibly be our ‘revolutionary socialist ideas’ that are screwed up. Plainly, the working class has the defect, right? Because, you see, Marxists exhaustively checked and re-checked all of their ‘revolutionary socialist ideas’, using their handy ‘revolutionary socialist ideas verifier’ from Wal-Mart, and found they are correct. The ‘revolutionary socialist ideas verifier’ was made in the People’s Republic of China and that’s a socialist country, right?
What sort of naive young communists buy into this bullshit?
You would think that before certain Marxists decided the working classes of the advanced countries were corrupted and bought out, they would first try to nail down whether they actually understand Marx’s theory correctly. I mean, just think about it: It is easier to change your ‘revolutionary socialist ideas’ than it is to ever actually “un-bribe” a corrupted fucking working class. If, as these folks believe, the first world working class is bribed by super profits, this has unimaginable consequences for politics. You might as well accept the idea that revolution is impossible in the first world, and thus communism, can never happen.
Communism, at least as Marx proposed it, is “the act of the dominant peoples ‘all at once’ and simultaneously”. It requires a very high development of the productive forces, “because without it want is merely made general”. However, according to the theory of a bribed first world working class, a very high development of the productive forces is more likely to be associated with the sections of the working class who are least likely to revolt, because they have been bribed with super profits.
On the one hand, the portions of the class that can create communism, because they enjoy a very high level of development of the productive forces, won’t revolt because they are bribed by superprofits; on the other hand, the portions of the class who aren’t bribed and thus might revolt can’t create communism because they don’t have the material basis of a very high level of development of the productive forces. Over here in the first world we have the basis but not the will; over there in the third world we have the will but not the basis.
So, actually we’re just completely fucked, right?
You can put lipstick on this pig and cheer the workers of the oppressed countries, but that ain’t going to get you to communism.
Does the fact that third world struggle have limited possibilities mean we should ignore them or that the anti-colonial struggle is useless? Of course not. Only an imbecile would make this obviously indefensible argument. But, what it does mean, according to Marx and Engels is:
- (1) “communism could only exist as a local event”
- (2) “the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition”.
- (3) “each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism.”
Thus, if we don’t wish another failed political attempt to create communism to happen, we have to figure out a way to crack the advanced countries; rather than complain about how corrupt workers are. Even if we COMPLETELY agree with the bribed first world labor aristocrats theory, we still have to figure out how we get these aristocrats to fight for communism. And situation is dire: these workers are fucking a racist, sexist, homophobic, imperialist-minded stratum who openly support fascist state food stamp socialism; but in historical materialism, and despite all of these defects, they play a critical role for communism.
What is the accusation against them? Fundamentally it is that they are paid more than workers in the third world. The argument is that because they are paid more, they are comfortable and couldn’t care less about the plight of the class as a whole. They have their 60 inch plasma televisions, 200 channels of mindless cable drivel and their Apple watches; they really don’t give a fuck if the rest of the class is starving.
Can I just say something at this point?
If the motherfuckers are comfortable, you can’t appeal to them on the basis of a 2% increase in their wages. They make relatively better wages than most of the class, so better wages are not their primary concern. Of course, they will not look a gift horse in the mouth; so if you want to give them more, they won’t complain, but it isn’t like they are going to overthrow capitalism to get a wage increase in the next contract.
Is there another approach, another issue on which even well paid wage-slaves might have an interest that brings them into conflict with bourgeois relations of production? An issue these well-paid wage-slaves might share with their poorly-paid wage-slave comrades in the third world?
Hmmmm, let me think.
The ugly truth of the matter is that Marxists agree with very argument they accuse Nick Land of advocating: the only basis for a working class revolt is that they suffer horribly at the edge of an inescapable starvation. So, when you encounter a first world working class who aren’t actually starving, you have nothing to offer them. Which is to say, your so-called revolutionary strategy can be defeated by something as insignificant as a regular and modest two percent increase in money wages.
But does an increase in money wages change the horrific nature of capitalist relations of production? Of course not. However you really don’t have anything else to offer the working class and so you whine that — My God! — these workers ain’t actually starving. They are bribed! They like their food stamp socialism! They don’t even bother to join unions. And, worst of all, they vote for Obama!
Well, you communist certainly don’t have any fucking money. If the only issue of importance to me in your theory is how much I get paid, the capitalists, who, by definition, have all the money, will always pay better than you assholes. You’re always going to get outbid. All you have to offer is the idea that under communism Warren Buffett will have to get a real job and some workers in Mozambique, Haiti and Bangladesh will get a ten cents raise. Who knows, we might even introduce electrification.
Hallelujah, Jesus! We’s done got FULL COMMUNISM!
I might suggest you look into the role labor hours plays in the production of surplus value and constitution/reproduction of all existing social relations, but that would be too easy for you assholes. You labor aristocracy theory motherfuckers have to fix your fucking theory, not take dictation.
The Real Movement 
Recently translated:
http://www.hicsalta-communisation.com/textes/are-slums-another-planet
“who says that…needs must be satisfied in the same way as in the North? Who says that hunger must be fought with imported frozen chicken and US wheat flour? Who says that hunger is due to a lack of resources in the countries suffering from famine? Who says that luxury hospitals are required for children to survive?
Those who noisily stress the scale of needs to be satisfied rarely discuss their nature and the specific social form of their satisfaction.
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Jehu, the theory of the labour aristocracy’s lineage includes Engels, Marx and Lenin. Lenin described it as “the pivot of the tactics in the labour movement that are dictated by the objective conditions of the imperialist era”. Lenin had believed that long term stagnation and decline of capitalism would push workers into supporting socialism but the working class in England and Germany hadn’t taken a revolutionary path and instead aligned themselves with their respective bourgeoisies in the war.
What Lenin describes is an _opportunism_ among the working class which he locates in the monopoly relations in production, among industries, regions and nations which create superprofits and which can be used to bribe a section of the working class. It is a _layer_ of the working class – parliamentarians, labour leaders, trade unionists, journalists, skilled workers in certain industries – who act as mouthpieces of the bourgeoisie, an upper strata that is susceptible to opportunism, bribery and chauvinism. This is determined in part by the economic sphere but also through politics and ideology.
How does this play out historically? In the UK during the 70s Black workers were being locked out of the factories when they demanded better working conditions and pay. As Black workers they experienced segmentation in the workforce – appalling work conditions, loss of pay when sick and so on. Union leaders and white workers would not come out in support of them because they were comfortable. One layer of the working class was able to struggle for its own interests and privileges while allowing other layers, divided into different strata, by intersections to do with skills, race and gender, to languish. That layer was more interested in maintaining its privilege and position rather than struggling as a class to abolish the grounds for wage labour altogether. Here you see the class collaborationist nature of white workers with their union leaders and owners of capital. They would rather this than pursuing their historical mission to collectively replace capitalism as suggested by Marx and Lenin. These workers were organised around a particular class line and ideology which unfortunately rested on racism and sexism.
While one strata of the working class experiences various advantages, broader sections of the working class in advanced industrial capitalist states experience benefits in terms of social security, education & healthcare. The bribery is directed at the layer of the working class that is in a strategic position in the class struggle. During the recent UK election campaign that section comprised of older white workers who have most of the post war benefits of pensions, decent wages, job security, housing that are now being dismantled for the rest of the working class, was assured their privileges would remain intact. Through the use of racist dog whistles it was implied that these privileges are being exhausted by migrant labourers, however so successful were the bribes and lies that the fact tory assaults on social security would hurt the working class as a whole failed to sink into the electorate’s consciousness. That is the opportunism of the labour aristocracy that Lenin saw happening among English and German workers a century earlier. When people talk about the labour aristocracy it is this they are referring to and not the fact that workers in the advanced industrial nations are better fed or have wide screen tvs.
For Lenin opportunism was the social product of an entire period of history. Lenin wrote, “One of the chief causes hampering the revolutionary working-class movement in the developed capitalist countries is the fact that … the capitalists of these countries have been able to create a relatively larger and more stable labour aristocracy … [which] forms the real social pillar of the Second International, of the reformists and the `Centrists’; at present it might even be called the social mainstay of the bourgeoisie. No preparation of the proletariat for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie is possible, even in the preliminary sense, unless an immediate, systematic, extensive and open struggle is waged against this stratum …”
Your analysis on third-worldism is weak. I might come back to it another time but I just wanted to put this out there.
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“On the one hand, the portions of the class that can create communism, because they enjoy a very high level of development of the productive forces, won’t revolt because they are bribed by superprofits; on the other hand, the portions of the class who aren’t bribed and thus might revolt can’t create communism because they don’t have the material basis of a very high level of development of the productive forces. Over here in the first world we have the basis but not the will; over there in the third world we have the will but not the basis.
So, actually we’re just completely fucked, right?”
Yes.
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Which is why Marx and Engels prediction of a communist future had nothing at all to do with a political event.
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Some quotes from Marx:
Karl Marx: Capital Vol. I, Chapter XXXI
Capital Vol. 1 published in 1867.
…The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China.
The different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power. …
The English East India Company, as is well known, obtained besides the political rule in India, the exclusive monopoly of the tea-trade, as well as of the Chinese trade in general, and of the transport of goods to and from Europe. But the coasting trade of India and between the islands, as well as the internal trade of India, were the monopoly of the higher employés of the company. The monopolies of salt, opium, betel and other commodities, were inexhaustible mines of wealth. The employés themselves fixed the price and plundered at will the unhappy Hindus. The Governor-General took part in this private traffic. His favourites received contracts under conditions whereby they, cleverer than alchemists, made gold out of nothing. Great fortunes sprang up like mushrooms in a day; primitive accumulation went on without the advance of a shilling. The trial of Warren Hastings swarms with such cases. Here is an instance. A contract for opium was given to a certain Sullivan at the moment of his departure on an official mission to a part of India far removed from the opium district. Sullivan sold his contract to one Binn for £40,000; Binn sold it the same day for £60,000, and the ultimate purchaser who carried out the contract declared that after all he realised an enormous gain. According to one of the lists laid before Parliament, the Company and its employés from 1757-1766 got £6,000,000 from the Indians as gifts. Between 1769 and 1770, the English manufactured a famine by buying up all the rice and refusing to sell it again, except at fabulous prices. …
Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc., these children of the true manufacturing period, increase gigantically during the infancy of Modern Industry. …
Tantæ molis erat, to establish the “eternal laws of Nature” of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage-labourers, into “free labouring poor,” that artificial product of modern society. If money, according to Augier, “comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.
KMC Vol. 1, p. 751-760.
Letter from Engels to Marx, Manchester, 7th October 1858
…The business with Jones [3] is very disgusting. He has held a meeting here and spoken entirely along the lines of the new alliance. After this affair one is really almost driven to believe that the English proletarian movement in its old traditional Chartist form must perish completely before it can develop in a new, viable form. And yet one cannot foresee what this new form will look like. For the rest, it seems to me that Jones’s new move, taken in conjunction with the former more or less successful attempts at such an alliance, is really bound up with the fact that the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable. The only thing that would help here would be a few thoroughly bad years, but since the gold discoveries these no longer seem so easy to come by.
Letter from Marx to Engels, London, 17th November 1862
… England has lately discredited itself more than any other country – the workers by their Christian, slavish nature, the bourgeois and aristocrats by their enthusiasm for slavery in its most direct form. But the two manifestations supplement each other.
Letter from Engels to Kautsky, London, 12th September 1882
… You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general: the same as the bourgeois think. There is no workers’ party here, you see, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies. In my opinion the colonies proper, i.e., the countries occupied by a European population, Canada, the Cape, Australia, will all become independent; on the other hand, the countries inhabited by a native population, which are simply subjugated, India, Algeria, the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish possessions, must be taken over for the time being by the proletariat and led as rapidly as possible towards independence. How this process will develop is difficult to say. India will perhaps, indeed very probably, make a revolution, and as a proletariat in process of self-emancipation cannot conduct any colonial wars, it would have to be allowed to run its course; it would not pass off without all sorts of destruction, of course, but that sort of thing is inseparable from all revolutions. The same might also take place elsewhere, e.g., in Algeria and Egypt, and would certainly be the best thing for us. We shall have enough to do at home. Once Europe is re-organised, and North America, that will furnish such colossal power and such an example that the semi-civilised countries will follow in their wake of their own accord; economic needs, if anything, will see to that. But as to what social and political phases these countries will then have to pass through before they likewise arrive at socialist organisation, I think we to-day can advance only rather idle hypotheses. One thing alone is certain: the victorious proletariat can force no blessings of any kind upon any foreign nation without undermining its own victory by so doing. Which of course by no means excludes defensive wars of various kinds.
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