Watchdogs of Capitalism: The reality of the labour aristocracy

Below are three articles originally published by the Revolutionary Communist Group, clicking the title will take you to the originals. I have reproduced these pieces due to their very high quality, appositeness and for the nuanced and accomplished understanding of the dialectic of party and class, that is; how do we create the space for the revolutionary struggle of the working class to unite with the revolutionary communist party? This is the question of questions facing us today. It will be obvious after reviewing these articles that the basis for this dual process is the capture and renewal of working class organisation from the 'labour Lieutenants of capital'.


from Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 115, October/November 1993
Haunted by the Labour Aristocracy
Part 1: Marx and Engels on the split in the working class

The SWP is obsessed by the concept of the labour aristocracy. Every few months without fail, an article appears in Socialist Worker, Socialist Review or International Socialism, always with the same refrain: there is no such thing as a labour aristocracy, nor has there ever been any kind of privileged stratum of the working class, especially one whose privileges were dependent on the survival of imperialism. ROBERT CLOUGH analyses the latest attempt to revise this theory. Part One examines whether Marx and Engels had a theory of the labour aristocracy.
The latest article by Corr and Brown in International Socialism (Issue No 59, Summer 1993, pp37-74) is a lazy, frequently dishonest production. The tone is set in the introduction, where they condemn a well-known writer on imperialism, Arghiri Emmanuel, for postulating 'a fundamental asymmetry in the system - in one area high wages and low profits, in the other low wages and high profits.' (p38) Their comment? 'This comes very close to the purely national division of the world into "proletarian" and "bourgeois" nations.' To more normal people, it comes 'very close' to Lenin's description of the 'essence of imperialism' - the division between oppressor and oppressed nations.

As we shall see, what is really at issue in the argument is indeed the existence and nature of imperialism, and that far from undermining the concept of the revolutionary role of the working class as the SWP argues, recognising and understanding the concept of the labour aristocracy is critical to re-affirming that revolutionary role. Hence we are not debating some abstract historical point. Bourgeois democracy depends on capitalism's ability to recruit a section of the working class to its side. But not just any section: it must be a stratum which controls the principal organisations of the working class, and which can constantly exclude any revolutionary element from these organisations - that is, act as the 'labour lieutenants of capital'. To win and retain the allegiance of this section, capitalism must be able to offer it a relatively privileged position, to give it a stake in capitalism's survival. The stratum is not fixed: its composition will change according to capitalism's development. Over the last hundred years (150 in the case of Britain), the fate of this stratum or labour aristocracy has been tied up with that of imperialism. Its form has changed: a hundred years ago, it was made up of skilled manual workers, whether in Britain, the US or Germany. Now it is more made up of white collar workers in the higher echelons of the public and service sectors. But without its support, imperialism could not maintain its democratic facade. In conditions where this privileged layer has proved incapable of controlling the organisations of the working class, or where imperialism has been unable to sustain it to any degree, the ruling class has had to resort to military or fascist rule,

In contrast, the struggle of revolutionaries and communists is to drive this privileged stratum from its positions of control, to isolate it from the rest of the working class. Without this political and ideological struggle, there can be no prospect of socialism. We can begin to see already the close connection between the SWP's rejection of the concept of the labour aristocracy, and a political practice which involves building an alliance with the left wing of this privileged stratum, particularly the left of the Labour Party. Hence Corr and Brown are not just discussing history: they are defending the political practice of the SWP. As we shall see later, their attack on Lenin in particular serves as a justification for their uncritical alliance with the left of the Labour Party on any issue to do with British imperialist foreign policy - be it Ireland, the Falklands or the Gulf War.

However, Corr and Brown have a major problem: that every contemporary political commentator on the phenomenon of the classic, late nineteenth century labour aristocracy not only recognised its existence, but usually predicated part of their political activity on either fostering it (The Liberal Party, Disraeli), organising it (the New Model Trade Unions), or fighting its bankrupt political standpoint (the revolutionaries). The existence of a privileged stratum of the British working class, overwhelmingly its skilled section in this period, was taken for granted in every political circle in the second half of the nineteenth century. In fact, the only people who have questioned it have done so at a distance of at least half a century, and are eithervirulent anti-communists (in particular Professor Seton-Watson who really started this hare running in 1953), bourgeois labour historians who deny the existence of classes let alone strata within classes (such as H Pelling), other modern labour historians who have a vested interest in playing down the significance of privilege (such as Stedman Jones), or the SWP. There is not a single authority within the revolutionary movement either now or at any stage in the past century who contested the issue; as materialists, they liked to deal with real phenomena rather than conjure them out of existence.

So how do our authors perform their own conjuring tricks? Selective quotation, sleight of hand, innuendo, a vast amount of ignorance, in other words, by using all the normal tools of the bourgeois academic trade. They start with Marx; so shall we.


Did Marx have a theory of the labour aristocracy?


Yes he did, whatever our authors say. Their view is that when he referred explicitly to its existence, it was in a 'descriptive' not 'analytic' manner (p41), or he used the term to refer to the trade union leaders, not to the privileged workers they led in the late nineteenth century. In particular, they say that whenever Marx made reference to the bribery of this upper stratum, 'the form of that bribery was left vague' (p42). However, it was quite overt. Marx worked alongside English trade union leaders in the Workingmen's International in the 1860s. The International was the prime force behind the formation of the Reform League in 1865, which agitated for universal male suffrage and a secret ballot. Its committee of twelve consisted of six workers and six middle class reformists.

Despite Marx's efforts, the workers soon adapted to the standpoint of the middle class reformists. The League started to receive considerable finance from far-sighted capitalists, and in particular leading Liberal politicians. As a result, the League qualified its demand for male suffrage with the phrase 'registered and residential'. This property qualification would exclude the mass of unskilled and casual workers. Marx condemned the manoeuvres of these working class leaders for the compromises they made. In 1868, it was the Tory Disraeli who 'dished the Whigs' by granting the extension of the suffrage to include about one in five workers; this respectable upper stratum had proved themselves worthy of this right, one which the ruling class was sure they would exercise with moderation. Later, in the 1868 general election, working class leaders were paid election expenses and £10 a head to canvass for the Liberals - a very direct bribe in any terms. Hence Marx's comment on one Barry 'that he is not one of the so-called leaders of the English workers, since these men are more or less bribed by the bourgeoisie and the government.' (Minutes and Documents of the Hague Congress of the International, p124)

Marx's experience in the First International was one of continuous struggle against the English trade union leaders, firstly on the Irish question and the defence of Fenian prisoners, and secondly in defence of the Paris Commune. Corr and Brown say that when Marx addressed the London Congress of the First International in 1871 and 'made reference to the unions as "an aristocratic minority" with most workers outside them, (he) again seemed to use the term in a general descriptive sense' (p42). They clearly have not read what he said, which completely undermines their position:

'The Trades Unions are an aristocratic minority - the poor workers cannot belong to them: the great mass of workers whom economic development is driving from the countryside into the towns every day has long been outside the trades unions - and the most wretched mass has never belonged; the same goes for the workers born in the East End in London; one in 10 belongs to Trades Unions - peasants, day labourers never belong to these societies.
The Trades Unions can do nothing by themselves - they will remain a minority - they have no power over the mass of proletarians.' (Minutes of the London Congress of the International, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol 22, p614)

This conclusion was drawn from the experience of nearly a decade of struggle, through which the unions had shown their complete contempt for the most oppressed sections of the working class, both at home and abroad. To suggest that he was using the term 'descriptively' is utter nonsense. It was these trade union leaders who attempted to get a motion of censure on Marx in the International in 1872 for saying that the English labour leaders had sold themselves 'to Gladstone, Morley, Duke and others' (Minutes and Documents of the Hague Congress of the International, p702). Those nineteenth century union leaders hada better understanding of Marx's threat to their position than do twentieth century academics.

Did Engels develop Marx's position?


Yes, he did, and in discussion with Marx too. Our two authors aren't quite clear on this; on the one hand, they say 'Like Marx, Engels began to detect the emergence of labour aristocracy in the early 1850s' (p43), on the other, they refer to the 'somewhat ambiguous ideas sketched by Marx and especially by Engels' (p46). But there is nothing ambiguous in his description in 1885 of the situation between 1850 and 1870, when be writes that 'A permanent improvement can be recognised for two "protected" sections only of the working class.' The first section are factory workers protected by limits on the working day, and:

'Secondly, the great Trade Unions. They are the organisations of those trades in which the labour of grown-up men (his emphasis) predominates, or is alone applicable. Here the competition neither of women or children nor of machinery has so far weakened their organised strength. The engineers, the carpenters and joiners, the bricklayers are each of them a power to the extent that as in the case of the bricklayers and bricklayers' labourers, they can even successfully resist the introduction of machinery... They form an aristocracy among the working class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final. They are the model workingmen of Messrs Leone Levi and Giffen, and they are very nice people nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in particular and for the whole capitalist class in general.
But as to the great mass of the working people, the state of misery and insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever, if not lower.' (In Marx and Engels: Articles on Britain, pp378-9)

What is the conclusion of our authors after they quote part of this passage? 'But what Engels seemed to make was a close identification of "aristocrats" with bureaucrats', continuing: 'Later writers specifically refused to identify "aristocrats" with "leaders", the whole point being to shift the focus onto a layer of workers' (their emphasis, p44). Who are they trying to kid? In fact they are so poorly researched that when they go on to say that Engels' 1892 Preface to The Condition of the Working Class in England was 'Engels' fullest denunciation of the "aristocracy among the working class" - a "small, privileged protected minority" steeped in "respectable bourgeois prejudices" and "permanently benefited" by the proceeds of empire' (p44), they do not realise he is quoting a large chunk of his 1885 article. They themselves have not read the Preface - only Lenin's citations from it! This is not a trivial point; it exposes the bogus erudition of the article - it is no more than cod academicism.

For Engels, the aristocracy are the skilled sections of the working class organised in their New Model Unions. So when Corr and Brown argue 'It is still hard to pin down exactly who the labour aristocrats were for Engels' (p45) we can only conclude it is hard for them to understand anything. Already in the 1850s Engels and Marx were discussing the corruption of the English working class movement and connecting it to England's industrial monopoly. As Engels said in a letter to Marx in 1858: '..the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois... For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.' (Marx and Engels: Selected Correspondence, p132). For those who would like to draw a distinction between Marx and Engels' alleged 'crudities', it is noteworthy that Marx never once contradicted Engels in his development of the position.

Our authors concede this, but then say 'there is no description or explanation of the mechanism by which the bribery works' (p43), and repeal the point elsewhere (eg p42, p45). That the bribes or privileges existed there is of course no doubt.

What were the privileges?


The labour aristocracy's privileges were both economic and political. Economically, their jobs were far more assured than those of unskilled workers; typically their unemployment rates were half or one third those of unskilled workers. Their wages were much higher - some 40 shillings per week at a time when theunskilled worker earned 20 to 25 shillings. They tended to live apart from the mass of the working class, socially and geographically. Their children had access to education. With higher wages came better food, better health and a longer life.

The political privileges were equally significant: the vote being one. The 1868 Reform Act with its property qualifications consolidated the developing aristocracy of labour by allowing it to participate in the bourgeois democratic process. This is not considered at all by our authors, although they speak for an organisation whose desire to vote Labour at every possible opportunity is remarkable if only for its single-mindedness. Yet this was the point at which the leaders of this aristocratic minority, aided by the most direct of bribes, sacrificed the interests of the mass of the working class for those of its privileged section, and became no more than an appendage to the Liberals.

Another political concession that came with increasing respectability was the legalisation of trade union organisation. However, the New Model Unions embraced only the skilled sections of the working class, and quite deliberately excluded the unskilled, through apprenticeships and restrictions on the number of labourers they might supervise. Corr and Brown, in defending these unions, argue that 'Nevertheless, it is one thing to forsake revolutionary class struggle but quite another to accept the philosophy of capitalism. The craftist unions clearly did not do this' (p60). Well, they appear to be alone in this judgement. Applegarth, leader of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and a member of the notorious London Junta, wrote in 1866:

'Let us then unite with dignified firmness and rest not until our unions have that protection to which they are entitled, and I trust that with such protection and a few more years' experience, we shall have established a new era in the history of labour, have gained the full confidence of our employers, adopted arbitration as the first resort of our differences, and freed our unions from the expense and anxiety of strikes as far as it is possible to do so...' (Quoted in T. Rothstein: From Chartism to Labourism, p186)
Now this would seem to be very much an 'acceptance of the philosophy of capitalism'; indeed, if a movement forsakes revolutionary struggle, it can do no other. Even Francis Williams, the official historian of the Labour Party some 45 years ago, is quite clear on the moderation of the skilled unions; discussing their role in the formation of the London Trades Council in 1860, he wrote:

'What was no less important was that they understood the middle-class point of view -- the point of view of those who in increasing measure now formed public opinion -- because they shared it. Their modest ambition indeed was to establish a new group within that wide amorphous class, raising the skilled workers whom they represented to a position totally divorced from that of the struggling mass below.' (F. Williams: Magnificent Journey - The Rise of the Trade Unions, p105)
Later on, Williams cites the opposition of the skilled unions to the eight- hour day in the 1880s as an example of their 'cautious, conciliatory and self-satisfied' attitude (Magnificent Journey, p162). Corr and Brown ignore this, although perhaps more than any other question it showed how opposed the craft unions were to the interests of the mass of the working class. On the one hand there were the socialists, including Tom Mann, demanding legislation for the eight hour day. On the other stood the craft unions, opposing any state intervention on the question, arguing that it was a matter of negotiation with the employers. Given that they were the only negotiating bodies, it was tantamount to saying only skilled workers could have the eight-hour day. Engels was in the thick of this struggle, and when under the influence of the new unskilled unions, the old gang of the skilled unions were defeated at the 1891 TUC, he spoke enthusiastically of the defeat of the 'bourgeois labour party':

'The old unions, with the textile workers at their head, and the whole of the reactionary party among the workers, had exerted all their strength towards overthrowing the eight-hour decision of 1890. They came to grief ... and the bourgeois papers recognised the defeat of the bourgeois labour party.' (Engels, Letter to Sorge, 14 September 1891)
Perhaps Engels was mistaken about their 'acceptance of the philosophy of capitalism'? Certainly Corr and Brown seem completely unaware of the major political battles of the time, when Tom Mann argued:

'New unionism must be judged by its fruits. Many identified with it had long been membersof their own societies and had grieved bitterly over the workers' poverty, particularly that of the unskilled and unorganised, and at the callous disregard shown by the old societies, even for the labourers in their own trade. The old school had proved unable to organise the unskilled and even to further their own interests.' (Quoted in Dona Torr: Tom Mann ond His Times, p18)
What was the source of these privileges?

We have already shown how Engels and Marx attributed the privileged existence of the labour aristocracy to England's industrial monopoly in the 1850s and 1860s, augmented by its colonial monopoly, especially during the period of relative industrial decline from the 1870s onward. When Corr and Brown cite Gareth Stedman Jones (who has accomplished his own personal revolution, become a professor and renounced both Marxism and the class struggle) in arguing that in Engels 'there was no definitive material theory of the labour aristocracy' (p45), it was certainly true that they produced no academic treatise on the matter. But Engels made pointed reference to England's monopoly position, as Corr and Brown concede earlier on in their article when they say that Engels was 'categorical' about the 'link between England's colonial monopoly and the corruption of a certain layer of the working class' (p43).

The liberal JA Hobson also made this connection at the turn of the century, and Lenin argued that by doing so, he showed himself more advanced than the so-called Marxist Kautsky. We would say that he was more advanced than Corr and Brown writing nearly a hundred years later. If we look at the sectors where skilled workers and their organisation were strongest, we find them to be closely connected to Empire: textiles, iron and steel, engineering, and coal. Textiles because of the cheap cotton from Egypt, and a captive market in India; iron and steel because of ship- building and railway exports, engineering because of the imperialist arms industry, and coal because of the demands of Britain's monopoly of world shipping. In a myriad of different ways, the conditions of the labour aristocracy were bound up with the maintenance of British imperialism. And this fact was bound to be reflected in their political standpoint.

To sum up: Corr and Brown show an amazing ignorance of the contemporary recognition of the existence of this privileged stratum; at each and every stage, they prefer to rely on bourgeois historians writing up to a century later. Their argument that 'in fact no new layer emerged which was materially and socially distinguishable from the rest of the working class in a way which was different from long established differentiation' (p67) is quite unsustainable in terms of all the contrary contemporary opinion. The point is that such a development within the working class was inevitable if the ruling class were to survive in conditions where the working class were becoming ever more preponderant numerically, and where there was a commensurate increase in their potential political and economic power. Furthermore, the emergence of the labour aristocracy was linked with the maturation of bourgeois democracy: only at that point in time when the ruling class could be satisfied that the working class would use the vote 'wisely' would they in fact receive it. Marx and Engels were well aware of the significance of the treachery of the Reform League; Corr and Brown over a century later are not.

from Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 116, December 1993/January 1994
Watchdogs of Capitalism
The Reality of the Labour Aristocracy Part 2

In his continuing analysis of the SWP's position on the labour aristocracy, ROBERT CLOUGH, having shown how Corr and Brown distort Marx and Engels, examines their critique of Lenin's theory.
Last issue, we showed how Corr and Brown (International Socialism, No. 59, Summer 1993) misrepresented Marx and Engels in their efforts to deny the existence of a labour aristocracy in nineteenth-century Britain. With the assertion that neither Marx nor Engels 'had a consistent analysis of such a phenomenon', they concluded 'much less that their use of the term laid the basis for a causal explanation of reformism in the way which Lenin uses it., (Corr and Brown, p39) This article shows that they have as little basis for their position on Lenin as they did on Marx and Engels.

Although Lenin's analysis of the nature and role of the labour aristocracy was most fully developed during the First Imperialist War, his awareness of the connection between opportunism and imperialism was already evident in his contribution to the debate on 'socialist colonialism' at the 1907 congress of the Second International. The debate, on a proposition that advanced capitalist countries had the right to colonial possessions as part of a broader 'civilising' mission, revealed widespread support for such racism (from German trade unionists to Ramsay MacDonald, an ILP delegate), even though it was eventually out-voted. Reporting the discussion, Lenin wrote:

'Only the proletarian class, which maintains the whole of society, can bring about the social revolution. However, as a result of the extensive colonial policy, the European proletarian partly finds himself in a position when it is not his labour, but the labour of the practically enslaved natives in the colonies, that maintains the whole of society ... In certain countries this provides the material and economic basis for infecting the proletariat with colonial chauvinism. Of course, this may be only a temporary phenomenon, but the evil must nonetheless be clearly realised and its causes understood.' (Collected Works [CW], Vol 13, p77)
Significantly, at the same Congress, Lenin had also opposed the unconditional admission of the Labour Party to the Second International because of its refusal to recognise the existence of the class struggle. Politically, Labour was still tied completely to the Liberal Party as the most effective means of representing the interests of the upper stratum of the working class. The division between this small minority and the mass of the working class was as great as it had been in Engels' day: a study by the Liberal Sir Leo Chiozza-Money in 1905 estimated that 33 million out of a population of 43 million lived in poverty, of whom 13 million lived in destitution. In 1911, it was estimated that it required 30 shillings per week to support a family in minimal comfort: 5 million out of 8 million manual workers earned less than this, their average income being 22 shillings per week. During this period, the normal wage for skilled workers was some 40 shillings per week.

The Labour Aristocracy and the Working Class


It is impossible to understand Lenin's conception of the role of the labour aristocracy unless we accept his starting point: that the proletariat must be a revolutionary class because of its position within capitalist society. This revolutionary character is expressed first in its actions, and subsequently in its consciousness. This distinction is vital: that is why Lenin spoke of the political work 'that brings closer and merges into a single whole the elemental destructive forces of the masses and the conscious destructive force of the organisation of revolutionaries.' (Lenin, CW, Vol 5 p512) In the beginning was the deed: thus Marx quotesGoethe in Chapter One of Capital, giving his warm approval to this pithy statement of the materialist position. The starting point for the development of revolutionary consciousness within the working class is its 'spontaneous movement' (Lenin, CW, Vol 4 p260), not the other way around.

Given this, it is the role of the labour aristocracy to undermine, fragment and destroy this spontaneous movement in order to prevent the working class acquiring a consciousness of its revolutionary role. Through its control of the organisation of the working class, its privileged access to resources such as finance, the media, meeting halls and so on, the labour aristocracy actively fights to isolate every act of working class resistance to prevent it developing a revolutionary character. Thus there is no single act of betrayal, but a continual process of struggle in which the opportunists pit themselves against the emerging movement of the proletariat, and in which the defeat of the labour aristocracy is the precondition to the working class achieving self-consciousness.

With this in mind, we can understand how Corr and Brown 'disprove Lenin: it is by turning the problem back to front. They do not believe the working class is capable of struggling in a revolutionary manner until it has achieved a revolutionary consciousness. Thus they are obsessed with the backwardness of the working class, or as they term it, 'mass reformism'; and this fixation means that they cannot conceive how the proletariat is forced despite itself into the movement which is the precondition for transcending its backwardness. Corr and Brown draw here on their mentor Tony Cliff, who argued in the early years of the boom that the working class in the countries in the West 'show a stubborn adherence to reformism, a belief in the possibility of major improvement in conditions under capitalism'. He continued:

'Why is this so? Why the general apathy and rejection of revolutionary changes in society, when humanity as a whole is in the grip of life and death struggles? Only if we find the correct answer to this question can we answer a further one: for how long can reformism push aside revolutionary aspirations in the working class?' (all quotes drawn from 'The Economic Roots of Reformism', in Neither Washington Nor Moscow, 1982)
For Cliff, the way Lenin 'explained reformism, or to use the term he coined, opportunism' was inadequate, because 'an inevitable conclusion...is that a small thin crust hides the urges of the mass of workers. Any break in this crust would reveal a surging revolutionary lava. The role of the revolutionary party is simply to show the mass of the workers that their interests are betrayed by the "infinitesimal minority" of the "aristocracy of labour".' But according to Cliff, this 'is not confirmed by the history of reformism in Britain, the United States and elsewhere over the past half century: its solidity, its spread throughout the working class, frustrating and largely isolating all revolutionary minorities makes it abundantly clear that the economic, social roots of reformism are not in "an infinitesimal minority of the proletariat and working masses as Lenin had argued.'

So the critical issue is the reformist or backward consciousness of the working class: it is this that explains the absence of revolutionary struggle. However, the social and political conditions of 1957 when Cliff wrote this are a surer guide as to why there should be no revolutionary struggle: imperialist boom was creating 'full' employment and rising living standards. Lenin was writing in a quite different period of deep social and economic crisis when 'the actuality of proletarian revolution' (Lukacs) was no empty phrase. Conditions in the first quarter of this century threw the working class into constant struggle regardless of its prevailing level of consciousness; and at every stage, the labour aristocracy used its privileged position to frustrate, limit and undermine that struggle, and as a consequence frustrate, limit and undermine the development of an independent class consciousness. Thus Cliff's reference to 'surging revolutionary lava' is a ludicrous and bombastic caricature: the labour aristocracy as the 'class enemy within the camp of the proletariat' was indeed the critical obstacle to the development of communist movements, not as Cliff would have it, 'reformism', or the class enemy of the proletariat within its own mind.

Corr and Brown take Cliff's standpoint and attempt to give it a veneer of scientific respectability by culling numerous quotations from respectable bourgeois labour historians. The only basis on which they choose these academics is their common hostility to Lenin. Thus they can be Eurocommunists, structuralists, avowed revisionists or anti Marxists - Corr and Brown don't particularly care. Hence they see no methodological problem in treating the arguments developed by (say) Henry Pelling or AE Musson, reactionary bourgeois historians the pair of them (sorry: academics with a 'particular Whig interpretation of labour history' - Corr and Brown, p73) as of equal validity to those advanced by Lenin. We can only assume that Corr and Brown believe that these historians are neutral figures whose statements possess a scientific objectivity in and of themselves - a preposterous position for those who claim to recognise theexistence of a class-divided society.

For our part, there is a good reason as to why Corr and Brown have no methodological axe to grind with such people: they share the same class position, that of the petit bourgeoisie. And whilst the preconditions for the working class acquiring revolutionary consciousness is its spontaneous movement, it is the other way round for the petit bourgeoisie: they must acquire the consciousness before the commitment to the struggle. The result is that Corr and Brown, along with radical bourgeois historians, project their class position on to the proletariat. The obsession with reformism is none other than an obsession with the problem of the consciousness of the petit bourgeoisie.

Lenin on Opportunism


So what did Lenin really mean by 'opportunism', and how does it differ from the concept of 'reformism' advanced by Corr, Brown, Cliff and the bourgeois academics they cite? Essentially, it is an alliance between the ruling class and a privileged stratum of the working class directed against the mass of the working class. Thus he argued:

'The relative "peaceful" character of the period between 1871 and 1914 served to foster opportunism first as a mood, then as a trend. until finally it formed a group or stratum among the labour bureaucracy and petty bourgeois fellow- travellers. These elements were able to gain control of the labour movement only by paying lip-service to revolutionary aims.' (CW Vol 22, p111)
And later on:

'A few crumbs of the bourgeoisie's huge profits may come the way of the small group of labour bureaucrats, labour aristocrats, and petit-bourgeois fellow-travellers. Social chauvinism and opportunism have the same class basis, namely the alliance of a small section of privileged workers with their national bourgeoisie against the working class masses; the alliance between the lackeys of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the class the latter is exploiting. (ibid, p112)
An alliance against the working class: hence Lenin's fondness for the phrase 'labour lieutenants of the capitalist class' as a description of the labour aristocracy. Yes, this represents a considerable development of Marx' and Engels' arguments, but there is no call for criticism on this account (see Corr and Brown p45). Events had moved on since the 1880s and 1890s: Lenin was writing in the midst of an imperialist war, where despite its earlier protestations, the leadership of the Second International were either openly or tacitly supporting 'their' ruling class in a revolting slaughter of working class people with the aim of deciding how to re-divide the colonies amongst the major capitalist powers. If Marxism could not keep pace with such changes, it could no longer be the science of revolution.

The war had revealed the existence of three trends within the socialist movement: the open opportunists, who enthusiastically supported 'their' ruling class (in Britain, the entire trade union leadership and the overwhelming majority of the Labour Party), the pacifists, who proclaimed their opposition to the war but refused to organise against it or to break with the opportunists who supported it (in Britain, Ramsay MacDonald, and in Germany, Karl Kautsky), and lastly the revolutionaries, who called for the defeat of 'their' imperialism and organised to achieve this end (in Britain, John Maclean, in Ireland, James Connolly, in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg, and in Russia, Lenin). Marxism had to explain the origin of those trends hostile to the working class, and Lenin alone of the revolutionaries was able to do so. But he then went further and translated this understanding into the practical political position which led to the defeat of Russian opportunism and the triumph of the October revolution. What we are discussing therefore is not Lenin's so-called crudeness or one-sidedness, but quite the opposite: his complete theoretical superiority to any other living socialist.

Now Corr and Brown find themselves in all sorts of trouble as they try to develop their criticisms of Lenin. On the one hand, they declare that Lenin talked a lot about the labour aristocracy, but had no consistent idea as to who it encompassed. On the other, they say he could not have been thinking of any section of the working class such as Engels' carpenters and engineers, for if he were, 'there were enormous implications for the concept of proletarian revolution, when whole sections of the working class would becastigated as "watchdogs of capitalism and corrupters of the labour movement"' (p46) the implication apparently being that there could not be any proletarian revolution whatsoever. Yet Corr and Brown exaggerate these 'whole sections' were always a minority in Lenin's view, and might anyway be thrown back into the mass of the working class under the impact of the overall crisis. In other words, the impoverishment of sections of the labour aristocracy was a thesis as uncontentious as the proletarianisation of sections of the petit bourgeoisie (even, possibly, some former academics). This of course happened in the 1920s in Britain; as John Foster observed, 'The previously "aristocratic" sections [skilled engineers, shipbuilders, textile workers and miners - RC] now came under crippling attack. Their local cultural institutions (the backbone of the old "framework" of control) disappeared into the abyss of unemployment'. However, he then continued:

'Yet to see this as the end would be to miss the whole essence of the labour aristocracy, to see it purely descriptively, in just one of its forms, and ignore its historical role and development: as the active process by which labour's class organisation was purged of anti-capitalist elements and made safer for economism and spontaneity.' (in ed J Skelley: The General Strike, p31)
And indeed the 'active process was to continue, with new sections of the working class being elevated in the 1930s to a level of privilege that had been previously enjoyed by skilled workers in those industries on which British capitalist prosperity had been built at the beginning of the century. But Corr and Brown are adamant: it 'makes no sense to think that Lenin saw the labour aristocracy in these workers. Lenin in fact used the term "labour aristocracy" to refer to reformist leaders (in particular to Kautsky)' (p 46). 'In fact', Lenin did not use the term 'labour aristocracy to refer to Kautsky - far from it: to Lenin, they were separate trends, and he repeatedly stressed the distinction, right from 1914 through to 1917. As he wrote in a work Corr and Brown claim to have read:

'Kautskyism is not an independent trend, because it has no roots either in the masses or in the privileged stratum which has deserted to the bourgeoisie. But the danger of Kautskyism lies in the fact that, utilising the ideology of the past, it endeavours to reconcile the proletariat with that party and thereby enhance the latter's prestige. The masses no longer follow the avowed social chauvinists...The Kautskyites' masked defence of the social chauvinists is far more dangerous.' (CW Vol 23, p119)
And in 1917:

'I might remark, in passing, that Souvarine is wrong in maintaining that "they [ie, the Russian comrades who speak of the collapse of the Second International] equate men like Kautsky, Longuet, etc with nationalists of the Scheidemann and Renaudel type". Neither I nor the Party to which I belong (the RSDLP Central Committee) have ever equated the social chauvinist viewpoint with that of the "Centre". In our official Party statements, in the Central Committee manifesto published November 1 1914, and in the resolutions adopted in March 1915...we have always drawn a dividing line between the social chauvinists and the "Centre". The former, in our opinion, have defected to the bourgeoisie. With regard to them we demand not merely struggle, but a split. The latter hesitate, vacillate, and their efforts to unite the socialist masses with the chauvinist leaders causes the greatest damage to the proletariat.' (CW Vol 23, pp195-6)

There is no doubt that Corr and Brown do not know what they are talking about. But this is not a matter of simple ignorance. If Kautsky was no more than a common or garden labour aristocrat as they suggest, then the trend that his position represents de facto cannot exist. Life is not so simple, for as Lenin argued, such a trend must and will come into existence in order to reconcile sections of the working class with the open and discredited opportunists. Henderson had to have his MacDonald, and Scheidemann his Kautsky, since on their own Henderson and Scheidemann could no longer command the allegiance of the revolutionary sections of the working class. Today, it is no different: John Smith must have his Kautsky or MacDonald whose task it is to reconcile radicalised sections of the working class with the rotten traditions of the Labour Party. And how might we expect that trend to act? In the 1980s, it would form an uncritical alliance with the Labour left in pacifist opposition to the Falklands War; in the l990s, it would renew that alliance in an equally pacifist opposition to the Gulf War. It might offer occasional criticisms of individual Labour leaders as they revelled in the slaughter of the Iraqi people, but not of the Party as a whole - indeed, the trend would remind its supporters that they should still vote for Labour despite its barbarity. And how would it justify this? Why,by explaining that Labour is despite everything a 'workers party' - 'capitalist' maybe, with a 'reformist' leadership certainly, but at the end of the day, still a workers party. And what organisation has adopted these positions and arguments? Corr and Brown will know - the SWP!

The correspondence between the Kautsky of 1914-17 and the SWP of today runs deeper. They share the notion that the problem for socialists is the backwardness of the working class - Kautsky used this to justify his refusal to break from the chauvinists since he would thereby break from the 'masses'. The corollary of this is that both Kautsky and the SWP condemn the spontaneous struggles of the working class since it exposes their alliance with opportunism. Thus the SWP has consistently opposed armed liberation struggles - which should be more properly described as revolutionary than spontaneous - especially that of the republican movement; it condemned black and white youth during the 1981 and later uprisings, and it condemned the miners' hit squads during the 1984-85 strike. It is clear then that the issue is not the 'backwardness' of the working class, but the backwardness of the SWP and the class position that its politics represent - that of the petit bourgeoisie.

Once we understand the interests that Corr and Brown's arguments serve, we can appreciate the full measure of their shallowness. The ambiguous class position of the petit bourgeoisie expresses itself in their reluctance to adopt a partisan position - hence Corr and Brown's pseudo-objectivity, their willingness to accept at face value the positions of bourgeois academia, the 'on the one hand on the other' presentation of their views. Indeed, it is partisanship that they criticise in Lenin, when they suggest that 'disillusion at the collapse of the Second International probably made it very difficult to avoid a certain amount of moralism, even among the finest revolutionaries' (p48). The inference is clear: Lenin allowed his judgement to be clouded by subjective feelings. 'Moralism' here is a pejorative 'moralistic' elsewhere in the article - but we must remember that only the privileged can afford the luxury of amorality and pretend that morality. and objectivity are polar opposites. Communist and revolutionaries reject this: there is a very definite working class morality, and that morality condemned the leadership of the Second International with scientific objectivity in 1914, just as it would condemn those who defended the Labour Party during the slaughter of the Gulf War.

To sum up: Lenin's position is comprehensible only if you start from 'the actuality of proletarian revolution' - that is, from a partisan standpoint. Any other approach must lapse into sociology or psychology, the fate of a bourgeois academia which wants anything hut a proletarian revolution. But the labour aristocracy as Lenin understood is not a sociological concept describing a stratum within, or without, or in some kind of juxtaposition to the working class, hut a historical process connected to the development of imperialism. Corr and Brown cannot understand this since they have not broken from the standpoint of the radical petit bourgeoisie, a standpoint which has to deny the existence of the labour aristocracy in order to ally with its political representatives.

from Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 119, June/July 1994
The Labour Aristocracy
Part 3: Between the Wars


In our previous two articles, we proved that the concept of the labour aristocracy was an integral part of revolutionary theory from Marx's day, and that it was accepted as such by all major theoreticians in the working class movement. We showed how it was that the labour aristocracy created organisations to defend and advance its interests -- exclusive craft unions, and, later, as British imperialism's dominant position in the world was undermined, the Labour Party. We also showed how the newer unskilled unions, formed in opposition to the elitist craft unions, soon succumbed to the prevailing trend of opportunism, their leadership absorbed into the labour aristocracy. ROBERT CLOUGH continues his analysis of the labour aristocracy.
The inter-war period was to see the destruction of the privileged conditions of those skilled sections of the working class familiar as the labour aristocracy to Marx, Engels and Lenin. This did not however mean that the lahour aristocracy disappeared as a trend in the working class, rather that its composition changed. This article demonstrates how this process started in the 1920s, and a later article will show how their organisations -- the trade unions and the Labour Party -- adapted themselves in order to represent new privileged strata that were to emerge during the 1930s.

The First Imperialist War


The First Imperialist War had greatly accelerated the incorporation of the organisations of the labour aristocracy into the imperialist state. This process had started with the first significant state welfare measures of the pre-war Liberal Government. The introduction of labour exchanges, a national insurance scheme and the Old Age Pensions Act were all initially opposed by the skilled unions. The TUC Parliamentary Committee argued that national insurance should be restricted to trade unionists 'otherwise you will have men to support who never had been nor never will be self-supporting. They are at present parasites on their more industrious fellows and will be the first to avail themselves of the funds the Bill provides.' Such opposition was quickly bought off when the Government offered the unions a role in the administration of these schemes, and soon there proliferated bodies like the Courts of Referees (administering the National Insurance Act) on which there would always be at least one 'labour representative'.

With the outbreak of war, both the Labour Party and the TUC were swift to defend the Empire against the German threat. The TUC proclaimed an industrial truce and organised recruitment drives for the armed forces. The rewards were substantial: participation in all kinds of state committees to oversee production and distribution, and, for the Labour Party, the offer of cabinet positions in the Coalition Government. In return, the labour aristocracy was expected to police the working class, ensuring that there was a minimum of resistance to speed-up, falling wages and dilution of skilled labour.

The post-war boom


In the post-war period, the most immediate role of the Labour Party and the TUC was to help stave off working class pressure that had built up as working class living standards had plummeted. In the circumstances, the ruling class deemed a brief inflationary boom as politically expedient to buy time. It could not afford any domestic challenge whilst it re-shaped the post-war imperialist order in the context of a triumphant Russian Revolution. Hence it gave the trade union leadership some leeway to maintain its authority through the uncertainties of demobilisation.

For a very short period, the trade union movement was to embrace the mass of the unskilled male working class, as membership rose from 2 million in 1910 to 6.5 million in 1918 and 8.3 million in 1920, of whom 6.5 million were affiliated to the TUC. However, despite the enormous struggles of the period, no independent working class movement appeared with a leadership able to challenge such betrayals as the sabotage of the Triple Alliance in April 1921, or their connivance in the partition of Ireland. Union amalgamations created vast new organisations such as AEU, whose rule book still excluded unskilled workers and women, and the T&GWU and the GM. Both the latter unions, organising unskilled and semi-skilled workers, were structured in such a way as to give the maximum of power to unelected officials and thereby minimise the influence of these poorer sections of the working class. They were to become in effect the private fiefdom of a handful of trade union barons, most notably Ernest Bevin, General Secretary of the T&G throughout almost the whole inter-war period. Leaders such as he were truly to become the 'labour lieutenants of the capitalist class'.

It was not merely through its control of the trade union movement that the labour aristocracy sought to undermine the working class movement -- it was also through the manipulation of state welfare. Thus the Labour leader JR Clynes argued in parliament in 1921 that 'organised labour, I am certain, together with the employers, if both were called more in touch with the administration of benefits, could be of great assistance in locating the shirkers, and making it impossible to get money when work could have been got.' And throughout the country, local trade unionists were to play 'hunt the scrounger', often as representatives of Trades Councils on Public Assistance Committees and Boards of Guardians.

The crisis in British industry


From 1921 until after the defeat of the General Strike industrial capital by and large stagnated. Productivity within the coal industry fell substantially: 1.2 million miners produced less coal in 1924 than 1 million did in 1913. Cotton consumption fell and even in the peak year of 1929 amounted to only 1.5 million tons compared to 2.1 million tons in 1913. There was a similar picture for steel, iron and shipbuilding; overall, the value of export manufactured goods in 1923 was 73% of the 1913 level. The captive markets of the Empire were no longer a sufficient compensation for low levels of productivity in these traditional sectors of industry. Such improvements as there were arose more from the intensification of labour than from new investment.

The movement of wages in these sectors reflected the stagnant conditions, fallingsignificantly between 1920 and 1924 -- by 11% in cotton, 14% in shipbuilding, 20% in iron and steel and 26% in coal. In the service sector however, there was a different picture, as wages rose by about 15%. Unemployment showed a similar pattern: in 1926, it was 40% in iron, steel and shipbuilding, 18% in cotton, and only in coal at 9% did it match the prevailing levels of the service sector. The traditional labour aristocracy was experiencing a savage assault on its previously privileged conditions. The brief life of the first Labour Government in 1924 did not change anything, it was noteworthy more for showing the extent to which Labour had usurped the role of representing the interests of the labour aristocracy from the Liberal Party, whose disintegration was now assured.

Beyond the General Strike


In these circumstances, a fall in union membership was inevitable, particularly amongst unskilled workers: by the time of the 1926 General Strike in support of miners facing massive wage cuts, TUC-affiliated membership was down to 4.3 million, two-thirds of its 1920 level. And whilst the government engaged in nine months' intensive preparation from late 1925 for the impending confrontation, the trade union leadership did absolutely nothing. But this inactivity was in its interests: defeat in the General Strike would above all mean defeat for those forces which might threaten its control of working class organisation.

The aftermath of the General Strike was a brief industrial boom lasting until 1929, which set the context for a political offensive by the Labour Party/trade union alliance directed against the small Communist Party. During 1927-28, Communists were banned and proscribed within the Labour Party and the trade unions. This coincided with the Mond-Turner talks of 1928 (Sir Alfred Mond was head of ICI, Ben Turner TUC General Secretary), an attempt to develop an open and public alliance with the increasingly dominant forces of finance capital. Although they achieved little in immediate practical terms, their main political conclusion -- that British industry must completely re-organise and rationalise if it were to compete on the world market -- was to become the refrain of the 1929-31 Labour Government. 'Mondism' was in substance the equivalent of the 'New Realism' of the 1980s. It expressed the self-same interests of a very narrow stratum of the working class as it sought a new accommodation with the ruling class. Thus Bevin could argue that:

'It is all very well for people to talk as if the working class of Great Britain are cracking their shins for a fight and a revolution, and we are holding them back. Are they? There are not many of them as fast as we are ourselves.'
The image of 'militant' trade union leaders was of course far from reality. Between the General Strike and the outbreak of war, there were only two strikes of any significant size -- the 'more looms' dispute of 1932 in the cotton industry, and the 1937 London busmen's strike. The first was a desperate and unsuccessful struggle to resist a massive increase in the intensity of labour; the second was a calculated move by Bevin to destroy the only organised opposition to his rule of the T&G. In both, the Communist Party played a leading role. Otherwise the trade union movement had no relevance forthe mass of the working class from 1926 onward.

In summary, the process of institutionalising the organisations of the labour aristocracy continued throughout the first post-war decade. It took place in a number of ways. Nationally, the amalgamation of unions and their assets created huge monoliths whose first priority was their own preservation. Governmental committees with trade union representation had proliferated, Labour had been allowed to form an administration. At a local level, trade union and Labour leaders had been increasingly involved in local government, and in the administration of centrally-funded state welfare. As a consequence, the organisations they led acquired a certain independence from the more privileged strata of the working class they represented. Hence it was that whilst the old labour aristocracy was to fragment under an unrelenting ruling class offensive, the survival of its organisations was never in doubt. The 1930s would then become a transitional period, where a new labour aristocracy would arise based on the luxury and consumer industries of the Midlands and the South, and where the old organisations would adapt themselves to organise and represent their interests.