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The Labour Aristocracy
The transformation of the skilled upper stratum into the core section of the labour aristocracy is the expression of the historical dialectic of a newly arisen stratification (social category) appropriating and altering the quality of a previously developed stratification. In concrete political terms it was the transformation of narrow craft trade unionism into all-sided collaboration with the imperialist bourgeoisie. In What Is To Be Done? Lenin had pointed out that trade unionism, though historically progressive, was essentially reformist because it limited the working class to bargaining for better terms
Hence, in the place of the hierarchy of specialised workmen that characterises manufacture, there steps, in the automatic factory, a tendency to equalise and reduce to one and the same level every kind of work that has to be done by the minders of machines; in the place of the artificially produced differentiation of the detail workmen, step the natural differences of age and sex.47 As the mass of workers become machine operatives and attendants, the category of skilled workers, “whose occupation it is to look after the whole of the machinery and repair it from time to time,” becomes “numerically unimportant”. Further, these mechanics and kindred workers are “a superior class of workmen, some of them scientifically educated, others brought up to a trade; it is distinct from the factory operative class and merely aggregated to it”.48 It has also become evident in the 20th century that these historical tendencies affect not just the industrial proletariat, but also the masses of workers exploited by commercial and bank capital as well those in the “service” sectors of the economy. Marx was not unaware of this phenomenon, even in its embryonic stage. Thus, in Marx’s discussion of commercial capital, he writes: The commercial workers, in the strict sense of the term, belong to the better-paid class of wage-workers — to those whose labour is classed as skilled and stands above average labour. Yet the wage tends to fall, even in relation to average labour, with the advances of the capitalist mode of production. This is due partly to the division of labour in the office … Secondly, because the necessary training, knowledge of commercial practices, languages, etc., is more and more rapidly, easily universally and cheaply reproduced with the progress of science and public education the more the capitalist mode of production directs teaching methods, etc., towards practical purposes … With few exceptions, the labour power of these people is therefore devaluated with the progress of capitalist production.49 The particular tendencies that predominated in earlier periods of capitalist development do not disappear, but rather emerge in more backward sections of industry that are being transformed, or appear — often in new forms — in new branches of the economy or old industries that are being reconstituted on a new technological basis. The general trend is to displace labour by machines, or automatic machine or flow processes. However, the specific natures of different production processes mean that this trend will unfold unevenly and with effects that temporarily counteract it. This is the phenomenon of technological advance bringing new categories of skilled labour into existence, which then eventually undergo a process of devaluation similar to the older skilled categories.