labor aristocracy

plural labor aristocracies · alternative labour aristocracy · alternative aristocracy of labour · alternative aristocracy of labor

1. alternativecountableuncountableAlternative form of labour aristocracy.

   Enfin nous pouvons toujours, en tant qu'anarchistes, empêcher le mouvement syndical de tomber dans les rouages d'une organisation autoritaire ou de créer une aristocratie ouvrière.

   1900, Paul Delasalle, L'action syndicale et les anarchistes, page 15; indirect English translation from Alias Recluse, transl., Anarchists and the Trade Unions, translation of La acción sindical y los anarquistas (in Spanish), 2013

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   The increase of duties, resulting herefrom, is compensated by having the economic and political basis of their achievements rendered more solid than that of the achievements of a labor aristocracy.

   April 1901, Karl Kautsky, “Trades Unions and Socialism”, in Eugene Dietzgen, transl., International Socialist Review, volume 1, number 10, page 595

   This is why the theory of class consciousness characterizes such workers as privileged, as a labor aristocracy, as a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. The distinguishing characteristic of the theory of the labor aristocracy is that, from its standpoint, the industrial workers in the metropoles of imperialism are not merely prisoners of bourgeois ideology, — they have deserted to the bourgeoisie.

   1974 [1972], Michael Velli with Lorraine Perlman, “III. Seizure of State Power”, in Manual For Revolutionary Leaders (Second Edition Including The Sources Of Velli's Thoughts), page 210

   Dissolute scions of British noble houses, predatory bankers and industrialists, even small proprietors and manufacturers with ‘expectations’, and various strata of the labor aristocracy could now conceive of themselves as ‘nature’s elect’, the product of natural selection and the ‘survival of the fittest’ transposed to the social realm.

   1995, Murray Bookchin, “3: The new Malthusians”, in Re-enchanting Humanity, page 71