askchapo

People saying doctors, lawyers, and software engineers are wrong.

The labor aristocracy is essentially the majority of the proletariat in the West. They add very little value to a commodity relative to their wage. Most value is added in the periphery where they extract raw resources from the earth and process it. The labor aristocracy benefits from the exploitation of the laborers in the periphery. If the miners in Congo collected the full value of their labor, the proletariat in the West would lose massively as the cost of their commodities would go up at retail AND their would be very little added value left to justify their salaries.

It's relevant because despite your ideology driving your solidarity with laborers in the periphery, your material conditions world get substantially worse if those laborers had a communist revolution and captured the full value of their labor. That is a major problem for leftists in the imperial core to wrestle with and solve.

Part of the reason there is some confusion is the term pre-dates the Marxist use of the term, which Lenin originated. Just like how imperialism was a term, but Lenin used it to refer to a specific phenomena of capitalism. In fact I think he originates it in Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism (though he might have used it earlier, I can't remember)

The original term in the late 19th century was just used for a well paid worker. This is what a whole heap of non-marxist people still use.

The IWW started using it in the early 20th century specifically to refer to professionals like engineers, doctors, skilled craftsmen, who were insulated from the same conditions as other workers. Who would often have guilds, rather than unions. The IWW specifically being Anarchists, Syndicalists, Marxists, DeLeonists and other various socialists, but not Marxist-Leninists. So you also hear it used in some union contexts still. Not that the IWW really is around in any real numbers, but it sort of spread to less radical unions.

Then Lenin uses the term to apply to all workers in the imperial core as is mentioned in other comments here. Despite myself holding to the Marxist-Leninist position I have basically dropped it from my vocabulary due to the ambiguity. I will say well paid proletariat, or imperial core proletariat etc

It's a pretty nebulous term the roots of which are in Lenin's Imperialism in which he describes a class of workers that sides with imperialists because they receive a portion of the superprofits of imperial exploration.

Historically it was used to describe business union leadership or union workers more broadly, especially those in the war industries. Further left tendencies tend to broaden the scope of who is a labor aristocrat including professional workers or even the whole of the white working class.

Personally I think as Marxists we need to reckon with the fact that many workers in the imperial core have petite-bourgeois brain worms precisely because their minds have been thoroughly rotted by debt and consumerism subsidized by the blood and sweat of the global periphery. That doesn't mean we should eschew work among these workers but we should understand it's limitations.

For instance there's a massive naval shipyard near me that employs many people (mostly cis white dudes). They have a militant union and excellent pay and benefits. Unsurprisingly they're all ridiculously conservative and nationalist and I've had multiple employees there tell me war would be good for them because it would mean more work and better compensation. Just because many of these workers are union proles does not mean that they will easily align with the interest of the global proletariat and if we are organizing or agitating them we need to understand that.

People who sell their labor but enjoy elevated privileges compared to less prestigious jobs

For example, a code monkey making $120k a year is a labor aristocrat compared to a deliveryman making $50k a year despite both selling their labor and not owning the means of production.

Those that fall under LA are usually more aligned and/or closer with the bourgeoisie. Think of middle managers who hang out with the CFO and CEO or a lawyer who has to interact with politicians and businessmen. I don’t know if this counts, but there are also service workers who resist minimum wage laws because they make more with tips and don’t want to be restricted with everybody else, so their politics are aligned with the companies.

The difference between LA and petite bourgeoisie is that the latter owns the means of production on a smaller scale and frequently also sell their labor.

Is it relevant? I mean, yeah. A lot of working class people don’t want to be shoving boxes or pumping shit out of toilets for a living if the pay and conditions are terrible. They will either aspire or have their kids aspire to do “better”. Once you reach it, you will probably become more out of touch just by the nature of being separated from the ground. Many industries like STEM are notorious for being anti union. And many unions seek to keep their labor aristocracy status and not exactly have solidarity with all labor. Some theorists propose that western LA will resist any attempts from outside the imperial core to improve its conditions because that would inherently mean living standards in the west lowers as exploitation is evened out. We can see this play out in places like France where it seeks to deploy the military in Niger to secure its uranium after the new government became anti-French, and you don’t see many protests against it despite everyone fetishizing the French’s labor protesting.

Labor Aristocracy - The section of the international working class whose privileged position in lucrative job markets opened up by imperialism guarantees its receipt of wages approaching or exceeding the per capita value created by the working class as a whole. The class interests of the labor aristocracy are bound up with those of the capitalist class, such that if the latter is unable to accumulate superprofits then the super-wages of the labor aristocracy must be reduced.

TL:DR : if you make more than the average ppp-adjusted world wage, then you are in a minority of the world's workers, and part of the labor aristocracy.

Anyone who makes more money than me