Labour Aristocracy a Thing of the Past

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

 

Labour Day is upon us, so how are workers faring these days? Not all that well.

Exactly a century ago, Vladimir Lenin, soon to become the Communist ruler of Russia, published a treatise designed to explain why workers in industrialized countries were not attracted to left-wing revolution.

In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin theorized that imperialist countries in the developed world, through exploitation of their colonies by access to cheap raw materials and exports of goods, enabled their capitalist classes to make such “super profits” that they could pay high wages to their own employees at home.

This created, in Marxist terms, a “labour aristocracy” that could count on strong trade unions that protected decent wages, job security, and standard of living. The result, wrote Lenin, was “something like an alliance” between the workers of a given nation and their capitalists.

Lenin’s theory of imperialism argued that the “handful of the richest, privileged nations” had turned into “parasites on the body of the rest of mankind.” 

Why is this no longer the case? Why have the ruling classes in so-called imperialist countries seemingly abandoned their own working classes in favour of a borderless international economic system?

A new book by Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization, helps us to understand this process. 

He notes that between 1820 and 1990, the share of world income going to today’s wealthy nations soared from twenty per cent to almost seventy. Since then, however, that share has plummeted. As he explains, this reversal of fortune reflects a new age of globalization that is drastically different from the old.

The “old” globalization, the result of the Industrial Revolution, increased international trade, but goods were produced in the developed home countries and exported. 

Innovation and production remained local, so well-paid jobs in major industries remained in the rich countries. Hence the “labour aristocracy” of yore, where factory workers could live comfortable “middle class” lives.

Baldwin asserts that the new globalization is driven by an information technology which has radically reduced the cost of moving ideas across borders.

Rapidly falling communication and co-ordination costs have made it far less necessary for all stages in a production process to take place in the same factory or even country.

This has made it practical for multinational firms to move labour-intensive work to developing nations. These firms also ship their marketing, managerial, and technical know-how abroad.

It has allowed jobs that were previously sheltered to being sent abroad. Now managers, technicians and clerical staff back home, as well as manual workers, are also in danger.

The historically uneven economic development between advanced industrial metropoles and peripheral colonies, which allowed for a comfortable life for the working class, no longer exists.

Economic globalization has had more and more people join what Guy Standing calls the “precariat.” 

Published in 2011, his book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class describes the economic insecurity that has resulted in a precarious way of life for those who have fallen out of the old working class. 

As stable jobs disappear, the uncertainty of work has become normal. Everyone becomes what used to be called a “temp.” Obviously, they have no unions to protect them. 

The reaction? With little prospects for future well-paid work, they register their alienation and anger via the ballot box, so we see the rise of populist movements across the developed world.