The labor aristocracy is corrupting the workers’ and revolutionary movement

The labor aristocracy is corrupting the workers’ and revolutionary movement

The question is : is the betrayal of the workers’ movement in a counter-revolutionary, social-collaborationist, social-negotiating, social-imperialist, social-patriotic, social-chauvinist, social-fascist, social-racist, social-warlike sense based only on the betrayal of the leaderships of reformist and opportunist organizations or on the penetration into the working class of a more favored layer which links its material interests to those of capitalism and imperialism, the labor aristocracy ?

The opportunist far left, which feels at home in the reformist swamp of trade unions and election campaigns, claims that it is only a question of organizational leadership. Lenin and Trotsky, as well as the entire revolutionary communist movement following Marx and Engels, assert the opposite.

Here is how we ask the question : Is there even a crisis of revolutionary leadership ?

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article2374

The anti-socialist and counter-revolutionary betrayal of the proletariat has an internal, real, material, social base, which, even if it is a minority, is a social layer which often has a preponderant influence within large companies, while it does not lead the large spontaneous and self-organized movements of workers like the yellow vests.

The Communist International in 1920 :

"What are the characteristic features of the old trade union movement that led it to capitulate to the bourgeoisie ? They are :
The narrowly corporatist spirit. The fragmentation of the organization. The respect for bourgeois legality. The habit of relying on the labor aristocracy and ignoring laborers and unskilled workers. The excessively high dues, inaccessible to the ordinary worker. The concentration of the entire leadership of the unions in the hands of people at the top of the labor ladder, functionaries who tended more and more to constitute a bureaucratic trade union caste. The propaganda of neutrality in the face of political questions posed before the proletariat was in reality equivalent to support for bourgeois politics. The sabotage of collective contracts, which, in fact, resulted in the conclusion of these contracts by the union bureaucracy and the enslavement by the capitalists of the workers of a given profession for a whole series of years. The overestimation of insignificant improvements (for example, of the purely nominal increase in wages) which the unions succeeded in obtaining from the employers, with the help of a peaceful agreement. The foregrounding of questions of relief and mutuality to the detriment of strike funds and the combativeness of the unions. The habit of regarding the unions as organizations whose entire mission is to improve working conditions within the framework of the capitalist regime and which in no way set themselves the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system.
Such was the old "free" professional movement, the old trade unionism. Such an atmosphere allowed Gompers in America to sell union votes during presidential elections, and the Legiens of all countries to make the unions the instruments of the bourgeoisie.
Will the unions follow the old path of reformism, that is, in reality, of the bourgeoisie ? This is the most important question facing the international workers’ movement.

Leon Trotsky in "Where is England going ?" :

"The imperialist war revealed only too clearly that the labor bureaucracy and the labor aristocracy had had time, during the previous period of capitalist prosperity, to undergo a profound petty-bourgeois transformation, as to their entire way of life and their entire spiritual formation. But the petty bourgeois retains the appearance of freedom until the first shock. The war revealed and consecrated at one stroke the dependence of the petty bourgeois on the big and the very big bourgeois. Social-imperialism was the aspect of this dependence within the labor movement. Centrism, on the other hand, to the extent that it was preserved or reconstituted during the war and since, expressed the terror of the petty-bourgeois labor bureaucrat at the idea of ​​being entirely and above all manifestly the captive of imperialism. German Social Democracy, which for many years during Bebel’s time still pursued a policy that was in reality centrist, could not maintain this position during the war, not least because of its power. It had to be either against the war - and that would have been, in reality, entering the revolutionary road - or for the war, and that would have been an open move towards the bourgeoisie.

Source : https://www.marxists.org/francais/trotsky/livres/ouvalang/ouvlan11.htm

Leon Trotsky in "Europe and America" :

"Such, in its essential features, is the material power of the United States. It is this power which allows them to apply the old method of the British bourgeoisie : fattening the labor aristocracy in order to keep the proletariat under tutelage, a method which they have brought to a degree of perfection which the British bourgeoisie would never have even dared to dream of."

Source : https://www.marxists.org/francais/trotsky/livres/europeameric/eur2.htm

Leon Trotsky in “The Revolution Betrayed” :

"The proletariat is the least heterogeneous class in capitalist society. The existence of social strata such as the labor aristocracy and the bureaucracy, however, is sufficient to explain to us the existence of opportunist parties, which, in the natural course of things, become one of the means of bourgeois domination. Whether the difference between the labor aristocracy and the proletarian masses is, from the point of view of Stalinist sociology, "radical" or "superficial," is of little importance to us ; it is from this difference, in any case, that the necessity arose in its time to break with social democracy and to found the Third International."

Source : https://www.marxists.org/francais/trotsky/livres/revtrahie/frodcp10.htm

Leon Trotsky in a letter on The Iron Heel, by Jack London :

"It is particularly important to emphasize the role that Jack London attributes to the labor bureaucracy and aristocracy in the coming evolution of humanity. Thanks to their support, the American plutocracy will succeed in crushing the workers’ uprising and maintaining its iron dictatorship for the next three centuries."

Source : https://www.marxists.org/francais/trotsky/livres/litterature/london.htm

Trotsky’s letter in 1930 :

“Traditionally, purely French organizations do not have a mass character. To a certain extent, they are based on a political and trade union “aristocracy” of the working class. The overwhelming majority remains unorganized and distant from the activities of political and trade union organizations. It seems to me that the role of foreign workers in France will shake up the great conservatism of this country. Since foreign workers represent, in their great majority, the lower strata of the country’s proletariat, they are thus close, linked, and share the fate of the lower strata of the country’s proletariat, which nevertheless remains more distant from official organizations. Foreign workers have a different spirit, simply because they are foreigners : an emigrant spirit, more mobile, more receptive to revolutionary ideas. This is why the ideology of communism can win the respect of foreign workers and make them a powerful instrument for the penetration of the entire French working class.”

Source : https://www.marxists.org/francais/trotsky/oeuvres/1930/05/300510d.htm

Leon Trotsky in "Their Morality and Ours" :

“Stalinism is not an abstract ‘dictatorship’ either ; it is a vast bureaucratic reaction against the proletarian dictatorship in a backward and isolated country. The October Revolution abolished privileges, declared war on social inequality, substituted government of the workers by the workers for bureaucracy, abolished secret diplomacy ; it strove to give social relations complete transparency. Stalinism restored the most offensive forms of privilege, gave inequality a provocative character, stifled the spontaneous activity of the masses by means of police absolutism, made administration the monopoly of the Kremlin oligarchy, and revived the fetishism of power in aspects of which the absolute monarchy would not have dared to dream.
Social reaction, whatever it may be, is obliged to mask its true aims. The more abrupt the transition from revolution to reaction, the more reaction depends on the traditions of revolution—in other words, the more it fears the masses and the more it is forced to resort to lies and imposture in its struggle against the advocates of revolution. Stalinist impostures are not the fruit of "Bolshevik" amorality ; like all important events in history, they are the products of a concrete social struggle of the most perfidious and cruel kind : that of a new aristocracy against the masses who brought it to power. It requires, in truth, total intellectual and moral poverty to identify the reactionary and police morality of Stalinism with the revolutionary morality of the Bolsheviks. Lenin’s party ceased to exist long ago ; internal difficulties and world imperialism broke it. The Stalinist bureaucracy succeeded it and is an apparatus for the transmission of imperialism. In world politics, the bureaucracy has substituted class collaboration for class struggle, social patriotism for internationalism. In order to adapt the ruling party to the tasks of reaction, the bureaucracy has "renewed" its personnel by exterminating revolutionaries and recruiting careerists.

Source : https://www.marxists.org/francais/trotsky/livres/morale/morale10.htm

Leon Trotsky in “The Revolution Betrayed” :

"It is quite undeniable that the situation of the upper stratum of the working class, and especially of those who are called Stakhanovites, has noticeably improved over the past year ; the press reports in detail how many suits, pairs of shoes, gramophones, bicycles, and even cans of food the decorated workers were able to buy. At the same time, we discover how inaccessible these goods are to the ordinary worker. Stalin says of the causes that gave rise to the Stakhanov movement : ’People have begun to live better, more cheerfully. And when people live more cheerfully, work goes better.’ There is some truth in this optimistic way, typical of the leaders, of presenting piecework : the formation of a labor aristocracy has in fact only become possible thanks to previous economic successes. The incentive for the Stakhanovites, however, is not ’cheerfulness,’ but the desire to earn more. Molotov modified Stalin’s statement in this sense : "The Stakhanovites are driven to high productivity by the simple desire to raise their wages." Indeed, a whole category of workers was formed in a few months, nicknamed the "thousand," because their wages exceeded 1,000 rubles a month. There were even some who earned more than 2,000 rubles, while workers in the lower categories often earned less than 100 rubles.

The sheer magnitude of these wage variations seems to establish a sufficient difference between the "notable" worker and the "ordinary" worker. This is not enough for the bureaucracy. The Stakhanovites are literally showered with privileges. They are given new homes, repairs are made to their homes ; they are granted additional stays in rest homes and sanatoriums ; schoolmasters and doctors are sent to their homes, free of charge ; they have free admission to the cinema ; they sometimes get shaved for free or as a priority. Many of these privileges seem intentionally granted to hurt and offend the average worker. The obsequious benevolence of the authorities is caused, as well as careerism, by a bad conscience : local leaders eagerly seize the opportunity to emerge from their isolation by granting privileges to a labor aristocracy. The result is that the real wages of Stakhanovites are often twenty to thirty times higher than those of the lower categories. The salaries of the most favored specialists would in many circumstances be enough to pay eighty to one hundred laborers. In terms of the extent of inequality in the remuneration of labor, the USSR has caught up with and largely surpassed the capitalist countries !

The best of the Stakhanovites, those who are truly inspired by socialist motives, far from rejoicing in their privileges, are dissatisfied with them. This is understandable : the individual enjoyment of various goods, in an atmosphere of general misery, surrounds them with a circle of hostility and envy and poisons their existence. These relations between workers are further removed from socialist morality than those of workers in a capitalist factory united by the common struggle against exploitation.

The fact remains that daily life is not easy for the skilled worker, especially in the provinces. Besides the fact that the seven-hour day is increasingly sacrificed to increasing labor productivity, many hours are taken up by the supplementary struggle for existence. It is pointed out as a particular sign of well-being that the best workers in the sovkhozes—state farms—tractor and combined machine drivers, already forming a distinct aristocracy, have cows and pigs. The theory that socialism without milk was better than milk without socialism is therefore abandoned. It is now recognized that workers in state agricultural enterprises, where there is apparently no shortage of cows and pigs, must, in order to ensure their existence, have their own miniature livestock. The triumphant announcement that 96,000 Kharkov workers have their own vegetable gardens is no less astonishing. Other cities are invited to imitate Kharkov. What a terrible waste of human energy is the "individual cow" and the "individual vegetable garden" and what a burden for the worker, and even more so for his wife and children, the medieval work of shoveling manure and earth !

The vast majority of workers, of course, have neither cows nor vegetable gardens, and often lack shelter. The wage of a laborer is 1,200 to 1,500 rubles a year, sometimes less, which, given Soviet prices, amounts to poverty. Housing conditions, one of the most characteristic indicators of the material and cultural situation, are extremely poor and sometimes intolerable. The vast majority of workers are crammed into communal housing that is much less well-equipped and much less habitable than the barracks. Is this to justify failures in production, work failures, poor workmanship ? The administration, through its journalists, itself gives descriptions of the workers’ housing conditions of this kind : "The workers sleep on the floor, the bedsteads are infested with bedbugs, the chairs are demolished, there is no cup to drink from," etc. "Two families live in a room. The roof has a hole in it. When it rains, they collect water by the bucketful." "The toilets are indescribable..." Details of this kind, which apply to the entire country, could be cited endlessly. As a result of the intolerable living conditions, "the fluidity of personnel," writes, for example, the head of the oil industry, "reaches very large proportions... Many wells are not exploited for lack of manpower..." In certain disadvantaged regions, only workers dismissed elsewhere for indiscipline agree to work. Thus, a category of wretched people deprived of all rights is formed in the lower reaches of the proletariat, Soviet pariahs whom a branch of industry as important as oil is obliged to employ extensively.

As a result of the glaring inequalities in the wage system, further aggravated by arbitrarily created privileges, the bureaucracy succeeded in creating very bitter antagonisms within the proletariat. Recent press reports painted the picture of a civil war in miniature. "Sabotage of machines is the preferred(!) means of combating the Stakhanov movement," wrote the trade union organ, for example. "The class struggle" is evoked at every step. In this "class" struggle, the workers are on one side, the trade unions on the other. Stalin publicly recommends "beating up" the resistance fighters. Other members of the Central Committee repeatedly threaten "the impudent enemies" with total annihilation. The experience of the Stakhanov movement powerfully highlights the gulf that separates power and the proletariat and the unbridled obstinacy of the bureaucracy in applying the rule : "Divide and rule." On the other hand, piecework, thus imposed, becomes, to console the worker, "socialist emulation." These words alone are a mockery.

Emulation, whose roots lie in biology, undoubtedly remains under communism – cleansed of the spirit of profit, envy, and privilege – the most important driving force of civilization. But in a more immediate, preparatory phase, the real strengthening of socialist society can and must take place not according to the humiliating methods of backward capitalism to which the Soviet government resorts, but by means more worthy of the liberated man and above all without the bureaucrat’s cudgel. For this cudgel is itself the most odious legacy of the past. It will have to be broken and publicly burned so that it will be possible to speak of socialism without the blush of shame rising to your forehead !

Source : https://www.marxists.org/francais/trotsky/livres/revtrahie/frodcp6.htm

August 1940

Leon Trotsky
Trade Unions in the Age of Imperialist Decline

The integration of trade union organizations into state power

There is one common aspect in the development or, more precisely, in the degeneration of modern trade union organizations throughout the world : their rapprochement and integration with state power.

This process is also characteristic of neutral, social-democratic, communist, and anarchist unions. This fact alone indicates that the tendency to integrate into the state is not inherent in this or that doctrine, but results from the social conditions common to all unions.

Monopolistic capitalism is not based on competition and private initiative, but on central command.

Capitalist cliques, at the head of powerful trusts, unions, banking consortiums, etc., control economic life on the same level as the state power and, at every moment, they resort to the latter’s collaboration. In turn, the unions, in the most important branches of industry, find themselves deprived of the possibility of profiting from the competition between the various enterprises. They must confront a centralized capitalist adversary, intimately linked to the state power. From this follows for the unions, to the extent that they remain on reformist positions - that is, on positions based on adaptation to private property - the necessity to adapt to the capitalist state and to attempt to cooperate with it.

In the eyes of the trade union bureaucracy, the essential task is to "liberate" the state from capitalist control by weakening its dependence on the trusts and attracting it to itself. This attitude is in complete harmony with the social position of the aristocracy and the labor bureaucracy, who are fighting to obtain a few crumbs from the distribution of the surplus profits of imperialist capitalism.

In their speeches, the labor bureaucrats do their utmost to try to prove to the - democratic - state how trustworthy and indispensable they are in peacetime, and especially in wartime. By transforming the trade unions into state organizations, fascism invents nothing new ; it only pushes all the tendencies inherent in capitalism to their ultimate consequences.

Colonial and semi-colonial countries are not under the domination of indigenous capitalism, but of foreign imperialism. However, this does not eliminate, but rather reinforces, the need for direct, day-to-day, practical links between the capitalist magnates and the colonial and semi-colonial governments that, in fact, depend on them.

To the extent that imperialist capitalism creates in colonial and semi-colonial countries a layer of aristocracy and labor bureaucracy, it seeks the support of these governments as protectors and guardians and sometimes as arbiters.

This constitutes the most important social basis of the Bonapartist and semi-Bonapartist character of governments in the colonies, and in general in "backward" countries. It also constitutes the basis of the dependence of reformist trade unions on the state.

In Mexico, the trade unions have been transformed by law into semi-state institutions and have, as a result, acquired a semi-totalitarian character. The nationalization of the trade unions, according to the legislators’ conception, was introduced in the interests of the workers, with the aim of ensuring their influence in governmental or economic life. But to the extent that foreign imperialist capitalism dominates the national state and it is possible for it to overthrow the unstable democracy and immediately replace it with an open fascist dictatorship, to this extent, the legislation relating to trade unions can easily become a weapon in the hands of the imperialist dictatorship.
Slogans for the independence of the trade unions

From the above, it would seem easy at first glance to conclude that the trade unions are giving up being themselves in the imperialist era, that they leave almost no room for workers’ democracy, which, in the good old days, when free trade dominated the economic arena, constituted the very content of the inner life of workers’ organizations. It might also be argued that in the absence of workers’ democracy, there can be no open struggle to exert influence over the members of the trade unions and that, as a result, the main arena of revolutionary work within the trade unions disappears. Such a position would be fundamentally wrong. We cannot choose the field and conditions of our activity according to our desires or aversions alone. It is infinitely more difficult to struggle to influence the working masses in a totalitarian and semi-totalitarian state than in a democracy. This remark applies equally to the trade unions, whose destiny reflects the evolution of capitalist states. But we cannot renounce working with the workers in Germany simply because the totalitarian regime there makes such work extremely difficult. For the same reason, we cannot renounce the struggle in the compulsory labor organizations created by fascism. A fortiori, we cannot renounce systematic work within the trade unions of a totalitarian or semi-totalitarian regime simply because they are directly or indirectly dependent on the workers’ state or because the bureaucracy deprives revolutionaries of the opportunity to work freely in these unions. It is necessary to conduct the struggle under all those concrete conditions that have been created by the preceding development, including the faults of the working class and the crimes of its leaders.

In fascist and semi-fascist countries, all revolutionary work can only be illegal and clandestine. It is necessary for us to adapt ourselves to the concrete conditions existing in the trade unions of each country in order to mobilize the masses, not only against the bourgeoisie, but also against the totalitarian regime reigning in the trade unions themselves and against the leaders who strengthen this regime.

The essential slogan in this struggle is : complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions from the capitalist state. This means : the struggle to transform the trade unions into organs of the exploited masses and not into organs of a labor aristocracy.

The second slogan is : democracy in the unions.

This second slogan follows directly from the first and presupposes for its realization the complete freedom of the unions vis-à-vis the imperialist or colonial State.

In other words, in the present epoch, trade unions cannot be mere organs of democracy as in the era of free-market capitalism, and they can no longer remain politically neutral, that is, limit themselves to defending the everyday interests of the working class. They can no longer be anarchist, that is, ignore the decisive influence of the State on the lives of peoples and classes.

They cannot remain reformist any longer, because objective conditions no longer permit serious and lasting reforms. The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism to subordinate and discipline the workers and prevent revolution, or, on the contrary, become instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.

The neutrality of trade unions is completely and irremediably a thing of the past and dead with free bourgeois democracy.
Necessity of work in the trade unions

From the above, it is clear that despite the continual degeneration of the trade unions and their gradual integration into the imperialist state, work within the trade unions not only has lost none of its importance, but remains as before, and in a certain sense is even becoming, revolutionary. The issue at stake in this work remains essentially the struggle to influence the working class. Every organization, every party, every faction that takes an ultimatumist position with regard to the trade unions, that is, that in fact turns its back on the working class, simply because its organizations do not please it, is doomed to perish. And it must be said that it deserves its fate.
In backward countries

Since in backward countries the main role is played not by national capitalism but by foreign capitalism, the national bourgeoisie occupies a lower social position than it should be in relation to the development of industry.

To the extent that foreign capital does not import workers but proletarianizes the native population, the national proletariat quickly plays the most important role in the life of the country. Under these conditions, the national government, to the extent that it tries to resist foreign capital, is forced to rely more or less on the proletariat.

On the other hand, the governments of those countries that consider it inevitable and more profitable for themselves to walk hand in hand with foreign capital, destroy workers’ organizations and establish a more or less totalitarian regime.

Thus, the weakness of the national bourgeoisie, the lack of traditions of democratic government, the pressure of foreign imperialism, and the relatively rapid development of the proletariat remove any basis for a stable democratic regime. The governments of backward countries, that is, colonial and semi-colonial ones, generally assume a Bonapartist or semi-Bonapartist character. They differ from each other in that some attempt to orient themselves in a democratic direction by seeking support among the workers and peasants, while others establish a form of military and police dictatorship. This also determines the fate of the trade unions : either they are placed under the tutelage of the state, or they are subjected to cruel persecution. This guardianship corresponds to the two antagonistic tasks that the State must face : either to draw closer to the entire working class and thus gain support to resist the excessive pretensions of imperialism, or to discipline the workers by placing them under the control of a bureaucracy.
Monopolistic capitalism and the unions

Monopolistic capitalism is less and less willing to admit the independence of the trade unions again. It demands that the reformist bureaucracy and the labor aristocracy, which are picking up the crumbs from its table, both be transformed into its political police in the eyes of the working class. If this does not happen, the labor bureaucracy will be abolished and replaced by the fascists. Then all the efforts of the labor aristocracy, in the service of imperialism, will no longer be able to save it from destruction.

At a certain point in the intensification of class contradictions within each country and of antagonisms between nations, imperialist capitalism can no longer tolerate a reformist bureaucracy (at least to a certain extent) unless the latter acts directly as a small but active shareholder in imperialist enterprises, in their plans and programs, both within the country itself and on the world stage. Social reformism must be transformed into social imperialism for the purpose of prolonging its existence and nothing more, for on this road there is generally no way out.

Does this mean that in the imperialist epoch, independent trade unions cannot exist, in general ? To pose the question in this way would be fundamentally wrong. The existence of independent or semi-independent reformist trade unions is impossible. Quite possible is the existence of revolutionary trade unions that not only no longer support the imperialist police, but that set themselves the task of directly overthrowing the capitalist system. In the epoch of decadent imperialism, trade unions can only be truly independent to the extent that they are consciously active organs of the proletarian revolution. In this sense, the transitional program adopted by the last Congress of the Fourth International is not only the program of party activity but, in its essential lines, also the program of trade union activity.
In the colonial and semi-colonial countries

The development of backward countries is of a combined nature. In other words, the latest technology, economics, and imperialist policy are combined in these countries in their traditionally backward and primitive state. This law can be observed in the most diverse spheres of development in colonial or semi-colonial countries, including that of the trade union movement. Capitalism operates here in its most cynical and open form. It transports the most advanced methods of its tyrannical rule onto virgin territory.
In England

Throughout the world trade union movement, a shift to the right and the suppression of internal democracy have been observed in recent times. In England, the minority movement in the trade unions was crushed (not without the intervention of Moscow) ; trade union leaders are today, especially in the field of foreign policy, loyal agents of the Conservative Party.
In France

In France, there was no room for an independent existence of the Stalinist trade unions. They united with the so-called anarcho-syndicalists under the leadership of Jouhaux, and as a result of this unification, there was a general shift in the trade union movement, not to the left, but to the right.

The CGT leadership is the most direct and open agency of French imperialist capitalism.
In the United States

In the United States, the trade union movement has gone through a very turbulent period in recent years. The rise of the CIO highlights the revolutionary tendencies manifesting themselves among the working masses. However, remarkable and highly significant is the fact that the new left-wing trade union organization, barely founded, fell under the control of the imperialist state. The struggle between the leaders of the old federation and those of the new one is reduced to a large extent to a struggle to achieve collaboration with Roosevelt and his cabinet in order to obtain their support.
In Spain

No less significant, although in a different sense, is the development or degeneration of Spanish trade unions.

In the socialist unions, all the leading elements that to some extent represented the independence of the trade union movement were sidelined. As for the anarcho-syndicalist unions, they were transformed into instruments of the republican bourgeoisie.

Their leaders became bourgeois conservative ministers. The fact that this transformation took place during the Civil War does not lessen its significance. War is a continuation of politics. It promotes its developments, exposes its fundamental characteristics, destroys everything that is rotten, false, and ambiguous, and maintains only what is essential. The shift of the trade unions to the right is due to the exacerbation of social and international contradictions. The leaders of the trade union movement felt, understood, or were made to understand, that it was no longer the time to play the opposition. Every opposition movement within the trade union movement, and especially at the top, threatens to provoke a formidable mass movement and thus create difficulties for national imperialism. This motivates the shift of the trade unions to the right and the suppression of workers’ democracy in the unions, the evolution towards the totalitarian regime, a fundamental characteristic of the period.
In Holland

We must also mention the case of Holland, where not only was the reformist trade union movement a prop for imperialism, but the so-called anarcho-syndicalist organization also came under the control of the imperialist government. Despite his platonic sympathies for the Fourth International, Sneevliet, the secretary of the organization, had, as a member of the Dutch parliament, as his primary objective to prevent the government’s wrath from falling on his trade union organization.
In Mexico

The nationalization of railways and oil fields in Mexico obviously has nothing in common with socialism.

This is a measure of state capitalism in a backward country that seeks to defend itself in this way, on the one hand, against foreign imperialism and, on the other, against its own proletariat. The management of railways and oil fields under the control of workers’ organizations has nothing in common with workers’ control over industry, for, ultimately, management is in the hands of the workers’ bureaucracy, which is independent of the workers, but in turn completely dependent on the bourgeois state. This measure on the part of the ruling class is aimed at disciplining the working class and making it work more in the service of the "common interests" of the state, which seem to merge with the interests of the working class itself. In reality, the whole task of the bourgeoisie is to liquidate the trade unions as organs of the class struggle and to replace them with the trade union bureaucracy as the organ of direction of the bourgeois state over the workers. Under these conditions, the task of the revolutionary vanguard is to lead the struggle for the complete independence of the trade unions and for the introduction of genuine workers’ control over the trade union bureaucracy which has been transformed into the administration of the railways, oil companies, etc.
Anarchism

The events of the last period preceding the war revealed with particular clarity that anarchism, which from a theoretical point of view is nothing more than liberalism pushed to the extreme, was in practice nothing more than a propaganda movement operating peacefully within the framework of the democratic republic whose protection it sought.

If we disregard individual terrorist acts, etc., anarchism, as a mass movement and political action, has only carried out propaganda activity under the peaceful protection of legality.

In times of crisis, anarchists have always done the opposite of what they had advocated in calm periods.

This fact was pointed out by Marx in connection with the events of the Paris Commune, and it was reproduced on a much larger scale in the experience of the Spanish revolution.

Democratic trade unions in the old sense of the term, that is, organizations in which different tendencies confront each other more or less freely within the same mass organization, can no longer exist for long.

Just as it is impossible to return to the bourgeois democratic state, it is impossible to return to the old workers’ democracy. The fate of one reflects the fate of the other. It is a certain fact that the independence of the trade unions, in a class sense, in their relationship with the bourgeois state, can be ensured, under present conditions, only by a completely revolutionary leadership, which is the leadership of the Fourth International. This leadership, of course, can and must be rational and ensure for the trade unions the maximum democracy conceivable under present concrete conditions. But without the political leadership of the Fourth International, the independence of the trade unions is impossible.

Source : https://www.marxists.org/francais/trotsky/oeuvres/1940/08/19400800.html

Leon Trotsky
The bureaucracy and the new aristocracy must be expelled from the Soviets.

July 3, 1938

I have received, regarding the slogan which appears at the head of this article, some critical remarks which are of general interest and therefore deserve to be answered not in a personal letter, but in an article [1].

Let us first cite these criticisms.

The demand to "drive out the bureaucracy and the new aristocracy from the Soviets" does not take into account, according to my correspondent, the serious social conflicts that exist within the bureaucracy and the aristocracy, sections of which will pass into the camp of the proletariat, as is stated in another passage of the same thesis (the draft program).

This demand ("drive out... bureaucracy...") establishes a false ("ill-defined") basis for tens of millions of people (including skilled workers) being deprived of the right to vote.

This demand is in contradiction with the part of the program which states that "the democratization of the Soviets is impossible without the legalization of the Soviet parties. The workers and peasants themselves will freely indicate by their votes which parties they recognize as Soviet parties."

"In any case," the letter’s author continues, "there does not seem to be any valid political reason for deciding a priori to deprive entire social groups in today’s Russian society of the right to vote. The deprivation of the right to vote should be based on political acts of violence committed by groups or individuals against the new Soviet power."

Finally, the author of this letter also points out that this is the first time that the slogan of "deprivation of the right to vote" has been put forward, that there has been no discussion on this subject, and that it would be better to refer this question to a thorough examination after the international conference.

These are the reasons and arguments of my correspondent. Unfortunately, I cannot accept them in any way. They express a formal, legal, purely constitutional attitude to a question that must be approached precisely from a revolutionary political point of view. The question is not who the new soviets will deprive of power when they have been definitively established : the task of drawing up the new Soviet constitution can be safely left to the future. The question is how to get rid of the Soviet bureaucracy, which oppresses and robs the workers and peasants, which is leading the October conquests to their ruin, and which constitutes the main obstacle on the road to international revolution. We have long since come to the conclusion that this can be achieved only by the violent overthrow of the bureaucracy, that is, by a new political revolution.

Of course, there are sincere revolutionary elements of the Reiss type within the ranks of the bureaucracy. But they are not numerous and, in any case, they do not determine the political physiognomy of the bureaucracy, which is a centralized Thermidorian caste, crowned by Stalin’s Bonapartist clique. One can be sure that the more determined the workers’ discontent, the more accentuated the differentiation within the bureaucracy will be. But to achieve this goal, we must, on the one hand, theoretically understand, politically mobilize, and organize the hatred of the masses against the bureaucracy as the ruling caste. Genuine soviets of workers and peasants can arise only in the course of the uprising against the bureaucracy. Such soviets will oppose the military-police apparatus of the bureaucracy. How, then, can we admit into the soviets the representatives of the camp against which the uprising is taking place ?
Wrong criteria

My correspondent, as I have already indicated, considers the criteria for designating bureaucracy and aristocracy to be erroneous ("ill-defined") since they lead to the a priori rejection of tens of millions of people. This is precisely where the central error of the author of this letter lies. It is not a question of a "constitutional" determination, applied on the basis of specific legal criteria, but of the true self-determination of the camps in struggle. Soviets can only appear in the course of the decisive struggle. They will be created by those layers of workers who have set themselves in motion. The significance of the Soviets lies precisely in the fact that their composition is not determined by formal criteria, but by the dynamics of the class struggle. Some of the layers of the Soviet "aristocracy" will oscillate between the camp of revolutionary workers and the camp of the bureaucracy. Their entry into the Soviets and its timing will depend on the general development of the struggle and the attitude adopted toward it by the various groups of the Soviet aristocracy. Those elements of the bureaucracy and aristocracy who go over to the side of the rebels during the revolution will certainly find a place in the Soviets. But this time, not as bureaucrats and "aristocrats," but as participants in the rebellion against the bureaucracy.

The demand to "drive the bureaucracy out of the Soviets" can in no way be opposed to the demand to legalize Soviet parties. In reality, these slogans complement each other. At present, the Soviets are only a decorative appendage of the bureaucracy. Only by driving out the bureaucracy—which is unthinkable outside of a revolutionary uprising—can the struggle between different tendencies and parties within the Soviets be regenerated. "The workers and peasants themselves will freely indicate by their votes which parties are Soviet," the thesis goes. But it is precisely for this reason that the bureaucracy must first of all be banished from the Soviets.

It is also wrong to say that this slogan represents something new in the ranks of the Fourth International. It is possible that its formulation is new, but not its content. For a long time, we held the position of reforming the Soviet regime. We hoped that by organizing the pressure of the vanguard elements, the Left Opposition would be able, with the help of the progressive elements in the bureaucracy itself, to reform the Soviet system. We could not avoid this step. But the subsequent course of events has at least refuted the prospect of a peaceful transformation of the party and the soviets. From a position in favor of reform, we passed to the position of revolution, that is, of the overthrow of the bureaucracy by violence. But how can one simultaneously overthrow the bureaucracy by violence and grant it a legal place in the organs of the insurrection ? If we consider the revolutionary tasks facing the Soviet worker and peasant to the end, we must admit that the slogan which serves as the title of this article is correct, self-evident and urgent. Therefore, in my opinion, the international conference should ratify it [2].

Notes

[1] The sentence that appears as the title of Trotsky’s article is taken from the Transitional Program in which he had defined the broad outlines of the "political revolution." Trotsky had received a letter from an American leader who criticized it. This leader, Joseph Friedman, known as Joe Carter (1910-195 ?), had been, as a young man, a leader of the Young Socialists (YPSL) in New York. He had moved to the Young Communist Party (YWL) in 1928 and almost immediately, at the age of 18, to the Left Opposition and had been expelled in December from the American CP. He had then led the Youth Spartacus League and was a member of the national committee of the SWP. He was a permanent opponent of Cannon. Trotsky wanted the discussion he was raising to be brought before all activists.

[2] Trotsky then wrote to Carter : "Dear Comrade Carter, Due to the general character of your letter, I have preferred, in the interest of the matter, to reply to it in an article which I am including for the National Committee. You may publish it in the Internal Bulletin or otherwise, if you deem it necessary" (Letter to Carter, July 4, 1938, 7574, courtesy of the Houghton Library, translated from English).
Source : https://www.marxists.org/francais/trotsky/oeuvres/1938/07/lt19380703.htm
The transition program :

The new upsurge of the revolution in the USSR will undoubtedly begin under the banner of the FIGHT AGAINST SOCIAL INEQUALITY AND POLITICAL OPPRESSION.

Down with the privileges of bureaucracy !

Down with Stakhanovism !

Down with the Soviet aristocracy with its ranks and decorations !

More equality in pay for all forms of work !

The struggle for the freedom of trade unions and factory committees, for freedom of assembly and of the press, will develop into a struggle for the revival and flowering of SOVIET DEMOCRACY.

The bureaucracy has replaced the Soviets as class organs with the fiction of universal suffrage, in the style of Hitler and Goebbels. The Soviets must be restored not only to their free democratic form, but also to their class content. Just as previously the bourgeoisie and the kulaks were not admitted to the Soviets, so now the bureaucracy and the new aristocracy must be expelled from the Soviets. In the Soviets there is room only for representatives of the workers, the collective farm workers, the peasants, and the Red soldiers.

Source : https://www.marxists.org/francais/trotsky/livres/trans/tran17.html
THE PROBLEM OF THE WORKING ARISTOCRACY and the revolutionary movement

an old text from a comrade who had just left Lutte Ouvrière, published by L’Ouvrier

Source : https://www.louvrier.org/sites/default/files/2020-12/P02-LE%20PROBLEME%20DE%20L%27ARISTOCRATIE%20OUVRIERE.pdf

The revolutionary socialist workers’ movement expresses itself in bursts. The working class, unlike previous revolutionary social classes, cannot develop its solutions within the framework of existing society. Its attempts can only take a seemingly ephemeral form. But in reality, each phase, each rise of its movement, enriches it and prepares its future.

This movement had one of its first forms in the 1830s in England, with the Chartist movement. It continued with the workers’ uprising of 1848 in Paris, which was bloodily suppressed. It revived brilliantly under the Paris Commune, taking the step to exercise power. And this time, it confirmed this on the scale of a significant fraction of the world’s population, with the Russian Revolution in 1917.

From each of these events to the one that will surpass it, time stretches : 23 years from 1848 to 1871, 46 years thereafter until 1917. And 80 years since, without having gone beyond the point reached by this revolution. Things seem to happen as if bourgeois society had each time found the means to recover and had taken advantage of the decline of the workers’ movement to consolidate its domination.

Until the Paris Commune, and during the decade that followed, it was through violence, repression, prohibitions of all kinds, and obstacles to workers’ organization that the bourgeois world gave itself a period of social tranquility. From this period, which is also that of the lives of Marx and Engels, we have a considerable capital left. The workers’ movement learned in particular to organize itself despite repression.

In wealthy countries, against socialist activists, the bourgeoisie has put off repression for bourgeoisization.

But things began to change in the final years of the 19th century in the major capitalist countries. In France, the right to unionize was recognized in 1884. In Germany, the anti-worker emergency laws were lifted in 1890. A new policy was clearly being implemented. The European bourgeoisie decided to calm things down with its proletariat.

Repression does not disappear completely, but it fades into the background : it will now be an alternative solution, when the new policy is no longer sufficient. This new policy consists of agreeing to negotiate, to bargain for certain improvements, thus constituting a relatively privileged layer in the working class, and attempting to select and favor a category of activists corresponding to this policy.

This policy will be a complete success in 1914. The bourgeoisie will not even have to raise its voice : it will be enough for war to be declared for us to immediately see in each country the majority of workers’ organizations go over with arms and baggage to its side, offer their services, and betray their entire past. After such a victory, all the capitalist countries that have the means, all the large or small rich countries, will definitively decide to use this path to control their workers’ movement. It is this policy which is the means by which our current bourgeoisies continue to maintain their order and their society.

Activists of other generations essentially had to learn to fight against repression. Today, we are still under police surveillance, but rather rare are the cases in France, England, and Germany where activists, and especially rank-and-file workers, can see the state and its repression as abusive and unjust arbitrariness, as means of hindering legitimate workers’ action.

Even rarer are the cases where the repressive action of the bourgeois State leads other workers to react, and incites some of them to engage in militant action, to take over from those who are imprisoned, persecuted or dead, forging generation after generation of less naive, more realistic militants, trained at the level where the reality of the State apparatus is situated.

We live in one of those rich countries, and we must preserve the legacy that cost previous generations dearly in terms of the ability to campaign in times of repression. But we must add to that the ability to navigate this situation where the bourgeoisie no longer needs to resort to repression. It is the existence of a well-fed, conservative, well-living working class, willing to believe in a reasonable future in this society, that replaces repression in a particularly effective way.

THE FIRST POLICY TOWARDS THE WORKING CLASS : TO LOWER THEM ALL TO THE ROCK-BOTTOM

Long before France or Germany, it was England that first chose a policy of pampering its working class, or at least a part of it, rather than making war on it. However, England took this step so early and with such an advance that for a long time this policy was considered exceptional, including by Marx and Engels.

It was in England that the Industrial Revolution began, and it was in England that the modern working class, the industrial worker, was born. For several decades, the exploitation of the worker was carried out solely through the most open violence.

The factory was then a veritable penal colony, where boss and foreman were jailers, inflicting fines and humiliations at every turn, whipping children who were exhausted, and abusing girls and women. People worked there until they were exhausted.

Working conditions are appalling. The atmosphere in the factories is unhealthy : hot, humid, and saturated with dust from scrap metal, cotton, or linen. Repeated movements for 14 hours at a time deform the limbs and the body. Serious accidents are frequent.

The factory spared no one. On the contrary, English bosses played to the fullest on the competition between men and women, between adults and children. Around 1845, children aged 5, 8, or 9 were putting in 14- to 16-hour days. Nearly half of factory workers were under 18, and just over half were women.

The worker is nothing, owns nothing, lives on his wages day by day. The only foodstuffs available to working-class families are potatoes, half-rotten meat, and adulterated goods (flour mixed with chalk, cocoa mixed with brown earth). Engels recounts in The Condition of the Working Class in England that among the lowest-paid workers in London, "for lack of other food, they consume potato peelings, vegetable waste, and rotting vegetation, and they eagerly pick up anything that might contain even an atom of edible product."

Workers’ housing was unsanitary, open to the elements, without a chair or bed, and contemporary witnesses compared it to pigstyes. In 1837, typhus ravaged London. The average lifespan of workers was significantly reduced over the course of half a century. The 1842 report on sanitary conditions established that in Liverpool, the average lifespan for manual workers and day laborers was only 15 years (compared to 35 years for the so-called upper classes). In Manchester, 57% of workers’ children died before the age of 5 (compared to 20% for the upper classes).

Few workers are fit for military service. "The workers," says a doctor in charge of examining the recruits, "are small, weak, and physically unsound. Many, moreover, have deformities of the rib cage or spine."

This terrible condition is made without any distinction, towards all workers.

The idea of ​​separating, of trying to divide workers among themselves, simply does not exist. If differences exist, they are due to chance, to the laws of capitalist competition, and in no way to a desire of the bourgeoisie to bring out any difference in treatment.

These differences are temporary. In the minds of workers, they do not appear in any way as a privilege, and they do not encourage those who experience a slightly less terrible fate for a few weeks or months to consider themselves differently from the working masses.

Here is what Engels says about it : "The working class of the big cities thus presents us with a spectrum of different modes of existence - in the most favorable case a momentarily tolerable existence : for hard work good pay, good housing and not exactly bad food - from the worker’s point of view, of course, all this is good and tolerable - at the worst, a cruel misery which can go as far as being without fire or home and dying of hunger ; but the average is much closer to the worst than to the best of these two cases. And
let us not think that this spectrum of workers simply comprises fixed categories which would allow us to say : this section of the working class lives well, that one badly, this is and always will be so ; quite the contrary ; if this is still sometimes the case, if certain isolated sectors still enjoy a certain advantage over others, the situation of the workers in each branch is so unstable, that any worker can be led to traverse all the steps of the scale, from relative comfort to extreme want, or even be in danger of dying of hunger ; and besides, there is no English proletarian who does not have much to say about his considerable reversals of fortune."

It is unity in misery, or in the permanent risk of misery. In these conditions, no working class can reasonably hope to escape.

If the bourgeoisie has a policy of division, it is only to exert downward pressure on wages and living conditions. It can impose the most terrible fate on immigrants, such as Irish workers. "The Irishman," wrote Engels, "is not
accustomed to furniture ; a pile of straw, a few rags absolutely useless as clothing, and that’s it for his bed. A piece of wood, a broken chair, an old crate for a table, he doesn’t need more ; a teapot, a few earthenware pots and bowls, and that’s enough for his kitchen, which serves at the same time as bedroom and living room. (...) And besides, why would he need space ? In his country, in his mud hut, a single room was enough for all domestic purposes : in England, the family does not need more than one room either. Thus this cramming of several people into a single room, now so widespread, was introduced mainly by Irish immigration." (...)

"It is against such a competitor that the English worker has to fight," says Engels, "against a competitor occupying the lowest rung of the ladder that can exist in a civilized country and who, precisely for this reason, is content with a lower wage than that of any other worker."

THE WORK OF MILLIONS OF COLONIZED PEOPLE, A COMPLEMENT TO THE EXPLOITATION OF WORKERS

In a manner that is entirely complementary to the frenzied exploitation of workers, young English capitalism practices modern colonization on a large scale before anyone else.

Its main field of action is India.

India had been the object of covetousness of France and England in the 17th century.

This competition was embodied by the rivalry between two companies, the French East India Company and the English East India Company, each supported by its national state. This economic war was won by England and sanctioned by the Treaty of Paris in 1763. France retained only a few trading posts, including Pondicherry and Chandernagore.

From then on, the whole of India saw the arrival of the English. But France did not give up. Around 1800, England had to fight two difficult wars against the
Maratha population, whose army was led by the French. Through a series of wars, England systematically added annexations to annexations over decades. In 1843, the Sindh region, and in 1849, the Punjab, were finally won, again against Indian armies equipped with French equipment.

In the regions that had become English, mutinies broke out regularly. In 1857, a revolt broke out among the Sepoys, who were native soldiers incorporated into the English troops. The revolt spread to the civilian population. It was bloodily suppressed. In 1858, England installed a viceroy in India itself.

At first, England was content to buy silks and cottons made in India by a large workforce that could make a living from them. But the development of cotton spinning and weaving mills in Manchester pushed it to make India a huge source of cotton. England competed with the colonial population by copying its products with its ultramodern machines. Indian weavers then had to lower prices to compete, and ended up ruined, returning to the land. They no longer had any freedom and were forced to produce cotton, only cotton, and not the traditional food crops from which they could live, through local consumption or exchange.

When the American Civil War broke out in the United States and dried up the American cotton supply, the development of cotton in India to the detriment of all other production became a real madness. In 1866, rice cultivation was restricted to such an extent that a surge in prices was enough to cause a famine. The Orissa sector alone in Bengal saw more than a million deaths. By 1870, cotton goods represented nearly half of English exports, and English capitalism was flourishing.

As soon as it began to verify the interest of colonial exploitation as a complement to the industry of the metropolis, England launched into a systematic hunt for new colonies. It took control of Australia from 1851, Lower Burma in 1852, Natal in 1856, Canada in 1867, the Gold Coast in 1871, New Zealand in 1875, the Transvaal in 1877, Egypt in 1882, in Africa wherever it could (Sudan, New Guinea, Rhodesia) from the 1880s, in Upper Burma in 1886.

Cecil Rhodes, the English businessman and colonial administrator, who would give his name to the state of Rhodesia, declared in 1895, after attending a meeting of the unemployed in London : "I was yesterday in the East End, and I attended a meeting of the unemployed. I heard frenzied speeches there. It was only one cry : Bread ! Bread ! Reliving the whole scene on my way home, I felt even more convinced than before of the importance of imperialism... The idea that is closest to my heart is the solution of the social problem, namely : to save the 40 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a murderous civil war, we, the colonizers, must conquer new lands in order to settle our surplus population there, to find new markets for the products of our factories and mines. Empire, I have always said, is a question of the belly. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialist."

FROM 1848, THE ENGLISH BOURGEOISIE FAVOURED A FRACTION OF ITS WORKING CLASS : SKILLED WORKERS AND UNIONS

It was in 1848 that signs of a new political attitude toward their working class on the part of English employers appeared. They discovered that slightly less terrible working conditions could improve output, and ultimately allow them to be successful. This is because the quantity of work that a worker can provide is not fixed. It can increase, as has been done until now by constantly lowering wages. But it can also increase, conversely, by wage increases.

It is the companies that are doing best that are the first to make this discovery.

Less crushed workers are better trained at work, workers who are less quickly thrown out onto the street gain experience and can improve their output, and finally, the reasons for absenteeism or strikes will tend to decrease. It is therefore possible to slightly increase the share that goes to the worker, while also increasing the share that goes to the capitalist.
This improvement in the lot of the worker is only likely to achieve its result because the general condition is and remains at its lowest. In the competition between bosses, only the most powerful can afford to use this policy, because it requires an investment, in improved wages, but also in less dangerous and more efficient machines.

English historian Hobsbawm explains that in 1840s England : "Employers gradually abandoned ’extensive’ methods of exploitation (longer working hours and lower wages in particular) in favor of ’intensive’ methods that meant the opposite. The 10-hour law of 1847 made this a necessity in the cotton industry, but we find the same trend throughout the industrial North without any legislative pressure. What continentals were to call ’the English week’, the ’weekend’ (which began on Saturday at noon) spread to Lancashire in the 1840s and to London during the following decade. Performance-based pay (bonuses for workers) certainly gained ground, while contracts often became shorter and more flexible. (...) Extra-economic constraints diminished : employers accepted more readily the legal supervision of working conditions - carried out by the admirable factory inspectors. These phenomena were less due to the rationality or political pressure than to an easing of tensions. British industrialists now felt wealthy and confident enough to support these changes. It has been reported that employers who, in the 1850s and 1860s, had advocated a policy of relatively high wages, ran successful, long-established companies that were not threatened with bankruptcy by market fluctuations." (Economic and Social History of England)

After several decades of this policy, a division of the working class has indeed taken place. According to Hobsbawm, around the 1880s and 1890s : "The first serious social surveys conducted at the end of the century (...)," he says, "showed that nearly 40% of the working class lived in what was then called "poverty" or worse, that is, on a family income of 18 to 21 shillings ; two-thirds of these unfortunate people, at some time in their lives - usually in their old age - became downright paupers. At the other end of the working class, at most 15% lived in what was considered comfort, on incomes of 2 pounds or more. In other words, the Victorian and Edwardian working class was divided between a skilled aristocracy who normally played the winning game in the labor market - that is, they relied on their scarcity to demand higher wages - the unskilled or unorganized mass who did not could only demand subsistence or near-subsistence wages from his employers." (...) "Plenty of food, clothes modeled on those of the middle class, when the rent allowed, a clean living room with cheap furnishings which, if neither luxurious nor beautiful in themselves, are the symbol of respectable affluence and the sign of a better future, a newspaper, a club, the occasional vacation, perhaps a musical instrument."

"This is how a well-informed observer described their condition in the mid-1880s. He was not, of course, talking about the bottom 40% of workers, those who could not sell their rarity."

In 1892, Engels analyzed the choices made by the English bourgeoisie to favor a section of the working class. "There is no lasting improvement in the standard of living except in two protected sectors of the working class. First, that of factory workers. The legal fixing of a normal working day to their advantage, on at least relatively rational bases, has enabled them to restore their physical constitution to a more or less degree, and has given them a moral superiority further reinforced by their local concentration. Their situation is, without a doubt, better than before 1848." (...) "Secondly, the workers of the large trade unions. (...) Their situation has undoubtedly improved remarkably since 1848. The best proof of this is that for more than 15 years, it is not only their employers who are satisfied with them, but they themselves who are also very satisfied with their employers. They constitute an aristocracy within the working class ; they have succeeded in conquering a relatively comfortable situation and this situation they accept as definitive. They are the model workers of Messrs. Leone Levi and Giffen, (...) and in fact they are very kind and by no means intractable to a reasonable capitalist in particular and to the capitalist class in general."

The English bourgeoisie therefore had a specific policy in deciding to redistribute a share of its profits and surplus profits from the exploitation of the colonies. It chose to favor skilled workers over unskilled workers, unionized workers (in large unions) over non-unionized workers.

The working class aristocracy defends its own interests and imposes its mentality and policies on other workers.

It was "the entire market for consumer goods for the poor that was transformed by the development of stores (...) and industrial production specifically aimed at the working class. A category of privileged workers had created, especially in the North, their own distribution network in the 1870s ; these Co-ops developed modestly at first - in 1880 they had only half a million members - but much more rapidly thereafter : in 1914, they had 3 million members. (...) Even more significant, (...) was the rise of clothing and shoe stores, (...) which expanded in the 1860s." In the 1890s, bicycles and sewing machines became accessible to some working-class households. Leisure activities too : with variety halls and sports (football). (Hobsbawm)

This shift within the working class was accompanied by a corresponding shift in ideas. The section of the working class that lived directly from the bourgeoisie’s interest in business abandoned the socialist point of view of hoping for social overthrow. It began to think, and then to act, in a manner quite different from that of the English working class of the 1830s and 1840s.

Although the labor aristocracy is numerically a minority, each of its members, through their position in the social organization, in the factory, in the city, holds a position that easily allows them to impose themselves on other workers. The tone is set by this new,
right-thinking, conservative layer. The union activist has more freedom of speech than the others, the skilled worker is viewed with complexity and distance by the unskilled worker.

Once reassured to see this new working class defending a vision of things compatible with its interests, the English bourgeoisie decided to take the step of giving the working class the right to vote, a right which it had refused for ten years, during the period of the Chartist struggles.

According to Hobsbawm, "The Reform Act of 1867 established an electoral system dependent on the votes of the working class. (...) Britain’s leaders did not welcome reform. Although their readiness to concede in 1867 contrasted sharply with their overall mobilization against Chartism in 1839, 1842, and 1848, without popular protest they would not have conceded so much. However, if they resigned themselves to it, it was because in their eyes the working class was no longer threatening, since it was now divided into a politically moderate aristocracy of labor, willing to rally to capitalism, and a politically ineffective proletarian plebs, who, without organization and leader, posed no major danger. The great mass movements which, like Chartism, pitted the entire working class against the employers, were dead. Socialism had disappeared from the country where it had been born."

MARX AND ENGELS OBSERVE THE ENGLISH LABOUR ARISTOCRACY AS A SPECIAL CASE

Marx and Engels were contemporaries of this emergence of a labor aristocracy in England. In a letter to Marx dated October 7, 1858, Engels wrote : "In reality, the English proletariat is becoming more and more bourgeois, and it seems that this most bourgeois nation of all nations wants to arrive at the point of having, alongside its bourgeoisie, a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat. Obviously, on the part of a nation which exploits the whole world, this is logical to a certain extent."

Marx does not mince his words when speaking of the English labor aristocracy. He says how this prosperity "demoralizes the workers," how it will take a longer or shorter time "for the English workers to rid themselves of their apparent bourgeois contamination," how "because of England’s monopoly, and as long as this monopoly remains, there will be nothing to be done with the English workers." In 1872, he declared that "the leaders of the English labor movement were sold out to the bourgeoisie," which earned him a reprimand from the International.

Engels, in a letter to Marx dated 8 August 1881, alludes to "the worst English trade unions which allow themselves to be run by men whom the bourgeoisie has bought or at least maintains." (quoted by Lenin in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, p. 129)

But the trade union bureaucracy is not the only one to blame. In a letter to Kautsky (December 12, 1882), Engels wrote : "You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. The same as what they think about politics in general. Here, there is no workers’ party ; there are only conservative and liberal radicals ; as for the workers, they enjoy in complete peace with them England’s colonial monopoly and its monopoly on the world market."

In a letter to Marx’s daughter on 7 December 1889, Engels attacked the English workers’ leaders who had become quite respectable : "I am not at all sure, for example, that John Burns is not more proud, in his heart of hearts, of his popularity with Cardinal Manning, the Lord Mayor, and in general, with the bourgeoisie than that which he enjoys in his own class. (...) And even Tom Mann, whom I judge the best of them, likes to say that he will have lunch with the Lord Mayor."

In the memoirs of Hyndman, another respectable labor leader, we find the following anecdote : a bourgeois woman once said to him about his efforts to educate socialist labor leaders : "You educate them, and we will buy them."

"Nothing to do with the English workers." This is Marx’s position. The problem of the labor aristocracy then only arises in the English case. At the time, the working class in the rest of Europe had not yet experienced this transformation. On the contrary, in many countries, it still had its true constitution before it.

Marx and Engels trust the revolution. They do not imagine that it will be postponed again, to the point that the English problem will become a general and unavoidable problem.

CAPITALIST COMPETITION AND THE GENERALIZATION OF COLONIAL POLICY

If Western Europe found itself playing the role of civilizer bringing its so-called benefits to backward colonies, it was not by God’s will, as white Europeans claimed. Even before the development of capitalism, 15th- and 16th-century Europe had sent its soldiers and missionaries, followed by merchants and civil servants, to the four corners of the planet. The Europeans’ superiority was solely military.

Many aspects of conquered civilizations are destroyed, annihilated without the whites even realizing what they are destroying. It will take centuries, once the anger that accompanies this conquest has somewhat subsided, for clear-sighted minds to seek out the riches brought to humanity by these annihilated or debased peoples.

Meanwhile, Africa, Asia, and the Americas know only land theft, killings, exploitation through violence, disregard for compulsory conversion to Christianity, or death inflicted as if on hunted animals.

At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, this first colonization, military and purely rapine, seemed to begin to recede. During the French Revolution, Central and South America gained independence and forced the Spanish and Portuguese colonists, as well as the English and French, to re-embark.

Then capitalist colonization, copying the methods inaugurated by the English in India, takes over. It is no longer only to make the trade of precious metals and luxury goods work that the bourgeoisie plunders and exploits. It is to keep large-scale industry going and expand, to procure the necessary raw materials, to open up new markets, to try to export capital that no longer finds sufficient interest in investing in the metropolis.

From 1880 onwards, colonial expansion took off at a rapid pace. Within thirty years, the European powers had literally divided up the world. So much so that by 1914, there was nothing left to share. All that could be done was re-division... and this was the challenge of the First World War.

France then occupies a good second place behind the English number one. It reigns supreme over an empire of 11 million km2, twenty times the surface area of ​​mainland France, and which includes 55 million inhabitants.

In France too, progress in the working class went hand in hand with colonial expansion and enabled the purchase of social peace : 1874 : reduction of working hours for women, creation of the Labor Inspectorate ; conquest of Tunisia. 1884 : Waldeck-Rousseau law granting freedom to create unions ; beginning of the conquest of Indochina.

1892 : Working hours for women and children reduced to 11 hours ; French protectorate over Madagascar. 1899 : State recognition of union delegates ; end of revolts in Indochina, and of the dismemberment of Africa. 1900 : Law limiting working hours to 10 hours per day ; end of the conquest of Madagascar. 1906 : Weekly rest legalized ; development of Michelin (rubber) in Indochina, Lesieur (oil) in Senegal, Boussac (cotton) in Chad. 1910 : First law on workers’ and farmers’ pensions.

As in England, this policy will in reality lead not to a general improvement but to a division of the working class. The labor aristocracy is now a phenomenon general to the imperialist countries, and no longer just the particular case of England. Lenin wrote in 1916 : "The period of imperialism is that of the division of the world among the great privileged nations which oppress all the others. Crumbs of the spoils resulting from these privileges and this oppression undoubtedly fall to certain layers of the petty bourgeoisie, as well as to the aristocracy and bureaucracy of the working class."

THE LABOUR ARISTOCRACY AND GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

The German Social Democratic Party has gone furthest and most consistently down the road to developing reformist ideas. This tendency began to emerge relatively firmly in 1890, when the German bourgeoisie abandoned its strictly repressive policy and allowed it a legal existence. Bernstein became the theoretician of the opportunist tendency.

Rosa Luxemburg was almost alone in opposing revisionist theories. Lenin retained great respect for Bebel and Kautsky, until the moment when, in August 1914, he read the copy of Vorwaerts, the German Party newspaper, which announced support for the bourgeoisie in the war that had just been declared. At the time, Lenin believed it to be a fake concocted by the German general staff.

He wrote to Shlyapnikov (October 27, 1914) : "I hate and detest Kautsky more than all others : what disgusting, petty hypocrisy and self-importance... Rosa Luxemburg was right, she who understood long ago that Kautsky was only a
servile theoretician, or to put it simply, a lackey of the party majority, of opportunism."

Rosa denounces opportunism as a bourgeois tendency in the workers’ movement, but she does not question the root of the evil : the development of the party in privileged social strata, petty bourgeois and worker aristocrats.

The German party allowed the two currents that combine to form the labor aristocracy to develop within it : the favored workers and the union bureaucracy. Renowned for its strong presence, the party is completely absent among immigrants, particularly Polish immigrants from the Ruhr and Upper Silesia (3 million), and it is less established in backward and poorer regions.

In fact, workers who benefit from the legal protections that union rights now provide are beginning to form the backbone of the party. What at one point was the result of years of struggle is becoming a stable situation.

Gradually, the activists are fundamentally changing their mentality. Owing the bourgeoisie for too long a relatively privileged situation compared to the common fate of the working class is rotten.

The successes of the German party add to the trade union bureaucracy, subsidized by the bosses, a petty-bourgeois bureaucracy that lives off the party’s own money : journalists, lawyers, permanent staff, party functionaries, are attached to its existence to the point of no longer being able to imagine themselves in a situation where revolutionary politics could lead to an outright ban.

These are the social bases which explain the collapse of Social Democracy at the declaration of war in August 1914.

LENIN TAKES INTO ACCOUNT THE PROBLEM OF THE WORKERS’ ARISTOCRACY IN THE IMPERIALIST ERA

It was up to Lenin to note and understand the nature of the problem of the working-class aristocracy, now present in all the colonial capitalist countries.

Lenin establishes a general link between the formation of a workers’ aristocracy and the colonial exploitation carried out by certain countries : the colonial policy pursued on a large scale has partly led the European proletariat to a situation where it is not from its labor that society as a whole lives, but from the labor of colonial natives practically reduced to slavery. The English bourgeoisie, for example, derives more profit from tens and hundreds of millions of inhabitants of India and its other colonies than from English workers.

From these conditions are created the material and economic bases for the contagion of the proletariat of this or that country by colonial chauvinism. This may, of course, be only a passing phenomenon, but it is nonetheless necessary to become aware of the evil,
to understand its causes, in order to be able to unite the proletariat of all countries to fight against this kind of opportunism." (Excerpt from the International Socialist Congress of Stuttgart, September 1907)

In 1907, Lenin spoke of a "perhaps temporary" phenomenon. His point of view became more clear-cut after 1914. In 1916, he returned to the work of Marx and Engels : "Marx and Engels did not live to see imperialism. At present, a system has formed comprising a handful (5 or 6) of "great" imperialist powers, each of which oppresses foreign nations, and this oppression is one of the factors artificially delaying the fall of capitalism, artificially maintaining opportunism and social-chauvinism in the imperialist nations that are masters of the world." ("Results of a Discussion on the Law of Nations", July 1916)

He later clarifies : "Neither Marx nor Engels lived to see the imperialist era of world capitalism, the beginning of which does not go back beyond 1898-1900.

But England, from the middle of the 19th century onwards, had this peculiarity in that at least two fundamental distinctive features of imperialism were united there : 1) immense colonies and 2) monopoly profits (due to its monopoly position on the world market). In both respects, England was then an exception among capitalist countries. And Engels and Marx, analyzing this exception, showed in a particularly clear and precise way its connection with the (temporary) victory of opportunism in the English workers’ movement."
("Imperialism and the Split in Socialism", October 1916)

The problem of the labor aristocracy, brutally revealed by the collapse of Social Democracy in 1914, dates back several decades. Rallying to bourgeois positions, says Lenin, "consists in sacrificing the fundamental interests of the mass of men to the temporary interests of a tiny minority of them, or, in other words, the alliance of a section of the workers with the bourgeoisie against the mass of the proletariat. The war makes this alliance particularly obvious and forced. Opportunism was engendered for decades by the peculiarities of the epoch of capitalist development, when the relatively peaceful and comfortable existence of a layer of privileged workers made them bourgeois, gave them scraps of the profits of national capital, spared them distress and suffering, and turned them away from the revolutionary tendencies of the masses doomed to ruin and misery." (...)

"To safeguard and consolidate their privileged position as the "upper stratum" of the petty bourgeoisie or aristocracy (and bureaucracy) of the working class—such is the natural wartime extension of petty-bourgeois opportunist hopes and corresponding tactics—such is the economic basis of today’s social-imperialism. And of course, the force of habit, the routine of relatively "peaceful" development, national prejudices, fear of sudden changes and disbelief in them—all this has played the role of complementary circumstances that have strengthened opportunism as well as hypocritical and cowardly conciliation with it, supposedly for a time only, supposedly only for special causes and motives. The war has changed the aspect of opportunism that had been cultivated for decades. It has carried it to a higher degree, increased the number and variety of its shades, multiplied the ranks of its adherents, enriched their argumentation of a host of new sophisms*". (*false arguments despite appearances).

"The economic basis of opportunism is the same as that of social-chauvinism, the interests of a thin layer of privileged workers and the petty bourgeoisie, who defend their privileged position, their right to the crumbs of the profits made in the plunder of other nations by "their" national bourgeoisie thanks to the advantages attached to its position as a great power."

If until 1914 the workers’ movement had been able to contain within itself both truly socialist elements and reformist elements, in reality in the process of being corrupted by the bourgeoisie, with the war the separation reached full maturity. Lenin makes a clear distinction between the two periods : "Opportunism, to speak on a European scale, was, so to speak, in a juvenile state before the war. Once the war had broken out, it became adult and its "innocence" and youth could not be restored. We saw the maturation of a whole social layer of parliamentarians, journalists, functionaries of the workers’ movement, privileged employees and certain contingents of the proletariat, a layer which was integrated into its national bourgeoisie and which the latter knew perfectly well how to appreciate and "adapt" to its views. It is impossible to turn back or stop the wheel of history."

"The bourgeoisie has engendered and formed in its service "bourgeois workers’ parties" of social-chauvinists in all countries. (...) From the economic point of view, the attachment of the labor aristocracy to the bourgeoisie has reached maturity and is completed ; as for the political form, this economic fact, this change in class relations will find one without too much "difficulty"."

"On the indicated economic basis, the political institutions of modern capitalism - the press, parliament, trade unions, congresses, etc. - have created for reformist and patriotic, respectful and well-behaved workers and employees political privileges and alms corresponding to economic privileges and alms. Lucrative and comfortable sinecures in a ministry or on the war industries committee, in parliament and various commissions, in the editorial offices of "solid" legal newspapers or in the leadership of no less solid and "bourgeois" workers’ unions - this is what the imperialist bourgeoisie uses to attract and reward the representatives and supporters of the "bourgeois workers’ parties"." ("Imperialism and the Split in Socialism", October 1916)

THE EXISTENCE OF THE LABOUR ARISTOCRACY POSES A PROBLEM ON AN INTERNATIONAL SCALE

The division of the working class, in Lenin’s eyes, poses a problem whose consequences play out in all countries, not just in the rich ones. "What matters," he says, "is that in the imperialist epoch, and as a result of objective causes, the proletariat has divided itself into two international camps, one of which is corrupted by the crumbs that fall from the table of the bourgeoisie of the great powers - due in particular to the double and triple exploitation of small nations - while the other cannot liberate itself without liberating the small nations, without educating the masses in an anti-chauvinist, that is, anti-annexationist, that is, favorable to ’self-determination’ spirit." ("Summary of a Discussion on the Law of Nations", July 1916)

"The monopoly of present-day finance capital is fiercely contested ; the epoch of imperialist wars has begun. Formerly, one could bribe and corrupt for decades the working class of an entire (his emphasis) country. Today, this would be improbable, even impossible ; on the other hand, each "great" imperialist power can and does bribe less numerous layers (than in England in the years 1848 to 1868) (Lenin’s emphasis again) of the "labor aristocracy." Formerly, "a bourgeois workers’ party," in Engels’ remarkably profound expression, could only be formed in one country, since it alone held the monopoly, but on the other hand, for a long time. Today, the "bourgeois workers’ party" is inevitable and typical for all imperialist countries ; but, given their fierce struggle for the division of the spoils, it is unlikely that such a party could triumph for for a long time in several countries.

For the trusts, the financial oligarchy, the high cost of living, etc., by allowing the corruption of small groups of the working aristocracy, crush, oppress, stifle and martyrize more and more the mass of the proletariat and the semi-proletariat." ("Imperialism and the Split of Socialism", October 1916)

Here, Lenin uses the expression "mass of the proletariat" to denote the part of the working class that does not include the labor aristocracy. We will use this expression in turn later.

Lenin emphasizes the differences but also the relations between the working classes of oppressed nations and oppressor countries :

"1°) Economically, the difference is that parts of the working class in the oppressor countries benefit from the crumbs of the superprofit that the bourgeoisie of the oppressive nations realize by flaying the workers of the oppressed nations twice rather than once. Furthermore,
economic data attest that the percentage of workers passing into the "mastery" is greater among the workers of the oppressor nations than among those of the oppressed nations, - that a greater percentage of the former rise to the level of the labor aristocracy.

It is a fact that the workers of the oppressive nation are to a certain extent accomplices of "their" bourgeoisie in the latter’s spoliation of the workers (and the mass of the population) of the oppressed nation.

2) Politically, the difference is that the workers of the oppressive nations occupy a privileged position in a whole series of areas of political life, compared to the workers of the oppressed nation.

3°) Ideologically or spiritually, the difference is that the workers of oppressive nations are always educated by school and by life in contempt or disdain for the workers of oppressed nations." ("A Caricature of Marxism", volume 23, August-October 1916)

Lenin also notes the existence of a real physical confrontation between the two fractions of the working class, with the development of immigration : "Among the characteristics of imperialism, we must also mention the decrease in emigration from the imperialist countries and the increase in immigration to these countries of workers from the most backward countries, where wages are lower. Example : in France, industrial workers are largely foreigners : Poles, Italians, Spaniards. In the United States, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe occupy the lowest-paid jobs, while American workers provide the highest proportion of foremen and workers performing the best-paid work."

THE WORKING ARISTOCRACY IN RUSSIA AND UNDER THE REVOLUTION

One might be quick to think that Russia in 1917 didn’t pose this problem, and perhaps that its absence helped the course of events for the Russian Revolution. But Lenin himself is responsible for telling us that this would be a mistake. Certainly, Russia is in many ways dependent on the European capitalist countries, France, England, and Germany. But a history spanning several centuries has also made it an imperial power. If it is not a great power in the capitalist sense of the term, it is nonetheless a great power inherited from the past.

In his conclusion to The Bankruptcy of the Second International, Lenin emphasizes that Russia is a country where "43% of the population oppresses a majority of ’alien’ nations (i.e., of different origin). The ’European’ type of development, where certain layers of the petty bourgeoisie, especially the intellectuals, and an insignificant fraction of the labor aristocracy, can ’enjoy’ the privileges conferred on ’their’ nation by its position as a ’great power’, could not fail to exert its effects in Russia as well."

The Russian Empire was built over 10 centuries, expanding into the Pacific and South Asia. In the 19th century, the Russian state maintained a gigantic administrative and military apparatus to ensure its control over vast regions and diverse populations.

This situation and this past influence mentalities and practices. Russia has experienced to a certain extent the formation of a labor aristocracy, linked to its position as a "great power." An example of this is the railways.

But, he explains, the political separation between the opportunist elements and the revolutionary elements was made, in a way, in advance, voluntarily, and it already had a whole history before 1914 ; "In Russia," he writes, "the complete separation of the revolutionary social-democratic proletarian elements from the petty-bourgeois opportunist elements was prepared by the whole history of the workers’ movement." Economism from 1894 to 1902, Menshevism from 1903 to 1908, the liquidationist current from 1908 to 1914, were manifestations of this.

Since at least 1902, under the influence of Lenin, a regular, systematic struggle has been waged against these currents, so that proletarian revolutionaries can delimit themselves from them and retain leadership in their organizations. And although we are witnessing the collapse of almost the entire Second International, Lenin can rightly conclude his work with this optimistic note : "The working class and the Social Democratic Party of Russia are prepared by their entire history to apply an "internationalist" tactic, that is to say, a genuinely and systematically revolutionary one."

It is therefore not impossible to combat the political influence of the labor aristocracy. The history of the Bolshevik Party also illustrates this struggle.

The Russian labor aristocracy continued to demonstrate its existence even after the revolution. This excerpt from a session of the Petrograd Soviet on March 12, 1919, is evidence of this.

Lenin has the floor :

"Some workers, the printers for example, say : under capitalism it was good. There were many newspapers, whereas there are few now ; I earned a good living, and I don’t want socialism. There were quite a few branches of industry that depended on the wealthy classes or that lived off the production of luxury goods, and quite a few workers in the big cities who under capitalism lived off this kind of production. In the Soviet Republic, we must leave these workers without work for a while. We will tell them : "Take another job, a useful job." To which they will reply : "I had a fine job, I was a jeweler, the work was clean and I worked for well-bred people. Now the muzhiks have arrived, the good people have been driven out ; I am for the return of capitalism."

"These people," Lenin continued, "will preach a return to capitalism or, as the Mensheviks say, a march forward toward healthy capitalism and a healthy democracy. And there will be a few hundred workers who will say that they lived well under "healthy" capitalism. But those for whom capitalism assured a good life formed a tiny minority, while we defend the interests of the majority, who, under capitalism, lived badly.

(Applause). Healthy capitalism has led to universal slaughter in the freest countries. There can be no such thing as healthy capitalism.

And Lenin draws a parallel with previous eras : "Similarly, in the days of serfdom, there were people, peasants, who said to the landowners : ’We are your slaves (and that after their liberation), we will not leave you.’ Were there many of them ? A tiny minority. Can one, on this basis, deny the necessity of the struggle against serfdom ? Of course not. Similarly, today, one cannot refute communism on the pretext that a minority of workers earned a good living working in bourgeois newspapers, in the production of luxury goods, or in the personal service of billionaires."

THE LABOR BUREAUCRACY, THE VISIBLE PART OF THE ICEBERG OF THE LABOR ARISTOCRACY

Today, revolutionary organizations are obviously not unaware of the existence of reformist politics among the working class in rich countries. They blame the parties and unions for this, and rightly analyze their social connection with bourgeois society, their integration into the state, the number of positions, the privileges, the bureaucracy of the apparatuses beyond the control of the workers, etc.

On this important aspect, one can profitably read the brochure of Lutte Ouvrière : "The unions in the imperialist countries : from the class struggle to integration into the State" (Exposés du Cercle Léon Trotsky n°13, June 14, 1985).

Workers’ Struggle evokes the emergence of a "labor aristocracy and even a bureaucracy" from the first union-type organizations, that is, the Unions in England (page 9). But it does not seem that these expressions were understood as Marx or Lenin intended them. Or else, this labor aristocracy mysteriously disappears thereafter. Indeed, as soon as we move on to the German or French examples that follow, Workers’ Struggle speaks only of the union leaders. As if they and their policies could exist without a whole social base. The development of the labor aristocracy, which nevertheless grows and asserts itself, is never described.

This brochure very quickly gives the strange impression that a policy opposed to the interests of the working class could have been developed in the working class, simply because of the will of the bourgeoisie, which actually chose to legalize the trade union movement at the end of the 19th century.

The betrayal of 1914, according to Lutte Ouvrière, is due only to the union leadership :
"This total and general rallying could not be explained if it did not have reasons prior to the war. Bourgeois society and especially its State had made a small place for the unions and suddenly they were no longer its irreducible adversaries, but a component." That these unions take root in a social class whose interests they effectively defend is the idea completely absent.

It would therefore be enough for the bourgeoisie to want to bribe workers’ organizations in order to succeed. This is obviously a false vision. And fundamentally foreign to Marxism. The bourgeoisie, which is more Marxist than that, has in reality understood that it had to modify the very composition of society, to fragment the working class, to constitute within it a whole privileged social layer, a layer which is today comparable to the "mass" of the working class in a certain number of decisive countries.

Applied to recent times, this analysis yields even more derisory results. Thus, we can read in the same brochure (page 35) that in post-Franco Spain in the 1970s, "the Spanish bourgeoisie immediately found, within the
workers’ organizations, men who were also capable of aligning themselves with their European counterparts, transforming themselves into worker bureaucrats, more linked to the interests of the bourgeoisie and its State than to those of the workers."

Why and how does a policy contrary to the interests of the entire working class become dominant ? A mystery, and a rather desperate mystery ! "Yet," the pamphlet tells us by way of consolation, "there were active trade union activists within the working class. These were, of course, Communist Party activists, whose only perspective was a reformist one. But to be a trade union activist under the Franco dictatorship, one had to be a real activist, accepting the risks that this activity entailed, an activist devoted to one’s class."

Devoted to the working masses, or devoted to the working aristocracy ? That’s the whole problem. In reality, the Franco dictatorship left no more choice to the militants of the working aristocracy than to the others, and that is certainly no reason to praise them as Lutte Ouvrière does here without distinction.
Basically, it is the old policy of the bourgeoisie towards the working class which consisted of corrupting some of its leaders, to also infiltrate its own men. The bourgeoisie then had an individualist vision of things. But since 1848 in England, and the end of the 1880s in the rest of Europe, it has given way to a social management of the problem.

Continuing today to see only the individual aspect—which obviously exists—is tragic. This seems to indicate that all it would take is a surge of the working class to get rid of its corrupt leaders. But this is no longer true.

As long as the labor aristocracy was not developed, and did not influence the whole of a national working class, a movement of the working class could indeed be sufficient to rid it of undesirable leaders, of parasites of all kinds, and it could give itself honest leaders in the heat of the moment. This is what we observe in the Chartist movement, before 1848.

But today we no longer have the right to rely on this spontaneity alone, when an entire layer of society, at the heart of the working class, has become its main watchdog.

The revolutionary leader Barta analyzes the difference between reformism and revolution quite differently : "However, reformism and revolution do not express two different methods for achieving the same goal, but the irreconcilable opposition between the class interests of the millions of exploited and oppressed, and the interests of a relatively well-paid working-class minority with a profoundly bourgeois mentality. Holding a large number of responsible positions in workers’ organizations or in the bourgeois administration (unions, political parties, town halls, seats in parliament, etc.), this layer usually dominates workers’ action, preventing it, breaking it when it threatens to overturn the system that allows them to rise above their class : this is how in June 1936 the labor aristocracy, represented by the union and political bureaucracy, managed to stop the rise of the millions of the most exploited workers. Reformism, by striving to safeguard the interests of the aristocracy worker raised above the masses, therefore defends the bourgeois order (which in turn engenders fascism)". (The Class Struggle, organ of
the Communist Union No. 41, December 24, 1944)

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE WORKING ARISTOCRACY IN FRANCE TODAY

Here we will call the "working mass" the part of the working class that is not the labor aristocracy. And we will keep "working class" for the entire working class, including the labor aristocracy. The working class therefore includes, according to this way of speaking, a working mass and a labor aristocracy.

Can we quantify the working masses and the working aristocracy in France today ?

Official statistics make this task complex. Official figures don’t even allow for a simple measurement of the working class. For example, hospital nursing assistants, who are at the bottom of the hospital ladder, are not classified with manual workers, but under a heading called "intermediate health and social work professionals," and this heading "intermediate professionals" includes technicians, foremen, and supervisors.

That said, we can try to find our way around using INSEE data, by socio-professional category. The employed active population is 22.12 million people in France (1995 figures).

Let’s start by setting aside the petty bourgeoisie, and if in doubt, the categories that the working class does not physically encounter, even if it could influence them morally in the event of struggles. There are 1.67 million artisans, merchants, business leaders, and exploiting farmers. There are also 2.87 million managers and higher intellectual professions, 0.75 million teachers. If in doubt, we also include commercial employees (0.78 million). There are also 0.44 million military and police officers. This makes a truly generous 6.51 million petty bourgeois or close to it.

Let us now try to define the working-class aristocracy. Still counting broadly, we count :

technicians, foremen and supervisors : 1.43 million (average monthly income of a household in this category in 1984, 13,000F) ;

intermediate professions in businesses and the civil service : 1.61 million (roughly the same income for 1984, 13,000F) ;

intermediate administrative professions in health and social sector (income 11,000F) : 0.85 million ;

administrative employees of companies (income 9,400F) : 1.96 million ;

civil service employees (income 9,000F) : 1.93 million ;

drivers : 0.56 million.

We have here a total of 8.34 million people. But in Social Security, on the railways, in the post office, many people work whose condition is closer to that of the worker than to the working-class aristocrat, even if they benefit from one advantage or another as a civil servant or similar (see the example of the railway worker in the appendix). We can more or less arbitrarily estimate the number of those who can be considered members of the working class at 0.5 million. The working-class aristocracy would therefore be 7.8 million people in France.

Who remains who can be considered the working masses of this country ?

Regularly, serious newspapers announce the end of the working class, the end of assembly line work, the "tertiarization" as they say. It is undoubtedly also to demonstrate the same thing that official statistics put the maximum number of people in the "intermediate professions" section.

In 1982, INSEE even introduced a new classification that distinguished between "industrial" workers and "artisanal" workers. The goal was obviously to reduce the number of "industrial" workers in the statistics. But this new classification was just as arbitrary. Cooks, road workers, building maintenance workers, cleaners, and handling workers were counted as "artisanal" workers.

The working masses would give us for 1995 :

unskilled workers : 1.81 million (the corresponding household income for 1984 is 8,000F per month) ;

skilled workers : 3.27 million (1984 income between 9,000 and 9,900F per household) ;

agricultural workers : 0.21 million (income 7,200F) ;

employees of direct services to individuals (which we extract from employees because the income here is 7,000F) : 1.17 million.

That’s 6.46 million people. We have to add the 0.5 million civil servants removed from the labor aristocracy : we arrive at 6.96 million, the basic figure for understanding the working masses. We can ask ourselves the question of having to remove a portion of the skilled workers, who may consider themselves or behave like aristocrats : let’s say a quarter of them. We arrive at 6.51 million for the working masses.

The working masses exist. They may be a minority within the working class as a whole, but that matters little. The real problem is to develop a policy that will allow us to discern this working mass and give it strength. Just as the Russian working class of 1917 was able to imbue the whole of society with its politics, the working masses today can do the same tomorrow with other social strata, including the labor aristocracy.

In any case, we have no choice. The revolutionaries of our time must simply accept this fact and work to find ways to restore the strength and soul of the working masses. It is, above all, a question of political choice. The problem of numbers and quantity exists, of course. But the working masses of rich countries have as natural allies almost the entire working class of other countries.

Over the past twenty years, the growth of the working class on an international scale has been impressive. While the industrial working class in rich countries has declined somewhat, the overall picture is quite different. Here is an idea, through the figures for the active population in industry, from 1975 to 1995, in millions of people (State of the World 1996) :

The declines are : France, from 20.3 to 15.2 (i.e. -5.1), Great Britain (-8.8), Italy (-3.3), the USA (-3). But the gains are : Japan (+2), Russia (+3), Mexico (+5). A series of countries see their working class double or triple : South Korea (+7), Turkey (+6), Thailand (+7), Morocco (+3), Algeria (+5). Finally, 5 countries make considerable leaps : Brazil (+10), Pakistan (+14), Indonesia (+16), and especially India (+70) and China (+72).

The result for all these countries is a gain of 200 million industrial workers (800 instead of 600). In total, there must be nearly a billion industrial workers on the planet today. This is the reality of exploitation hidden behind the official discourse on the so-called disappearance of the working class.

THE ESSENTIAL OF THE WORKING MASS TODAY IN FRANCE : WOMEN, YOUNG PEOPLE, IMMIGRANTS

The working masses no longer represent the entire working class in a country like France, but they are the ones who work hard, they are the ones who produce and are useful, they are the ones who do not rely on hopes of social advancement, they are the ones who are inclined to be generous. Where are they ? Women, young people, immigrants, are the social groups where they are most present.

We get a lot of fuss when a woman becomes an airplane pilot or a subway driver ; but the real massive transformation of women is when they become workers : the 1990 figures (INSEE) give 266,000 women among nursing assistants, 236,000 hospital service agents, 217,000 cleaners, 190,000 service agents in educational establishments.

Cleaners are 66% women. Similarly, 41% of unskilled industrial workers are women. In total, there are (1989 figures) more than one million unskilled female workers. From 1978 to 1984, the proportion of women working on the assembly line increased, offsetting the decline among men. In 1984, 30% of female workers worked on the assembly line, compared to 13% of male workers (INSEE social data 1990, page 110). Assembly line work is transferred from one sex to the other.

Capitalism replaces one category with another, just as it prioritizes young people in lower-paid or precarious jobs. But it cannot do without the working class, even with outsourcing ; it also needs a minimal strategic base in the mainland.

There are 800,000 workers of foreign origin in France (INSEE Survey 1995), and 370,000 employees. We rub shoulders with this part of the foreign working class. Another part of foreign workers should concern us : these are the workers abroad this
time, directly employed by our bosses. There are nearly 2 million of them in their companies and their direct subsidiaries.

Every year, more than 800,000 young people leave the education system. Nearly 40% of them do not have the baccalaureate (1992 figures, Alternatives économiques HS n° 22, source Education nationale). Most of them will become workers. Their world of work is one of precariousness, unemployment, temporary work, fixed-term contracts, and underpaid internships. For them, this precariousness does not necessarily mean marginality. Young people are rediscovering what workers knew a century ago and more : the norm with capitalism is job instability.

THE WORKERS’ ARISTOCRACY AND THE COMMUNIST ORGANIZATION

On the level of the communist organization to be built, on the level of the party therefore, Lenin draws the consequences of the arrival at maturity of the working class aristocracy in his conclusion to "The Bankruptcy of the 2nd International" : the working class aristocracy must be kept outside the party.

"The imperialist epoch," he wrote, "cannot tolerate the coexistence, in the same party, of the vanguard men of the revolutionary proletariat and the semi-bourgeois aristocracy of the working class, which enjoys scraps of the privileges that the position of "great" power confers on "its" nation."

Concretely, this means that in our time, in the imperialist countries, proletarian revolutionaries must apply to potential members of the organization who live in the labor aristocracy the same rules as those developed for elements of petty-bourgeois or bourgeois origin : break with their environment, complete devotion to the working masses.

This means that such a party should be concerned about its numerical and sociological composition, including in its accounts the working aristocracy along with the petty bourgeoisie.

If it is decided not to exceed a certain quota of non-proletarians, members of the labor aristocracy should not be counted among the workers.

A worker from the labor aristocracy may obviously wish to join the fight for socialism, for communism. If he is truly a socialist, a communist, and aware of the realities of our time, he will find it natural to sacrifice the privileges that his membership in this privileged stratum gives him, and to offer the advantages to the cause of the working masses, the only ones who can fight in the name of humanity. He would proceed as a member of petty-bourgeois origin who wishes to be a full member of the workers’ party should do.

Lenin fought to preserve this notion of sacrificing acquired privileges at the Second Congress of the Communist International. He engaged in a polemic with Comrade Criespen of the German Independent Party.

"Criespen spoke about high wages," Lenin continued. "In Germany, you see, the circumstances are such that, compared to the Russian workers and, in general, the workers of Eastern Europe, the workers live quite well. According to him, one could only make a revolution if it did not "too much" worsen the situation of the workers. I ask the question, said Lenin : is it admissible to use such language in a communist party ?

This is counter-revolutionary language. The standard of living in Russia is undeniably lower than in Germany, and when we established the dictatorship, the workers suffered more from hunger and their standard of living fell even lower. The victory of the workers is impossible without sacrifice, without a temporary worsening of their situation.

We must tell the workers the opposite of what Criespen said. When, in order to prepare the workers for the dictatorship, we talk to them about a "not too" great worsening of their situation, we forget the essential point, namely that the labor aristocracy was formed precisely by helping "its" bourgeoisie to conquer and oppress the entire world by imperialist means, in order to thus secure better wages. If the German workers want to act as revolutionaries today, they must make sacrifices and not be afraid of them."

(Speech on the conditions of admission to the Communist International July 30, July 19 – August 7, 1920)

Lenin generalizes his point of view : "From the general point of view, from the point of view of world history, it is true that in backward countries a simple coolie is incapable of carrying out the proletarian revolution, but in a small number of richer countries where, thanks to imperialist plunder, people live more comfortably, it would be counter-revolutionary to tell the workers that they have to fear "too great" impoverishment. The opposite must be said.

The labor aristocracy, which is afraid of sacrifices and fears "too great" impoverishment during the period of revolutionary struggle, cannot belong to the party. Otherwise, dictatorship is impossible, especially in Western European countries."

The communist organization must also be concerned with making special efforts towards the working masses in the imperialist countries. In October 1917, during a discussion held to revise the party program, Lenin insisted on the importance of mentioning the role played by immigrant workers in rich and powerful countries ("For a Revision of the Party Program", October 1917, Volume 26). Comrade Sokolnikov proposed adding, after the increase in the employment of women and children, "also unskilled foreign labor imported from backward countries."

For Lenin : "This is a valuable and necessary addition. Precisely this exploitation of the labor of lower-paid workers from backward countries is characteristic
of imperialism. It is on this, in particular, that the parasitism of the rich imperialist countries is based, to a certain extent, which corrupt a part of their workers with the help of higher wages, while at the same time exploiting "cheap" foreign labor without measure and without shame. One should add, says Lenin, the words "lower paid," as well as the words "and often deprived of rights," because the exploiters of "civilized" countries always take advantage of the fact that imported foreign labor is deprived of rights. This is constantly observed not only in Germany with regard to Russian workers, or more precisely, those from Russia, but also in Switzerland with regard to Italians, in France with regard to Spaniards and Italians, etc."

In the same passage, Lenin considers that this situation makes the revolution more difficult to appear in the imperialist countries, but conversely it makes it easier to declare itself in the oppressed countries.

"Perhaps it would be rational to emphasize more strongly and express more concretely in the program the special place occupied by a handful of imperialist countries, the richest ones, which enrich themselves as parasites by plundering colonies and weak nations. This is an extremely important feature of imperialism," he says, "a feature which, incidentally, facilitates to a certain extent the emergence of profound revolutionary movements in countries subjected to imperialist brigandage, threatened with being partitioned or strangled by the imperialist giants (this is the case of Russia), and, on the contrary, hinders to a certain extent the birth of profound revolutionary movements in countries which plunder many colonies and foreign countries according to imperialist methods, thus making a (relatively) large part of their population their accomplices in the division of the spoils."

THE CRUCIAL PROBLEM OF THE ENTIRE WORKERS’ MOVEMENT

During Lenin’s lifetime, the problem of the working-class aristocracy was not only considered, reflected upon, analyzed, but it was now placed as the number one problem.

Lenin reiterates that true revolutionaries must fight the labor aristocracy. In a letter to Sylvia Pankhurst, he writes : "Without fighting this layer, without destroying all its credibility among the workers, without persuading the masses that it is completely perverted by the bourgeoisie, there can be no question of a serious communist movement.

This is equally true of England, France, America and Germany." (Letter to Sylvia Pankhurst, August 28, 1919)

What can Lenin mean by "ruining all his credibility" ? Is it a question of addressing each and every aristocratic worker and accusing him of all privileges and all evils ? No, no more than one would do so with the petty bourgeoisie.

It is by addressing the workers of the working masses that it is a question of "ruining this credit".

To ruin this credit is to demonstrate by A plus B that the mass worker has no interest in linking his fate, in any way, to that of the bourgeoisie. Nor does he have any interest in copying his attitude from that of the working-class aristocrats with whom he rubs shoulders. He has no interest in dreaming of a stable and progressive career path, in hoping for lasting peace for himself and his children. It is a matter of destroying the influence he is constantly subjected to by the working-class aristocrat.

The absence of socialist ideas has made the working-class aristocrat a model and a goal for the worker to achieve. It is this image that must be destroyed. It is the mentality that results from it that must be fought. It is a mentality of class struggle that must be revived. It must be made clear that the bourgeoisie will never give this fate to all workers. The bourgeoisie will never be able to give an equal fate ; it can only live by creating inequalities. We must challenge the aristocratic-working-class way of posing demands, of systematically excluding the idea of ​​the need to change the world, and on the contrary, of seeking illusory and impossible solutions, when they are not, worse, frankly corporatist and selfish.

And we must, of course, clearly denounce to the workers, including the labor aristocracy, the responsibility of our bosses in the global economic war which, while pitting bosses against each other, crushes the poor by the millions.

We have a huge amount of work to do to popularize the idea that the wealth of our bourgeoisie comes from the overexploitation of our former colonies, and poor countries in general. We must use every significant fact of current events to connect the names of our bourgeoisie with the names of these cities and countries.

It is not impossible to detach, at least morally, and rally to the socialist cause conscious workers in the labor aristocracy. Exactly as one can and must detach intellectuals from the bourgeois class to link their fate and their lives to the socialist revolution. It is not impossible to plant the flag of another vision of things in the circles of the labor aristocracy than the current refusal to consider the responsibility that our country has in the situation in the Third World. The bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie are currently developing great efforts to channel - notably with the multiplication of humanitarian organizations - the feeling of injustice that is constantly born and reborn here among those who discover this reality. With the working masses as with the labor aristocracy, there is much to discuss to win over both sides to our points of view.

On the other hand, we must "ruin," fight directly and openly, those who shape positions that amount to preserving and consolidating the existence of privileges in a more or less disguised manner. The militants of the labor aristocracy, for that is who we are talking about, have invaded practically all the workers’ organizations in the rich countries, parties as well as unions. It must be clearly understood that the fact of militating and fighting is not in itself a patent of socialism.

How many struggles marked by corporatism, contempt for others, and the desire to win alone in the hope of earning more than others have we witnessed in recent years ? The railway workers’ strike of 1986-1987 saw numerous episodes where train drivers campaigned against the strike of sedentary workers, "inferior" categories according to the official hierarchy. The nurses’ strikes, made popular by the media, were so because they liked the corporatist, elitist aspect : it was about recognizing exams, a qualification, years of study.

The youth revolt during the attempt to introduce a minimum wage for young people, the CIP, in March 1994, contained the same rotten germ. Only young people preparing for a DEUG, two years of study after the baccalaureate, could be concerned by the struggle : for them, there was no question of introducing a discounted minimum wage. This implied that no one cared if it was introduced for others, those without qualifications. Even young people can therefore be poisoned, in the rich country where we are, by this virus of dirty money that comes to us from the misery of the world.

The role of activists is to know how to turn things around, to transform every weakness into strength. One of the qualities of youth is generosity and the rejection of injustice. Provided we demonstrate what the reality is, we can transform an unconscious activist of a selfish cause into a conscious activist of the socialist cause.

This concern must therefore be constant. There is no separate, pure problem where the existence and influence of the labor aristocracy do not arise. Revolutionary militants must work on it permanently, on all occasions, in all movements.

WHAT POLICY TO COUNTER THE INFLUENCE OF THE WORKING ARISTOCRACY ?

Currently, no one, at least in France, is taking this problem into account and analyzing the importance of the labor aristocracy. The first thing is to recognize it, and to recognize the "working masses." Then we must recognize its influence.

One cannot discuss Stalinism without addressing the problem of this social base. Its success among the French working class is entirely dependent on the existence of a significant labor aristocracy. This layer identified with reformist politics and found obvious interest in its fake revolutionary policy for decades.

We need to understand how imperialist profits reach and affect the working class. There is, of course, money, which is perfectly legible and quantifiable, thanks to the level of wages. But that is far from all. There are also general conditions : the absence of epidemic diseases, the absence of anti-worker repression, bourgeois freedoms to read, to assemble, to vote, the possibility of walking in pleasant cities or countryside, and elementary education provided to all children.

These things are still given even to the working masses of rich countries. And yet, they are in fact a privilege of rich countries. They can, as is currently the case, lead to the working class clinging to them selfishly, and remaining ignorant of the situation of their brothers in the Third World. They can, through a just policy, be a subject of revolt here, if it becomes clear that these essential needs are not even satisfied in these countries, that it is due to the arbitrariness and injustice
established by our capitalists, our teachers of democracy.

Chauvinism and nationalism are often denounced and ridiculed by the far left. It is often an anarchist, petty-bourgeois, and superficial denunciation. This nationalism camouflages, behind the idea that our nation is superior and brings democracy and freedoms, the fact that it cruelly oppresses and exploits, through capital. Demonstrating this is difficult, more difficult than in the colonial era, because the laws of capital make the links between poor and rich countries almost immaterial.

A true tradition of denouncing this exploitation across borders must be established here in mainland France. In the Third World, everyone knows what the IMF is. How many French workers know what it is ?

It is not enough to use the figures provided by the official economy. We must seek figures that speak to the simplest workers : what a meal costs, what a medicine costs. And we must put these figures in relation to the waste and luxury spending that is piling up here. Our working class must know the meaning of the words "hunger," "precariousness," "solidarity," or "struggle" in these countries. We therefore need living links with workers in these countries to obtain and usefully use this information.

The worker influenced by a bourgeois point of view, a working-class aristocrat, may dream of having a beautiful car, or any other superfluous thing that in this world is a sign of social success. It is enough to say with the right words and real facts the blood and pain that this car actually costs for this dream to begin to destroy itself.

START BY BUILDING A REVOLUTIONARY SUPPORT BASE IN THE WORKING MASS

In practice, as we have said, the working masses and the working aristocrats are extremely mixed. How should the revolutionary worker militant behave ?

Lenin returns to his classics. "Engels," he says, "distinguishes between the ’bourgeois workers’ party’ of the old trade unions, the privileged minority, and the ’inferior mass,’ the true majority ; he appeals to this majority which is not contaminated by ’bourgeois respectability.’ Therein lies the essence of Marxist tactics !" he proclaims. (Speech delivered at the Congress of the Swiss Social Democratic Party on November 4, 1916, Volume 23, October 1916)

The important thing in this reasoning is not that it is a matter of appealing to the majority against a minority. In the attitude of Engels, Marx, and Lenin, the important thing is to appeal to this working mass. "Our duty, therefore," Lenin continues, "is to go lower and deeper, to the real masses : therein lies the whole meaning of the struggle against opportunism and the whole content of this struggle."

In other words, the only way to be consistent if one wants to combat reformist, conservative, etc. ideas, and to give revolutionary socialist ideas a chance, is not only to have correct ideas, a correct program, it is not only to proclaim oneself a revolutionary socialist worker, etc., it is to turn, to get closer, to rub shoulders, to live and to campaign within the working masses.

Lenin had no other advice to give when, in August 1919, he replied to the English activist Sylvia Pankhurst, who asked him for advice, in the letter already quoted : "To be indissolubly linked to the working masses, to know how to carry out constant propaganda there, to participate in every strike, to echo every demand of the masses, that is what is essential for a communist party," said Lenin, "especially in a country like England where, until now (as indeed in all imperialist countries), the socialist movement and the workers’ movement in general were active in the socialist movement and the workers’ movement in general, rather narrow upper layers, elements of the working aristocracy, for the most part completely, irremediably corrupted by reformism, prisoners of bourgeois and imperialist prejudices."

The 2nd Congress of the Communist International made this concern one of the bases of its program : "One of the most serious obstacles to the revolutionary movement in the developed capitalist countries derives from the fact that, thanks to colonial possessions and the surplus value of finance capital, etc., capital has succeeded in creating there a small, relatively imposing and stable labor aristocracy. It enjoys the best conditions of remuneration ; above all, it is imbued with a spirit of narrow corporatism, petty bourgeoisie, and capitalist prejudices. It constitutes the real social "point of support" of the 2nd International of reformists and "centrists" and is very close, at the present time, to being the main point of support of the bourgeoisie. No preparation, even preliminary, of the proletariat for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie is possible without a direct, systematic, broad, and declared struggle with this small minority which, without doubt (as experience has fully proven) will give many of its own to the guard white of the bourgeoisie after the victory of the proletariat. All parties adhering to the 3rd International must, at all costs, give substance to this slogan, "more deeply in the masses", understanding by mass the whole group of workers and those exploited by capital, and especially the least organized and the least enlightened, the most oppressed and the least accessible to organization."

This task lies before us : no workers’ party in the rich countries addresses the problem of the labor aristocracy, either punctually or in a sustained and profound manner. No reformist party, of course, since they have all become, in one way or another, parties of the labor aristocracy. It is their interest and their policy to present their policies as those of the entire working class.

But no party, union, or group calling itself revolutionary does this either, at least not in France. It is a whole political apprenticeship that must be undertaken. It is a whole capital that must be built. Without this, everything else is vain, childish, or mendacious. We must learn to respond to the most diverse problems of the workers’ movement, systematically taking this factor into account. However, for decades, since the end of the Second World War, revolutionaries of all tendencies have "forgotten" the problem of the labor aristocracy.

Workers need dreams and hope. But the working masses lack them even more. It is they, more than anyone else, who need to dream of creating another world. Their dignity is at stake. This worker must not receive revolutionary ideas through the labor aristocracy, for they can only be distorted.

It is essential that revolutionary militants address the problem of providing themselves with the means to address this layer directly, and that they adapt their material and methods to it. Otherwise, in practice, their activity will naturally tend to develop essentially among the working-class aristocracy.

Without this approach, Marxist ideas are simply not applied. A break is essential.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LENIN : The Bankruptcy of the 2nd International
(Editions sociales)

LENIN : Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism
(Editions sociales)

INSEE 1996 : Social data

Economic Alternatives Special Issue No. 30, 4th Quarter 1996

HOBSBAWM : Economic and Social History of England, Volume 2
(Seuil, UH)

LENIN : Complete Works
(Editions du Progrès, Moscow)

Rosa LUXEMBURG : Reform or Revolution
(Maspéro)

ENGELS : The situation of the working class in England
(Social Editions)

Georges RIBEIL : The Railway Workers, volumes 1 and 2
(Thesis)