/edu/ - Education

>Those workers (proletarians) in the developed countries who benefit from the superprofits extracted from the impoverished workers of developing countries form an "aristocracy of labor". The phrase was popularized by Karl Kautsky in 1901
I'm noticing this really is a recurring theme with Lenin, but I'll leave this for another thread…
>and theorized by Vladimir Lenin in his treatise on Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. [b]According to Lenin, companies in the developed world exploit workers in the developing world where wages are much lower. The increased profits enable these companies to pay higher wages to their employees "at home" (that is, in the developed world), thus creating a working class satisfied with their standard of living and not inclined to proletarian revolution. It is a form of exporting poverty, creating an "exclave" of lower social class. Lenin contended that imperialism had prevented increasing class polarization in the developed world and argued that a workers' revolution could only begin in one of the developing countries, such as Imperial Russia.[/b]

By contrast, the definition within revolutionary syndicalism is that trade union bureaucracy, 'yellow unions', or social democratic unions were labelled 'labor aristocracy', (the IWW for example instead being a revolutionary industrial union, created within the orthodox Marxist theories of De Leonism).