Towards the end of the 19th century Marxists analysed the phenomena of a section of the working class, which because of its nature as craft based, skilled workers enjoyed a relatively privileged position compared to the mass of unskilled workers. Particularly, in Britain with its vast Empire, which super exploited people around the globe, and brought some of those proceeds back home, a small proprtion of which could be used to sweeten this privileged layer, there was a tendency for this "Labour Aristocracy" to see itself as separate from the wider Labour Movement. It defended its Craft privileges against the unskilled, opposed unskilled workers joining its unions etc. and thereby divided and weakened the Labour Movement.
In addition, these economic and social differences led to a set of ideas commensurate to them. The fact, that this layer were able to negotiate better condiitons for itself was a strong motivational force to the basic ideas of reformism, that instead of repalcing Capitalism it was sufficient to simply negotiate improvements within it. In turn this attitude provided a foudnation for the establishemnt of a Trade Union bureaucracy that could fulfil this function of intermediary within this negotiation.
The concept that ideas, and ideological tendencies are a reflection of material conditions, that they are an ideological representation of the interests of social forces, and that changes in the dominance of different sets of ideas are themselves a reflection of changes in thesesocial forces, and the changing relative of strengths between them, is fundamental to Marxist class analysis. Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet bureacracy, the reason for ist rise, the ideas it held etc. is a classic example of that - though perhaps, THE classic example is Marx's "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte". Trotsky, demonstrated, how it was the decline in the economic and social power of the working class, and the rise of a new petit-bourgeoisie growing out of the NEP, together with the increasing number of State functionaries, bureaucrats with the typical petit-bourgeois mindset shared by all bureaucrats, that led to a rise in those ideas within the Communist Party reflective of the interests of such social strata.
In recent posts discussing the Statism of much of the Left I have pointed to the historical roots of such ideas. Ideas that go back to the beginnings of the Socialist Movement, which although gradually thrown over by Marx and Engels, remained at the heart of the main workers parties, including its most authoritative representative - the German SPD. But, perhaps if we were to apply the marxist method we could identify objective root for the dominance of statist ideas, and in particular for the benign attitude of much of the left towards the bouregois state itself.
In every developed country in the world the State accounts for around 50% of all economic activity. It not only holds vast numbers of people in a State of dependency upon it, almost like feudal serfs dependent upon their Lord and Master, through the development of Welfarism, but the bouregois State is THE bigest single employer in all of these countries. It employs vast armies of people in a huge bureaucracy as well as large number working in the direct provision of various services from healthcare and education, to fire and protection, to public transport, and the wide array of Local Government services. A look at the facts of unionisation in Britain, and this is almost certainly true of every other coutnry, shows that rather like the situation of the Labour Aristocracy at the edn of the 19th century, these workers represent the bulk of unionised workers, and certainly the most organised.
Could it be that one of the reaons that so much of the Left today has such a benign attitude to the bourgeois State, that rather than seeking to limit its influence it seeks to expand it, that it calls upon it to act in the interests of workers and so on, is atually a reflection of the fact that that Left itself is employed in large numbers by that State?
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