The Segmentation of Work and the Labour Aristocracy

Abstract

ONCE A FIRMLY ESTABLISHED orthodoxy in British labour historiography, the labour aristocracy now looks set to become a historical curiosity. In its original formulation by Engels and Lenin, the concept was used to explain the essentially negative question of why twentieth-century labour movements — particularly the British — had failed to dominate decisively the course of political change. Interest in the labour aristocracy was dictated by its relevance as an explanation for reformism. But this question has now come to be regarded as both anachronistic and irrelevant. The models and assumptions that are required to explain reformism as a product of artificial sectionalist divisions or false consciousness have fallen into disrepute. To the contrary, it is now suggested, there is nothing unnatural about the main theme of reformist politics within the working class. Powerful forces stimulate class cooperation as much as class conflict and they intersect with profound divisions within the working class to make sectionalism rather than unity the normal category and characteristic of class structure. Indeed, some have gone as far as to deny the value of drawing any distinction between the labour aristocracy and the rest of the working class because both were equally vulnerable to and dependent upon capitalist rela-