labour aristocracy

labour aristocracy A concept developed by Friedrich Engels to designate an upper section of the working class which was in receipt of higher wages and hence liable to be bribed into a surrender of its class interests. The money for this payment was, in Lenin's interpretation of the argument, held to come from colonial profits.

The major discussion of the concept has been in relation to the development of class relations in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (the so-called ‘labour aristocracy debate’ of the 1970s). Among other things, the principal protagonists (who included sociologists of class and culture) disputed the definition of the concept itself; the role of this stratum in promoting working-class militancy and quiescence; standards of living in the immediate aftermath of the Industrial Revolution; conditions of employment, authority in the workplace, and the social construction of skill; the cultural and political elements in class consciousness; the emergence of the ‘domestic ideal’ and the changing role of women in industrial society; and the links between the development of the British working class and nineteenth-century British imperialism. The debate petered out—largely unresolved—but yielded a prodigious amount of excellent historical research at both the national and local levels of analysis. A convenient summary of the issues will be found in Robert Gray's The Aristocracy of Labour in Nineteenth-Century Britain, c. 1850–1914 (1981).