Due to their better-off condition, such workers are more likely to align with the bourgeoisie to maintain capitalism instead of advocating for broader working-class solidarity and socialist revolution.
The theory that well-compensated and well-to-do proletarians are more manipulable into collaborating with the bourgeoisie was formulated by Friedrich Engels in a letter dated 7 October 1858 to Karl Marx.
[9][6] The precise wordings "aristocracy of labour" and "labour aristocracy" are attested in works produced from the late 19th to early 20th century such as William Morris's 1885 The Manifesto of The Socialist League (in English),[10] Frank Kitz's 1886 article Internationalism (in English),[11] Paul Delasalle's 1900 pamphlet L'action syndicale et les anarchistes (in French),[12] Karl Kautsky's 1892 book Das Erfurter Programm in seinem grundsätzlichen Theil erläutert (in German)[13] and 1901 article Trades Unions and Socialism (translated into English by Eugene Dietzgen),[14] etc.
[15][page needed] 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.
The American capital which poured into Europe through the 'Marshall Plan' made it possible to reconstruct the factories, plants, transport and agriculture so that their production extended rapidly.
The obvious improvement of the standard of living of the working people in comparison with that of the time of the war and even before the war, the rapid growth of production, which came as a result of the reconstruction of industry and agriculture and the beginning of the technical and scientific revolution, and the full employment of the work force, opened the way to the flowering among the unformed opportunist element of views about the development of capitalism without class conflicts, about its ability to avoid crises, the elimination of the phenomenon of unemployment etc.
The new stratum of the worker aristocracy, which increased considerably during this period, began to exert an ever more negative influence in the ranks of the parties and their leaderships by introducing reformist and opportunist views and ideas.
[citation needed] At the beginning of the 20th century in the United States, "most American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions did not admit unskilled mass-production workers".
[18] Selig Perlman wrote in 1923 that skilled workers organized into craft unions were more interested in trade separatism than in labor solidarity.
[29] Labor historian Melvyn Dubofsky has written the following: By 1896 Gompers and the AFL were moving to make their peace with Capitalism and the American system.
The AFL concerned itself with a "philosophy of pure wage consciousness", according to Selig Perlman,[31] who developed the "business unionism" theory of labor.
[32] While craft unions provided a good defense for the privileges of membership, conventions such as time-limited contracts and pledges not to strike in solidarity with other workers severely limited the ability of craft unions to effect change in society at large, leaving only the ineffectual means granted by a business-dominated elite society, i.e. electoral politics, lobbying congress and a newly enfeebled economic weapon, the injunction-circumscribed strike.
However, there are many aspects to business unionism that solidarity unionists still find suspect– a tendency to operate as a business, rather than according to "union principles"; enthroning elite hierarchies of leadership which are not easily recalled by the membership; deriving significant income from the sale of insurance or credit cards, arguably leading to conflicts of interest; union leadership compensation levels that are closer to those of corporate executives than of rank and file workers; top-down decision making; and building relationships with the leadership of corporations or political parties that the rank and file may view with suspicion.
Arguing that the white working class possesses a petit-bourgeois and reformist consciousness, the book posits that the colonized peoples of the United States constitutes the proletariat.