My post was too long so I had to post here: https://pastes.io/07p5nd9dxc
Edit: first correction to the paste, our trans community is represented far above the general population. Around 11% of our community is trans, while in the world only 1% of people are. I also only gave absolute numbers for some reason in the paste so here’s the percentage points: 10% trans women, 1% trans men, 7.7% nonbinary.
Interestingly enough, I am from Latin America, but from a labor aristocratic background. When I visted a friend in Europe, I noticed I had far better living standards than them
I have been thinking about this a lot, for many US-ians and Europeans who know Spanish or Portuguese and work from home, they could easily live comfortable lives in many Latin American countries. Even have public healthcare. I think it is a neat idea for any Imperial Core comrades who work in tech and want to have more time for communism.
You are not labor aristocratic and I wouldn’t trust the “living standards” too much; people have a weird conception of poverty and “middle strata” and how they actually live.
Yes, comrade, I am. I am the son of two doctors, a profession which is highly valued here in Brazil. My family earns enough not to go through economic grievances, so much so my mother is able to sustain a company just through her salary alone (which is a major drain in the family’s finances btw). So you could consider myself from a petty-bourgeois/labor aristocratic background, but more precisely labor aristocratic, since the family’s income does not come from the company, but from the wages they receive as doctors.
I… doubt that that comes as labor aristocrats.
Labor aristocrats are people that relish and are fine with the way things are and balk at revolution and fight for the bourgeoisie at every opportunity.
It doesn’t mean petit-bourgeois, for example. And you aren’t a labor aristocrat, I can tell.
Just because I come from a certain class, I am not obliged to defend the interests of my class background. There are some proletarians who also unconsciously defend the interests of the bourgeoisie because knowledge is not accessible, but this does not make them labor aristocrats nor anything close.
A labor aristocrat, and I don’t know if I got the close Leninian meaning of it, is simply well-off paid members of the working class, either because there’s great demand for their skills and few people doing it or a combination of both, or even through artificially inflated wages for certain functions. I think Lenin spoke of labor aristocracy in the context of imperialist war, but I think the category could very well apply to the internal composition of the working class, as well as the international division of labor. A British proletarian very well earns much more than a Brazilian proletarian, though with the European austerity measures and Russian sanctions this gap is becoming closer lol
There are obviously functions in bourgeois society which tends to be well paid: military generals, judges, police chiefs, senators, managerial and executive offices, etc. I don’t know if these could be considered labor aristocrats as well, but they do work, but of course they work in the interests of the bourgeoisie, they have meetings with bourgeois representatives, receive gifts, dinners, and all kinds of bribery to serve the interests of capital.
But apart from these, there are certain well paid members of the working class, who enjoy high salaries because of the demand for certain functions, such as (in some countries) doctors, lawyers, engineers, academic professors, etc. These are what could be considered labor aristocrats, because they very clearly tend to support the status quo and in many instances are even reactionary, with the possible exception of lawyers and academic professors, for different reasons. But, for instance, my two (doctor) parents are staunch supporters of the fascist Bolsonaro. This is very common among doctors in Brazil.
They also have an inclination of becoming petty-bourgeois through their small enterprises because they are able to concentrate a little bit of wealth. A small minority of those petty-bourgeois can become bourgeois themselves. For instance, I have a distant family member who is a bourgeois, and came from a labor aristocratic condition. He was an engineer working for Banco do Nordeste, and later accumulated capital and set up a construction business with his partner and some rich associates he got acquainted with through his work at bank.
A labor aristocrat is someone that has been successfuly played and paid off and they are not a class, as far as I’m concerned; they’re generally the thin layer of workers around the top, though not necessarily petit-bourgeous.
Look, you know yourself and your background more than I do, of course, so I won’t discuss this more, but if you are a communist and fight against capitalism and so on then I don’t think you really count as a “labor aristocrat” and I’m not sure if your background is really “labor aristocratic” but that’s just me.
I never said a labor aristocrat was a class in of it itself. You measure labor aristocracy in terms of how much someone is in favor of capitalism, a subjective measure, and I measure labor aristocracy in terms of how economically distant someone is from an average working person, a more objective measure.
It’s kind of the only measure that you can use, otherwise we’re just talking about different strata entirely.