Labor Aristocracy
Labor aristocracy is, in Infrared's usage, the stratum materially benefiting from imperialism and monopoly revenues — and today it is located less in the factory than in the professional office.
Haz's formulation
From the HASAN PIKER CIVIL WAR | 24hr SUBATHON stream:
> "There are a fucking latte-sipping labor aristocracy who gained from imperialism. The urban petty bourgeoisie sitting in offices materially benefits from the financial revenues of monopoly capitalism. Those are not people who are getting paid out on the basis of the material [production]... You can't just exclusively compromise with the people who are materially predisposed and incentivized to support imperialism."
The strategic point
- The classical category (Lenin, Engels on the English working class) is updated: the imperial rent now flows through professional-managerial salaries, NGO grants, university sinecures — which is why the online left's class base behaves as a conservative interest defending empire and its moral fashions.
- Hence the inversion that scandalizes the left: the MAGA base — deindustrialized, service-employed, small-town — is often more objectively anti-imperialist than the credentialed "left," whose class position ties it to the system (Class, MAGA Communism).
- Historical pattern noted by Haz (INFRARED RENAISSANCE): socialism/social-democracy was always "associated with the inceptual professional petty bourgeoisie, and also the labor aristocracy, which is also a kind of petty bourgeoisie" — Lenin's break with it defined communism itself.