Working class support for One Nation (Part II): In defence of the explanation
First published at Revitalising Labour. Read Part I here.
The labour aristocracy thesis has generated sustained criticism from Marxists and non-Marxists alike. In Australia, the most sustained engagement with these criticisms comes from within the International Socialist Tendency (IST) tradition. This piece takes those criticisms seriously and argues that they rest on a series of analytical errors. Errors worth examining carefully, because they illuminate something important about why the left consistently struggles to explain working class support for One Nation.
Starting with the evidence
Before engaging with the specific criticisms, a methodological point needs to be established. Both the IST and Theodore Allen reject the labour aristocracy thesis, but the more interesting analytical question is whether their rejection is warranted by the evidence or driven by the implications the thesis would have for their respective political frameworks.
Allen’s rejection is the more interesting case. His historical evidence, the invention of the white race as a political project, the specific legal and institutional mechanisms through which racial privilege was constructed and maintained, the real if limited material benefits that whiteness delivered to white workers, actually supports the labour aristocracy thesis rather than refuting it. Allen rejects the concept primarily because he believes it implies that white workers’ accommodation to racial hierarchy reflects a rational material interest, which he fears would make anti-racist politics within the white working class appear futile. His two-volume work, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (Verso, 1994) and Vol. 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (Verso, 1997), provides the most comprehensive historical account of whiteness as a constructed political project, with an accessible precursor in his 1975 pamphlet held in the UMass Amherst digital collections.
But this is a misreading of what the thesis requires. The labour aristocracy concept identifies a tendency, a pressure that operates on sections of the working class in specific directions, not a deterministic outcome. A tendency can be contested. Lenin’s entire point was that identifying the tendency was the precondition for organising against it. Treating the tendency as deterministic is the same error Allen attributes to the thesis, but it is an error in the reading, not in the original concept.
The IST’s rejection is more straightforwardly political. The thesis creates analytical difficulties for the IST’s foundational commitment to the revolutionary potential of the whole working class without differentiation, and its rejection of explanations for working class accommodation to capitalism that locate the source of that accommodation within specific sections of the class rather than in ruling class manipulation. As one IST theorist puts it, the labour aristocracy thesis amounts to lying to workers by implying that sections of the class have interests that conflict with revolutionary politics. This criticism is both wrong about the thesis and, as we will see, sits awkwardly alongside the IST’s own analytical practice.
The well-paid workers can be militant objection
The most common IST criticism of the labour aristocracy thesis is that well-paid workers not only can be but often are industrially militant. The skilled craft unions of the late nineteenth century were among the most combative industrial formations in the world. The AMWU’s hot shop tradition in Australian manufacturing combined high wages with a culture of shop floor militancy that produced significant industrial achievements. How can the thesis identify higher wages as a basis for political accommodation when higher wages were often the product of industrial militancy?
This criticism conflates two different things: industrial militancy and revolutionary political outlook. They are not the same.
The labour aristocracy thesis does not claim that well-paid workers cannot be industrially militant. It claims that their relative material privilege provides a basis for political accommodation to capitalism as a system, for reformist rather than revolutionary politics, for defending the specific gains of the organised section rather than challenging the system that produces them, for accepting the terms of labour market inclusion rather than contesting the terms of exploitation itself.
The craft union militant who fought successfully for higher wages and better conditions often did so partly by controlling access to the trade, by maintaining the scarcity of skilled labour that gave the union its bargaining power. Racial exclusion, the colour bar, restrictive apprenticeship practices, these were mechanisms of labour market control that simultaneously won relative privilege for organised workers and divided them from potential allies. The militancy and the accommodation were not contradictions; they were both expressions of the same underlying interest in maintaining a privileged position within capitalism rather than contesting capitalism itself.
Moreover, and this is crucial, the labour aristocracy’s relative privilege was historically the product of militancy at some point. That is precisely why capital paid the higher wages: because the specific industrial leverage of craft workers made it rational to do so rather than face disruption. The relative privilege is the product of past militancy that has calcified into a defended position, not evidence against the thesis.
The Australian metal trades provide the clearest local illustration. The AMWU’s hot shop tradition was genuinely impressive, real industrial achievements, real gains for members, real capacity for collective action. And the tradition’s most politically sophisticated practitioners understood that the gains were the product of collective struggle, not of any inherent superiority of the trade or the tradesmen. When that understanding was strong, the tradition produced the kind of cross-sector solidarity and political consciousness that the labour aristocracy thesis predicts should be possible. When the craft identity and the defence of relative privilege became the primary orientation, the same tradition produced the colour bar and the marginalisation of less organised workers.
The productivity objection
The IST’s more theoretically developed criticism argues that higher wages in the imperial core reflect the higher productivity of workers there rather than any redistribution of imperial surplus. Workers in advanced capitalist countries are more exploited, produce more surplus value, than workers in the periphery, because they work with more capital-intensive equipment and produce more output per worker. The differential in wages reflects the differential in productivity, not a sharing of imperial super-profits.
This argument requires engaging with the question of the organic composition of capital and how it shapes the rate of surplus value production across different periods. During the early period of imperialism and in the post-war period, the extraction of super-profits from the periphery was primarily based on the extraction of raw materials; as manufacturing shifted from the imperial core to the periphery, it shifted primarily to low capital-intensive industries, and the extraction of super-profits became almost entirely based on the enforced lower cost of labour reproduction in the periphery. During these periods it is arguable that the rate of exploitation in core manufacturing was higher than in the periphery, the IST’s productivity argument has some purchase here.
But the argument has become substantially weaker as conditions have changed. With the deindustrialisation of much of the core and the movement of wider forms of manufacturing into the periphery, the organic composition of capital in the periphery is no longer markedly lower than in the core, yet wages have not markedly increased at the same time. This divergence between rising capital intensity and stagnant wages in the periphery demonstrates that the wage differential reflects structural conditions of exploitation rather than inherent productivity characteristics of different workforces.
More fundamentally, the productivity argument ignores something the IST consistently passes over: even if there were at particular periods higher relative rates of exploitation in the core, the standards of living of workers in the core were still far higher than those in the colonies and neo-colonies of the periphery. The super-exploitation of workers in the periphery helped to subsidise this through two mechanisms, driving down the prices of consumer goods in the core, while companies with productive activity in the core extracted super-profits through the additional mechanisms that Mandel identified in Late Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975): technological rents, monopoly pricing, and the terms of unequal exchange. This is precisely why there can be an apparent discontinuity between the extraction of super-profits in the periphery and relatively high wages and living standards in the core. The benefit is transmitted through price mechanisms and overall profit rates, not only through a direct wage transfer that would show up in investment flow data.
Attributing the global wage differential primarily to the productivity characteristics of different workforces, rather than to the structural conditions of colonial and neocolonial exploitation that have historically prevented capital accumulation and technological development in the periphery, also reproduces the civilisational hierarchy argument that justified colonial exploitation in its contemporary economic form. The productivity of US or Australian workers relative to Indonesian or Bangladeshi workers does not reflect inherent characteristics of those workforces. It reflects the specific historical conditions under which capital has been accumulated, technology has been developed, and labour has been organised. Conditions that were themselves shaped by colonialism and imperial exploitation.
The argument also fails to explain why capital consistently made wage concessions to organised workers in the post-war period rather than simply relocating production, which it subsequently did when the balance of forces allowed. The post-war compromise was not the expression of an economic law relating wages to productivity; it was the product of a specific balance of class forces at a specific historical moment, forced by working class industrial power and the political leverage created by the communist threat.
The post-war compromise and its logic
There is a deeper explanatory problem here. The IST’s framework cannot adequately explain why capital entered the post-war compromise in the first place, or why workers accepted it. The deliberate incorporation account, that capital strategically designed the compromise to demobilise working class militancy, runs into the same class fractions problem that the White Australia analysis below identifies. Different fractions of capital had different and sometimes conflicting interests in the specific elements of the compromise, many resisted specific provisions, and the form the settlement took in different national contexts reflected the specific balance of class forces rather than a unified ruling class strategic design. The honest account is that capital made concessions because the specific balance of forces, working class industrial power combined with the political leverage created by the communist threat, made concessions the rational response at a specific historical moment.
The question of why workers accepted the compromise is equally important, and the same applies to why workers fought for and defended the arbitration system and the award structure in the Australian context. For any of these to work politically, there had to be genuine benefit. Workers correctly identified that the arbitration system delivered real wage improvements and real protections against employer power. They were not clueless or deceived. They were making rational assessments of genuine improvements in their material situation, improvements worth having and worth defending.
A framework that must treat workers as either deceived or irrational whenever they accept improvements in their material conditions cannot explain why those improvements were fought for, why they were defended, or why their erosion produces the specific political formations it produces. The labour aristocracy thesis explains this directly: the benefits were real, the accommodation they produced had a genuine material basis, and understanding that basis honestly is the precondition for understanding what contesting it requires.
The IST’s response to this problem is bureaucratic misleadership, the union bureaucracy led workers away from their revolutionary potential toward accommodation with capitalism. But this restates the problem at a different level without resolving it. Why did workers follow that misleadership over a sustained historical period? The only honest answer is that the misleadership delivered sufficient real material benefits that workers chose to follow it, which is, in different language, the labour aristocracy thesis.
The ruling class project account of White Australia
Duncan Hart’s account of the White Australia Policy in Red Flag exemplifies the IST’s alternative explanation for working class racism: the ruling class project account. Hart argues that the core driver of the White Australia Policy was the ruling class need to build a national identity against external threats, particularly the rising Japanese empire, and rejects as post-hoc blame-shifting the historical research that places greater responsibility on the labour movement itself.
This account runs into an immediate historical problem: the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.
Japan was a formal British ally from 1902 through to 1923, when the alliance was allowed to lapse under American pressure. That alliance period covers exactly the formative years of White Australia’s institutional consolidation after federation in 1901. The Commonwealth was building its racial exclusion architecture at precisely the moment when Japan was Britain’s most important Pacific ally, whose defeat of Russia in 1905 demonstrated its strategic value.
A ruling class project designed to build national identity against the Japanese threat would not have been developing during the period of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. The contradiction reveals that the racial ideology had its own organic momentum, driven substantially by working class and labour movement pressure, that operated independently of and sometimes contrary to the strategic calculations of the ruling class at any given moment.
This is precisely what Carlotta Kellaway’s 1953 paper in The Australian Quarterly documents (library access may be required). Writing when White Australia remained bipartisan policy, Kellaway gives considerably greater responsibility to the labour movement in the development of the policy, and outlines the competing interests between the labour movement and capital. The policy’s specific form, dictation tests rather than explicit racial exclusion, reflected a genuine class contest: capital actively moderated the labour movement’s more extreme exclusionary demands, while labour consistently pushed for more extreme exclusion than any fraction of capital wanted. The Kellaway evidence is not anomalous, it is contrary evidence that the ruling class project account simply does not engage with.
There is also an internal logical gap that the evidence does not need to close. Even accepting the premise that Australian capital needed to construct a common national identity after federation, the ruling class project account does not explain why that identity took a racial exclusionary form rather than the other forms available — civic nationalism, imperial loyalty, labour movement solidarity, or various combinations of these that other settler colonial societies experimented with in the same period. More fundamentally, it cannot explain why the policy took a form that ran directly against the interests of specific and significant sections of capital, the shipping companies whose trade relationships with Asia depended on the movement of Asian labour, the sugar planters whose production model relied on Pacific Islander and Chinese workers, the financial institutions with commercial interests across the Asia-Pacific region.
There is a further historical error worth noting. The argument that White Australia was driven by the need to construct a common national identity against external threats requires Australian ruling class nationalism to have been the operative political framework in the post-federation period. It was not. The national identity actually constructed after federation was explicitly imperial British identity, Australia as part of Greater Britain, as an outpost of the British race in the Pacific, whose defence depended on British naval power. Hart’s account substitutes a nationalist framework that was not operative for the imperial British identity framework that was, and in doing so misrepresents both the character of the post-federation political settlement and the specific form the racial exclusion took within it.
Hart also draws an equivalence between Australian federation-era protectionism and contemporary Trumpian protectionism that collapses a fundamental difference in political economy. Trump’s protectionism operates between competing imperial capitals. Australian protectionism in the federation period was operating in an entirely different structural context, redistributing the surplus of a narrow extractive sector into manufacturing and secondary industry, providing the industrial base that made the centralised arbitration system and the living wage politically achievable, and managing the tensions between competing capital fractions by giving manufacturing capital a stake in the national settlement. These are not equivalent political economies.
What the framework cannot see
There is a revealing asymmetry in how the IST’s approach treats working class racism and capital’s response to it. Workers who take racist positions are treated as passive, deceived by ruling class ideology, responding to external manipulation, incapable of generating racist ideas organically. Capital, meanwhile, is treated as either omnisciently strategic, deliberately constructing racial hierarchy to divide the working class, or as irrelevant to the explanation.
The White Australia Policy illustrates the problem precisely. The ruling class project account requires capital to have been sufficiently omniscient and unified to design a racial exclusion policy serving its strategic national identity interests, while simultaneously designing that policy in a form that directly damaged the concrete interests of the shipping companies, sugar planters, and financial institutions whose trade and production relationships with Asia the exclusion threatened. The class fractions analysis dissolves this contradiction: different fractions of capital had different and sometimes contradictory interests in the policy, the labour movement pushed for more extreme exclusion than any fraction of capital wanted, and the specific form the policy took reflects the contest between those forces.
Both attributions, workers as passive victims of ruling class ideology, capital as omniscient and unified, produce a framework that is simultaneously too charitable to working class agency and too credulous about capital’s coherence. Workers can and do generate racist ideas organically, from within their specific material and psychological conditions, from their experience of labour market competition and cultural change, from the psychological investment in whiteness that Roediger documents. When they do, the ruling class is likely to promote and amplify those organic racist ideas, precisely because their organic character makes them more durable and more politically effective than top-down imposition could achieve.
This matters practically. If workers are essentially good but contaminated by ruling class ideology, the political response is to correct their consciousness, to explain that they have been deceived, that their real interests lie in class solidarity rather than racial identification. That is a fundamentally patronising political intervention that treats workers as objects of consciousness-raising rather than as agents whose own experience and reasoning need to be engaged with seriously. The result is a left that is consistently surprised when racist ideas emerge within the labour movement, and consistently unable to develop the sustained political work that would actually reduce their reflexive availability over time.
The lying to workers objection
The IST’s most explicit objection to the labour aristocracy thesis is that it involves lying to workers, presenting them with a political framework that implies some of them have interests that conflict with revolutionary politics, which the IST considers both false and politically demoralising.
This criticism is wrong about the thesis. The labour aristocracy thesis does not require deceiving anyone. It requires honestly acknowledging that the material and psychological conditions of specific sections of the working class create real pressures toward accommodation to capitalism, pressures that are contested by the tradition’s best political work, from the Minneapolis Teamsters organising to the AMWU’s hot shop tradition at its most sophisticated. Naming those pressures honestly is the opposite of lying to workers; it is the precondition for developing the political practice that can contest them.
The irony is that the IST’s own engagement with the historical evidence on this question is characterised by exactly the selective presentation and analytical simplification it attributes to the labour aristocracy thesis. Armstrong’s account of One Nation’s class base in the 1990s is accurate as far as it goes — but it omits the evidence of Howard’s battlers, the specific movement of sections of the working class toward One Nation that the Samaras data documents for the current period, and the basic arithmetic problem that a 58% consideration figure creates for any exclusively petty bourgeois class base account. Hart’s ruling class project account simply does not engage with contrary evidence, such as that provided by Kellaway, that capital actively moderated labour’s more extreme exclusionary demands. The productivity objection presents a simplified account of the relationship between wages and productivity that ignores both the reality of large-scale western capital investment in fixed capital across the global south and the structural conditions of colonial and neocolonial underdevelopment that produced the global wage differential in the first place.
The selective use of evidence is compounded by a consistent pattern of misrepresenting the position being argued against. The IST’s critique attacks a version of the labour aristocracy concept that treats it as a deterministic outcome. The claim that well-paid workers cannot be militant, that sections of the working class are irredeemably accommodated to capitalism, that revolutionary work within labour aristocracy formations is futile. Lenin’s actual argument was none of these things. The thesis identifies a tendency to be contested through specific political work, not a condition to be accepted. Refuting the straw man version leaves the actual argument entirely untouched.
A framework that cannot account honestly for why sections of the working class support One Nation, that dismisses contrary historical evidence, and that argues against a position its opponents do not hold, cannot develop the political practice adequate to the terrain it claims to be navigating.
The Charlie Post criticism
Charlie Post, the most rigorous contemporary IST critic of the labour aristocracy thesis, argues that the thesis implies abandoning organising in privileged sectors of the working class. That if skilled white workers have a material interest in racial hierarchy, political work among them is futile. This reading would indeed be politically paralysing, and Post is right to contest it.
Post’s critique engages primarily with the formulation of the labour aristocracy thesis developed by Max Elbaum and Robert Seltzer in their 1982 pamphlet, which became the base education document on the topic within formations influenced by the Democratic Socialist Party tradition, and with Jonathan Strauss’s subsequent academic reformulation, published through Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, in articles on Engels and the theory of the labour aristocracy, the labour aristocracy and working-class politics, and its application to Australian working-class history. Engaging with those specific texts is legitimate, but it means Post’s critique is operating at one remove from Lenin’s original formulation, and the politically consequential argument at the core of that formulation, that the thesis identifies a tendency to be contested through specific political work, not a deterministic outcome, is not what his critique actually engages with.
Post’s criticism is therefore doubly wrong, both because his arguments against the thesis fail at the level of Lenin’s original formulation, and because his reading of its political implications is wrong. The thesis identifies a tendency to be contested, not a condition to be accepted.
Lenin never drew the conclusion Post attributes to him. As Tony Cliff’s own account of the Bolsheviks’ work in the Russian trade union movement documents, the Bolsheviks worked extensively in the labour aristocracy, the metalworkers, the skilled trades, precisely because they understood that the tendency identified was a tendency to be contested through political work. Cliff himself identifies the printers as “skilled labour aristocrats” who resisted Bolshevik influence in Petrograd, the exception that proved the rule. The specific political work required in those sectors was different from the work required in less privileged sectors: reattributing the source of gains from sectional characteristics to collective struggle, building cross-sector solidarity, developing transitionary demands that united rather than divided sections whose immediate interests appeared to conflict.
The Local 574/544 Teamsters organising in Minneapolis is the most developed historical illustration of this work being done well. The Trotskyist leadership was working with workers who had the potential to develop into a labour aristocracy as the union consolidated, and made specific political choices, including the push for industrial unionism within an American Federation of Labor craft structure, that contested that potential rather than accommodating to it. The alliance with the Farmers Union, the organisation of unemployed workers, the industrial unionism that broke craft boundaries, all were political interventions against the narrowing of horizon that craft unionism produces.
Post also argues against Lenin’s imperialism analysis on the basis that the volume of direct foreign investment flowing from core to periphery is too small relative to total global investment to account for the wage differential between core and periphery workers. The data is accurate as far as it goes: the majority of DFI does flow between core countries rather than from core to periphery. But the argument stops exactly where it needs to continue. Post finds a data point sufficient to set the theory aside rather than following the argument through to ask what the actual transmission mechanisms are. Had he followed it through, he would have had to engage with the multiple mechanisms through which super-profits are generated and transmitted. The super-exploitation of workers in the periphery driving down consumer goods prices in the core, the overall profit rate effect raising investment and employment demand across the imperial economy, the specific super-profit mechanisms operating through companies whose productive activity remains in the core, and with the question of why there can be an apparent discontinuity between super-profit extraction in the periphery and relatively high wages in the core. That discontinuity is precisely what the thesis needs to explain, and explaining it does not require the majority of DFI to flow from core to periphery.
Mandel’s 1964 engagement with this question makes a move that is worth following more carefully, because it is more coherent than Post’s but shares the same fundamental methodological error at a deeper level. Mandel’s argument is that Engels was right: the original labour aristocracy was constituted by the differential between skilled and unskilled workers within the metropolitan working class, not primarily by a core-periphery differential. But industrial unionism, the organising of previously “unskilled” workers in mass production industries around their strategic location in the economy, had substantially closed that internal differential. The factory workers who had been the unorganised mass beneath the skilled craft aristocracy had, through the Congress of Industrial Organisations wave and its equivalents, achieved wages and conditions that made the internal differential much less marked. The labour aristocracy in its original sense had therefore largely dissolved. What remained was a differential between the metropolitan working class as a whole and workers in the colonies and neo-colonies. Hence Mandel’s conclusion: the real labour aristocracy is now the proletariat of the imperialist countries as a whole.
This was a coherent historical observation given what was knowable in 1964, at the height of the long boom. Industrial unionism had closed much of the skilled-unskilled differential within the metropolitan working class, and the post-war settlement, the arbitration system, the award structure, the welfare state, appeared as a stable achieved outcome rather than as a historically contingent product of a specific balance of forces. What Mandel could not see from 1964 was that the material basis of that settlement, the long boom itself, was about to crumble. The profit rate crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the breakdown of Bretton Woods, the shift to neoliberalism, the deindustrialisation of the core, the reopening of internal differentials through enterprise bargaining and casualisation, much of this happened after Mandel wrote, and much of it after he died in 1995. In that moment, he took the post-war settlement as permanent just as its foundations were giving way.
Both Post and Mandel make the same methodological error: taking a snapshot of the differential at a specific historical moment and using it to make a claim about the thesis as a whole. Mandel’s snapshot is the height of the long boom, when the internal differential appeared to have closed permanently; Post’s snapshot is the DFI flow data of the neoliberal period. Neither engages with the thesis as a historical framework designed to track the opening and closing of differentials across different periods of capitalist development. Which is precisely what the thesis, properly understood, is doing. The labour aristocracy is not a fixed stratum but a historically produced relationship that is made and unmade through specific class struggles, institutional arrangements, and phases of accumulation. Taking a snapshot at any particular moment and finding that the differential does or does not match what the thesis predicts is not a refutation, it is a misunderstanding of what kind of claim the thesis is making.
The subsequent history confirms this. The reopening of internal differentials through deindustrialisation and enterprise bargaining has not simply reversed the process Mandel described. It has produced new meanings, new forms of anxiety and resentment, new political formations that his reformulation, which collapses the internal variation into a uniform core-periphery distinction at a specific historical moment, cannot account for
Both Post and Mandel are making the same fundamental error at different levels: they find an argument sufficient to set the theory aside, the DFI volumes, the closing of the internal differential, without following the argument through to see whether it actually refutes what the theory claims. If either had followed through, the argument would have led them back toward something like the original thesis rather than away from it.
But there is a more fundamental problem that neither Post nor Mandel engages with at all, and it is the problem the psychological wage framework supplies. Both are operating within an essentially economist frame, asking whether objective differentials in wages or living standards are large enough, or structured in the right way, to produce the political effect Lenin identified. The question of how large a differential needs to be to produce accommodation is being answered by the authors’ own assessment of what seems politically significant. But it is not their assessment that matters. What produces political accommodation is not the size of any differential in some objective sense, but the meanings workers give to their relative position, and those meanings are produced through specific historical, institutional and cultural processes that are not determined by the size of the gap.
A relatively modest material differential can produce intense psychological investment if it is institutionally structured, culturally reinforced and historically sedimented in the right ways. The White Australia Policy illustrates this precisely: whatever the material benefit to Australian workers of excluding Chinese labour, what made it politically powerful was not its size but the meaning it carried within a specific colonial institutional context: the sense of belonging to a racially defined community with a stake in the colonial economy, the psychological wage of whiteness operating through a specific institutional form. Conversely, the closing of the skilled-unskilled differential through industrial unionism that Mandel correctly identifies did not dissolve the psychological investment in relative privilege. It transformed it, producing new forms of identification with the institutional arrangements that had delivered the gains, which is exactly what the post-war compromise and its Australian expression in the arbitration system and award structure represent. And when those arrangements eroded through deindustrialisation and enterprise bargaining, the psychological investment did not simply dissolve. It produced the specific political formations the pieces are trying to explain. One Nation’s outer suburban support base is not the labour aristocracy of the post-war settlement, it is the dissolution products of that formation, workers whose parents had the institutional arrangements that produced a specific form of social belonging and who are experiencing their removal.
The labour aristocracy thesis, properly understood, is not a hydraulic model in which super-profits flow from periphery to core in sufficient volume and political accommodation results. It is a framework for asking how workers understand their material position, what institutional and cultural forms give that position its political significance, and what happens to those meanings when the material conditions shift. That question is what neither Post nor Mandel can ask within their shared economist frame, and it is the question that Du Bois’s psychological wage concept, developed through Roediger and applied to the Australian context, is precisely designed to answer.
There is a further irony in Post’s theoretical position worth naming directly. His alternative explanation for working class reformism draws heavily on Mandel’s bureaucratisation thesis, the account of the labour officialdom as a distinct social layer with its own institutional interests in managing class conflict. But Mandel’s Late Capitalism is simultaneously one of the primary theoretical sources for the monopoly super-profits analysis that Strauss draws on and that Post is contesting. Post selectively inherits Mandel, taking the bureaucratisation account while setting aside the Late Capitalism economic analysis that underpins what he is contesting. This mirrors at the level of a specific theoretical debate the broader pattern of selective inheritance the piece has been identifying throughout.
The Australian case also illustrates an important variation within Lenin’s framework. Australia as a settler colonial state occupied a different position in the imperial hierarchy than the colonies Lenin’s analysis was primarily developed to explain. It developed as an extension of the imperial core rather than as a site of pure extraction, permitted to develop manufacturing behind tariff walls, subject to more even development of productive capacity. Understanding this variation is part of what is required to explain why the labour aristocracy thesis takes the specific Australian form it does, and why a simplified application of the framework consistently misses it.
What the framework cannot explain
The IST’s rejection of the labour aristocracy thesis has specific political consequences that the tradition then has to explain away through other means.
If working class racism is primarily the product of ruling class manipulation rather than of organic material and psychological conditions within specific sections of the class, then the explanation for working class support for One Nation must be found in Rupert Murdoch, Sky News, and Gina Rinehart rather than in the specific experience of workers whose material position has been eroding for three decades. Both sets of factors are real, but ruling class amplification is considerably more politically significant when what is being amplified is organic rather than externally imposed. Murdoch is more effective when he is cultivating something that already exists than when he is creating it from nothing.
Without the labour aristocracy framework, there is no adequate account of why the post-war compromise’s breakdown takes the specific political forms it does. Why working class anxiety about downward mobility takes cultural and racial form rather than class form, why One Nation attracts the specific constituencies it does, why the ALP consistently loses ground to the cultural right in outer suburban seats where working class voters are actually concentrated.
And without it, there is no theoretical basis for the kind of patient, differentiated political work that the terrain requires, work calibrated to where specific workers actually are rather than where the theory says they should be, building the material and psychological conditions for more ambitious political development rather than simply asserting the correct political line and waiting for workers to arrive at it.
The tradition the thesis draws on
The labour aristocracy thesis connects to a broader theoretical tradition worth making explicit, partly because that tradition is also the IST’s claimed inheritance.
Rosa Luxemburg’s argument in The Accumulation of Capital, that capitalism requires continuous expansion into non-capitalist peripheries for the realisation of surplus value, and that the destruction of those peripheries through colonial incorporation is both the mechanism of capitalist expansion and its ultimate limit, implies something like the labour aristocracy thesis without fully developing it.
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony provides the most sophisticated account of why the accommodation is durable. The ruling class is most effective not when its ideology is experienced as external imposition but when it has been genuinely absorbed into the common sense of subaltern classes. Contesting that hegemony requires the long, patient cultural and political work that taking the labour aristocracy thesis seriously points toward.
Lenin identified the labour aristocracy tendency and its material basis in imperial accumulation. Trotsky agreed with the concept, engaging with it in his 1940 notes on trade unions, where the labour aristocracy’s integration into imperialist super-profits is central to the analysis, while developing the Transitional Programme explicitly from the actual political conditions of the working class as it existed rather than from an idealised revolutionary subject. The IST claims Trotsky as the continuator of Leninism, yet its position requires departing from both.
These departures follow a consistent pattern. Tony Cliff’s state capitalism thesis resolved the political inconvenience of Trotsky’s degenerated workers’ state position, which required defending the Soviet Union against imperialism while calling for political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy, by finding a theoretical redefinition that resolved the inconvenient conclusion. The rejection of the labour aristocracy thesis and Lenin’s imperialism analysis follows similar logic: both produced political conclusions that were demanding and complicated, and both were replaced with the permanent arms economy thesis, a framework that made the political task appear simpler by allowing the imperial dimension of metropolitan working class privilege to be sidestepped entirely.
This is not unique to the IST, it is a recurring tendency in political formations under organisational and political pressure. The relevant question is not whether this has happened but whether the resulting frameworks are adequate to the terrain they claim to explain. On the evidence of One Nation’s class base, on the history of the White Australia Policy, on the question of why workers accepted the post-war compromise, the answer is that they are not.
There is something worth noting directly about the analytical method involved. The selective use of evidence, the straw man formulation of opposing positions, and the management of contradictory evidence through the false consciousness frame. These are failures not just of specific arguments but of the materialist and dialectical method the tradition claims as its foundational commitment. Marxism as a method requires engaging honestly with evidence that complicates the preferred conclusion. Dialectical thinking requires engaging with contradiction, the way phenomena contain opposing tendencies, the specific processes through which those contradictions develop and resolve. The labour aristocracy’s simultaneous militancy and accommodation, the White Australia Policy’s simultaneous character as labour movement project and site of capital fraction resistance, Eureka’s simultaneous radicalism and racial exclusion, all are dialectical unities that require holding both dimensions rather than selecting one and explaining away the other. That is a challenge for any political formation, but it is particularly acute for one that claims dialectical materialism as its foundational method.
The mischaracterisation of Australia as a particularly aggressive independent imperial power, visible across a number of Red Flag pieces including Hart’s, compounds these analytical failures and produces specific political errors. The moments that look most like Australian imperial aggression are precisely the moments of deepest alignment with US strategic priorities: AUKUS has Australia acquiring nuclear submarine capability it cannot operate independently, within a strategic framework entirely determined by US priorities in relation to China. Understanding Australia as sub-imperial rather than independently aggressive is not just analytically more accurate, it changes the assessment of what political pressure on the ALP can achieve and through what mechanisms, as explored in more detail elsewhere.
The political conclusion
The labour aristocracy thesis, Allen’s historical materialism, and Roediger’s psychological wage together produce a more adequate framework for understanding working class racism and right-wing populism. Not because they make the political task easier but because they make it more honest.
They explain why the accommodation persists through changing material conditions. They identify the specific mechanisms through which it is reproduced and the specific political work that can contest those mechanisms. They point toward cross-racial solidarity, transitionary demands, and the reattribution of the source of gains from racial to collective characteristics: the political work that can actually shift the terrain rather than simply denouncing the positions that the terrain currently produces.
The alternative framework is preferred precisely because it makes the task appear easier. If sections of the working class are essentially good but contaminated by ruling class ideology, the task is exposing the contamination and waiting for crisis to strip it away. The labour aristocracy framework makes the task appear harder because it is harder. But a framework that cannot explain the actual terrain cannot develop the political practice adequate to it, regardless of how comfortable its simplifications are.