Imperialism and British workers: moving past the labour aristocracy debates

Our history is shaped by the legacy of empire.  Alfie Hancox takes a critical look at debates around the idea of Labour Aristocracy and argues that ‘a strategic approach to socialist internationalism will mean not losing sight of either conjuncture – the contingencies of class and national struggles, and points of anti-imperialist resistance – or structure – British labour’s long, intimate entanglement with empire.’

Introduction

In 1920, the year after white workers in Britain’s port cities partook in murderous riots targeting black and Asian seamen, the queer Jamaican communist Claude McKay – then working in London as a journalist for Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Dreadnought – observed how racism was a useful tool for the ruling class in keeping white dockworkers’ eyes averted from ‘the huge stores of wealth along the water front.’ Reflecting, however, on the isolation of anti-colonial sentiment within the labour movement, he also wondered whether British workers might be just as willing as the capitalists to ‘be provided with cheap raw materials by the slaves of Asia and Africa for the industries of their overcrowded cities’. McKay concluded that ‘today, the British Empire is the greatest obstacle to International Socialism’.

In the hundred years since, Marxists have grappled with imperialism’s subversion of working-class internationalism; the extent and depth of the ‘corruption’, and its causal relationship to political reformism and consent for the capitalist status quo in the global North.

The most influential point of departure for theorising imperialism is Lenin’s classic account of monopoly capitalist competition for cheap resources and labour, written during a time of great power conflict and colonial jingoism. Lenin argued that monopoly ‘superprofits’ enabled the economic bribery of a privileged layer of Western (and particularly British) workers: a corrupted ‘labour aristocracy’. The oversimplifications of Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) reflected the constraints of a popular ‘operational theory’ accounting for both the causes of world war, and socialist susceptibility to national chauvinism. It nonetheless offered a powerful critique of liberal political economy as well as the ‘great betrayal’ of the Second International, and thus remains a central reference point for Marxist debates.

In 2006 Marxist sociologist Charlie Post (now a member of the Tempest collective) wrote an influential series of articles on ‘The Myth of the Labor Aristocracy’, arguing that reformism and working-class conservatism are better explained by the emergence of trade union and socialist party bureaucracies. Other Marxists have pointed out that socialist nationalism has a momentum of its own, as the pursuit of social reforms through securing concessions from the capitalist state, along with the incorporation of labour representatives into parliamentarism, encourages the welding of class politics to the ‘national interest’. [1]

The oversights and ambiguities of the labour aristocracy theory have, however, been extrapolated to dismiss imperialism’s impact on workers altogether, including Lenin’s key insights into the specific character of reformism in the global North, beyond a generalised account of union bureaucracy and parliamentary socialism. In Jacobin Magazine, Vivek Chibber refers to ‘the labour aristocracy thesis’ as ‘yet another instance where the Leninist legacy did a lot of damage’, while making the questionable claim that the ‘fruits of imperialism’ have ‘no significance whatsoever for a general analysis of either the North or of global capitalism’. In his recent rs21 article, Post also reiterates his view that Northern workers receive no material benefits from imperialism.

Through a ‘metacritique’ of the labour aristocracy debates, this three-part article assesses the development of Marxist thinking on imperialism and the British working class, from Lenin to the postwar new left. This first part looks at Lenin’s explanation for the death of the Second International, as well as the limits in his approach of collapsing together related but distinct issues of nationalism, social imperialism, and the state capture of socialism. Part two will examine the immediate roots of present-day debates in the charged political climate of the 1960s–70s, the high tide of Western welfare capitalism and neocolonialism, as well as the rise of Powellite populism. Finally, part three will assess the changes and continuities seen in twenty-first century imperialism, and its impact on British workers today.

The search for simple answers about imperialism and working-class consciousness have often concealed ‘a complicated web of political and economic relations, and a detailed balance sheet of gains and losses’ in need of untangling. [2] It is hoped that historicising the different ways that Marxists have addressed this question will help us move beyond inherited doctrinal disputes, and reintegrate anti-imperialist analysis into pressing discussions of socialist strategy.

Part one: Mensheviks of the west

1914 triggered off a lasting crisis in the international socialist movement. While Lenin attributed the Second International’s collapse to imperialism’s economic impact on Western workers, more recently Marxists have reemphasised other explanations, including the innate conservatism of the labour bureaucracy, and the broader dynamics of socialist ‘nativism’. As we will see, none of these factors alone adequately account for the direction of the British labour movement, which can be understood only by seeing how these three elements articulated together.

Origins of a metaphor

In mid-Victorian Britain, skilled craftsmen in the conservative New Model Unions described by Sidney and Beatrice Webb defended their narrowly sectional interests and the closed apprenticeship system, at the expense of poorly-paid ‘unskilled’ labourers and pieceworkers – often racialised minorities and women. The derisory metaphor of an ‘aristocracy of labour’ which ‘must be broken down the same as other aristocracies’ was used by the left-wing of Chartism, and subsequently taken up by Marx and Engels. [3] It was the latter who linked the labour aristocracy’s existence to imperialism, during a time when Britain’s dominant ‘free trade’ empire provided booming export-oriented industry – coal, iron, shipbuilding, cotton – and cheap food imports from Europe and America: in 1882 Engels lamented in a letter to Karl Kautsky that ‘workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the Colonies’.

Developing Engels’s insight in the early-twentieth century context of intensified great power rivalry leading to world war, Lenin argued that an ‘upper crust’ of Western workers had been ‘bribed’ by imperialist ‘superprofits’, imbuing them with ‘narrow-mindedness, craft selfishness and opportunism’. Like Engels, Lenin was especially scornful of Britain’s labour movement, having attended the 1907 Second International congress where soon-to-be Labour Party leader Ramsay MacDonald supported the failed motion for a ‘socialist’ colonial policy. By 1914 British co-operative societies, pioneered by artisan weavers, even owned tea plantations in South Asia and depots purchasing palm oil in West Africa.

War and the ‘nationalisation of class’

For Lenin it was the First World War, when European parties of labour rallied behind national colours, which above all highlighted the extent to which imperialism had undercut socialist internationalism. However, the connection was more complex than Lenin’s emphasis on imperialist monopoly profits and the role of craft unions, which reflected his reliance on the Webbs’ outdated History of Trade Unionism. In the first place, ‘privileged’ workers are often, as Lenin himself recognised, more militant by very virtue of their stronger bargaining power, particularly in response to threats of downward mobility. This was seen for instance with the role of skilled metal workers in the revolutionary wave in Europe catalysed by the war.

More significantly, jingoism and militarism had a momentum of their own in the age of mass politics, when workers and socialist politicians of all backgrounds were overcome by what one German radical described as ‘this driving, burning desire to throw oneself into the powerful current of the general national tide’. [4] The current of socialist nationalism was particularly fierce in the dominant imperialist countries.

In extrapolating, like the radical-liberal economist John Hobson, from the ‘glaring case of Rhodes and South Africa’, Lenin laid great stress on the wealth accrued from British capital investments in the empire and shared in by a ‘privileged minority’ of workers. What this missed was the wider significance of ‘the whole far-flung range of imperial connections’ to Britain’s global trade success. [5] 1870–1914 saw rising working-class consumption levels in Britain, of sugar but also meat, dairy, and cereals imported from Europe, the settler dominions, and America. This suggested the fruits of imperialism were being enjoyed more and more widely by British workers. [6] While this hardly amounted to direct ‘bribery’ – increased purchasing power reflected the gains of worker organisation in this period – class struggle, and the ruling class’s capacity to grant concessions, was mediated by successful empire. As Satnam Virdee argues, the securing of rising real wages and social insurance accelerated the ‘subjective integration’ of workers as well as socialist politicians into the imagined national community. [7]

Within this period the Labour Party and trade unions overwhelmingly supported the ‘free trade’ doctrine, because of its association with cheap food, rather than the annexationist imperialism of a Cecil Rhodes. While the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) had been supported by the Shipbuilders’ Union, because imperialist exploits abroad meant more skilled jobs, there was also strong labour opposition. The argument, though, was over what foreign policy reflected the true ‘national interest’, with the labour opponents of war, influenced by Hobson, counterposing costly armed expeditions to a free trade policy viewed as mutually beneficial (ignoring that the terms of world trade were still enforced through British naval supremacy!). [8] The target of the free-traders was typically not empire as such, and still less capitalism, but ‘unpatriotic’ financiers dragging Britain into wars funded by taxpayers. This nativist framing took on racial, specifically antisemitic, connotations, with the Trades Union Congress (TUC) narrowly passing a resolution scapegoating ‘cosmopolitan Jews’. Such a superficial anti-imperialism, compatible with racial and national chauvinism, helps explains how readily the labour movement rallied behind the ‘defencist’ war effort in 1914 against Prussian militarism.

As noted by Eric Hobsbawm and Partha Gupta, state loyalism was not only promoted by craft unions in export industries directly benefiting from empire (the most notable example of which was the British Weavers’ Union, which self-servingly lobbied against protective tariffs for Indian cotton producers). [9] With the ebbing of the militant New Unionism – which helped spark a brief rebirth of authentic anti-imperialism, in William Morris and Eleanor Marx’s Commonweal – the leadership of the modern general unions like Ernest Bevin, representing labourers and semi-skilled workers, became bulwarks of the British state. Even Keir Hardie opined that ‘the working class is not a class; it is the nation.’ Lenin was essentially collapsing together two separate issues, social imperialism on the one hand and the state capture of socialism on the other, with logics of their own.

WWI was a decisive moment in what Tom Nairn has referred to as Labour’s ‘nationalisation of class’. [10] Labour bureaucracies were integrated into the state machinery, and the TUC put its weight behind conscription and the war economy. [11] As Lenin wrote, ‘economic privileges and sops’ were divided among the ‘labour members of War Industries Committees, labour officials’ – but these were by no means only ‘workers belonging to the narrow craft unions’. For labour officials who glimpsed access to the chambers of state power, the promise of social reforms in exchange for upholding the ‘national interest’ by, for example, opposing anti-colonial and Bolshevist subversion, held great appeal. The ‘labour lieutenants of capitalism’ (Lenin borrowed the phrase from the syndicalist De Leon) contributed greatly to the ‘monstrous victory’ of national chauvinism within the Second International.

By ingratiating themselves to the British state, labour officials also accepted the colonial status quo. This meant that, as the free trade doctrine gradually gave way to protectionism in the interwar period, under the pressure of German and American industrial competition, the Labour and TUC officialdom – not just labour aristocracy – were increasingly amenable to social imperialism. Pioneering the new approach was Jimmy Thomas, leader of the Railwaymen’s Union, who insisted he would tolerate ‘no mucking about with the British Empire’ upon his appointment as Colonial Secretary in the first (minority) Labour government in 1924, and followed this up by authorising the RAF bombing of Iraqi villagers.

Critics of Lenin point out that trade union conservatism is more ‘simply’ explained by ‘the specific role they play in society, negotiating between capital and labour over the terms of exploitation’. As these critics point out, these dynamics also play out in non-imperialist countries. But as we have seen, this functionalist account is insufficient by itself in explaining the imperialist thread running through Britain’s labour history.

The real strength of Lenin’s approach lay in identifying the qualitative character of reformism in the ‘strong’ imperialist nations; describing how the ‘Mensheviks of the West’ had acquired ‘a much firmer “footing” in the trade unions’ than in his Russia – the ‘weakest link’ in the imperialist chain. For Lenin this was related to the question of why socialist revolution succeeded in the East rather than the West, as Marx originally anticipated. In a 2015 article on Leninism, Post reduces this issue to the political level, of Tsarist absolutism short-circuiting ‘the stabilisation of parliamentary institutions and trade union legality [that] was the social foundation of reformism’ in the West. While this is no doubt true, the institutions of Western reformism were built on the economic bedrock of imperialism. As the British example most firmly demonstrates, prosperous empire enhanced the ruling class’s manoeuvrability to maintain domestic social compromise – bolstering the parliamentary framework during the interwar revolutionary tide.

Empire socialism

On the eve of the 1926 British General Strike, the TUC passed a remarkable communist-inspired resolution affirming the right of all colonised peoples to self-determination. This radical intervention was, however, undercut by the official left in government. When the heroes of Red Clydeside – a hotbed of industrial insurgency in 1914–19 – were defanged and co-opted into the first Labour cabinet, it was not just a case of the parliamentary safety valve. Upon taking seats in the House of Commons, the Clydesiders traded in the language of class war for social imperialism: lobbying for imperial preference to assist ‘national British industry’, while scapegoating black and Asian immigrants for wage depression.

Social imperialism was a political, as well as economic, device. The new imperialism’s late-Victorian Tory ideologues, Rhodes, Chamberlain and Disraeli, had aimed at disarming socialism by appealing to a defence of imperial greatness and its reflected glory; strengthened by ‘kinship’ ties to the dominion settler-colonies. Three decades later, labour leaders with experience of office during a period of economic crisis found they could also use empire as a pressure valve for class strife. During the second minority Labour government in 1929, Bevin, leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, supported the social-imperialist policy of tied loans to the colonies with ‘buy British’ clauses, as a solution to national unemployment. [12]

Anti-imperialist opposition cohered outside of the Parliamentary Labour Party and TUC. Members of the League Against Imperialism, particularly ‘racialised outsiders’ in the orbit of the communist movement like Shapurji Saklatvala, sought to convince workers that imperialist competition was mutually ruinous in the long run. Without struggling for a ‘world standard’ for labour, both metropolitan and colonised workers would be stuck in ‘a race to the bottom’ – as was most clearly apparent with the impoverishment of British miners. There was a solidarity campaign for the anti-colonial activists, including several British trade unionists, persecuted in the Meerut Conspiracy Trials. However, the trade unions were too easily seduced by the immediate nostrum of imperial preference to shore up the old export industries, rather than the long-term strategy of international working-class revolution – or even industrial rationalisation and modernisation.

With British imperialism increasingly fitting Lenin’s description of large industrial-financial combines, it was inevitable that ‘raw-material exploitation, investment and “the flag”’ became closely associated. [13] The visibility of immediate benefits of empire to workers, however much they were a chimera, and the ideology of imperial greatness that was a hangover from the epoch of free-trade supremacy, discouraged most labour and socialist critics from challenging imperialism in its totality.

As has been shown, the empire question in the British labour movement was generally not a case of pro- versus anti-imperialists, but rather the orthodox imperialism of ‘free trade’ (associated with cheap food) against imperial protectionism. In contrast to Lenin’s labour aristocracy thesis, what we see is a more complex interplay between economic and political-institutional forces. WWI had cemented the state capture of the trade union and socialist officialdom, who in seeking to identify workers with the ‘national interest’ frequently resorted to social imperialism and anti-immigrant nativism. These prejudices were, though, latent within the working class as a whole, since imperialism had permeated the lifeblood of Britain’s economy and its national culture. The aristocratic craft unions did play a significant, but by no means leading, part in the story.

Despite the oversimplifications of his theory, Lenin far-sightedly identified that imperialism had generated ‘not only a certain “non-adaptability to any break in gradualness”’ – it had also created ‘an entire opportunist trend’ on the Western left, encouraged by those within the labour movement who aligned with ‘their’ national bourgeoisie through ‘numerous ties of common economic, social, and political interests’. For Lenin, this disarming of Western socialism had its ‘dialectical opposite’ in the anti-colonial national liberation struggles in what later became known as the Third World. These trends magnified in the decades after Lenin’s death, but the radically transformed postwar world economy, and consolidation of social democracy in the global North, would raise novel problems.

Part two: From Lenin to the new left

Lenin’s writings on imperialism and ‘social chauvinism’ had constituted a powerful, rallying challenge to the discredited Second International. However, his equation of imperialism with ‘monopoly capitalism’, which he posited as capitalism’s last, moribund stage, neglected continuities with earlier phases, and its ongoing vitality. The apocalyptic temper of early-twentieth century Bolshevism, along with its residual economic determinism, was reflected in Lenin’s belief that reformism would wither away as imperialist crisis eroded the material basis for the labour aristocracy’s existence. [14]

Writing during the capitalist recovery after the Second World War, Tony Cliff, a Palestinian Jewish Trotskyist and founder of the International Socialist tendency in Britain, criticised the Leninist theory that ‘a small thin crust of conservatism hides the revolutionary urges of the mass of the workers’ for underestimating the durability of reformism: ‘its solidity, its spread throughout the working class, frustrating and largely isolating all revolutionary minorities’. The postwar economic ‘tide that raised all boats’ and the spread of welfare capitalism had generated an enlarged social basis for reformism, beyond any privileged labour aristocracy. Imperialism, though, had hardly disappeared from the picture.

Imperialist social democracy

Enshrouded in left-wing mythology, the defining era of British social democracy was also the zenith of trade union imperialism and empire socialism. Attlee’s Labour government that built the welfare state relied on dollars earned from colonial exports of rubber and tin from Malaya and cocoa from Ghana, as well as Iranian oil, to assuage its huge balance of payments deficit with America. [15] The Trades Union Congress and its Colonial Advisory Committee played its role overseas, in helping to marginalise anti-colonial nationalisms threatening British economic control. [16]

Infamously, Ernie Bevin, the Transport and General Workers Union heavyweight and now Labour’s Foreign Secretary, declared in 1946 that ‘I am not prepared to sacrifice the British empire [because] it would mean that the standard of life of our constituents would fall considerably.’ As the Pan-Africanist George Padmore bluntly put it, labour leaders like Bevin wanted to turn British workers into collective ‘shareholders of the Empire’. In a way, Lenin’s account of the imperialist-corrupted ‘labour lieutenants of capitalism’ had been prophetic. Again, though, as we saw in part one, social imperialism was not just driven by the ‘aristocratic’ craft unions but was part of the broader political phenomenon of nationalist social democracy. Even Nye Bevan, the Welsh miner turned founding father of the NHS, expressed outrage when Gamel Abdel Nasser took control of the Suez Canal, racistly dubbing him ‘Ali Baba’.

The corollary of Labour’s nationalisation of class was that parliamentary socialists and trade union leaders accepted as natural that the colonies would remain suppliers of raw materials for British industries providing skilled jobs for British workers, and buyers of their manufactures. As Charlie Post emphasises, it would be short-sighted to see postwar welfare reforms and wage rises as mere ‘sops’ – again, there would have been no concessions without working-class struggle – but imperialism had nonetheless greatly enhanced the ‘flexibility and manoeuvrability of the ruling class’ to maintain social compromise within the national capitalist framework.

There was little support among workers for the annexationist imperialism of Tory prime minister Anthony Eden, but there was ready acceptance of the beneficial economic exchange with the colonies. This did not stop the labour movement joining, and at times spearheading, the growing pressure for controls on black and brown immigration from the decolonising empire. Particularly in the ‘aristocratic’ craft unions, anti-immigrant attitudes meshed with ingrained practices of exclusion based on apprenticeship and parochial or kinship attachments. [17] With the advent of the welfare state, though, the wider British working class was increasingly integrated into the ‘national-racialized scaffold’.

Social welfare expanded significantly under the reforming Labour government, with an ostensibly universal healthcare system serviced by low-paid workers, particularly women, extracted from the empire. The reforms were partial – there were chronic housing shortages, and initial austerity. Nonetheless, their national character, and provision by the state, tied ideas of economic redistribution to nativist (and gendered) notions of entitlement, belonging, and exclusion. [18] Increasingly, after the waning of the 1950s economic boom, hostility to immigrants came wrapped in the social-democratic language of distributing limited national resources. In 1968, these anti-immigration arguments long voiced by trade unionists were effectively capitalised on and radicalised by Conservative politician Enoch Powell.

As was noted at the time by the socialist journalist Paul Foot, the racial-populist appeals of Powell and the new right transcended any neat boundaries of class or strata. [19] Even more than the racist interwar campaigns against ‘aliens’ and colonial port workers, Powellism highlighted the inadequacy of the orthodox Leninist tendency to collapse distinct issues of patriotism, social imperialism, and racism into a singular phenomenon of ‘social chauvinism’, attributed to the economic bribery of a privileged minority of workers. A turn to broader questions of political culture by intellectuals associated with the 1960s new left, like Stuart Hall, came partly in reaction to the weaknesses of the labour aristocracy theory, deemed ‘too rational, too partial, too naïvely materialistic and, in a sense, far too optimistic’. [20]

Third Worldism in Britain

Also associated with the sixties new left, but with a very different approach to the Gramscian Marxists like Hall, was a flowering of anti-imperialist political economy inspired by Third World revolutionary intellectuals including Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, and Che Guevara. These theorists pointed to new mechanisms of neocolonial economic exploitation, which had survived formal decolonisation.

Developing Lenin’s earlier insights, they argued that Western social democracy was still underpinned by unequal economic relations with the formerly colonised nations, enabled by enduring financial and technological dependencies and asymmetric military power. At the same time, the relative social peace in Northern Europe and America was all the more conspicuous in comparison to the revolutionary ‘storm zones’ of the emergent Third World. Assumptions about Western workers being the vanguard of revolution, as with Ted Grant (founder of the Trotskyist Militant tendency)’s claim that a ‘Socialist Europe, Japan and America’ would ‘lead Asia, Africa and Latin America direct to Communism in a World Federation’, were increasingly divorced from reality. [21]

In reacting against these Eurocentric attitudes, some Third World-oriented Marxists began to argue that the whole Northern working class had become a ‘labour aristocracy’ living a parasite existence on the backs of the poorer nations. Writing in the New Left Review in 1963, radical geographer and sinologist Keith Buchanan wrote off the entire Western proletariat as ‘embourgeoisé’ and ‘Euro-centric’, accusing it of having directly ‘forced up its standard of living … at the expense of fellow workers in the colonial world.’ [22] Arghiri Emmanuel, the brilliantly iconoclastic author of Unequal Exchange, went much further than Lenin in arguing that colonialism had ‘benefit[ted] the proletarians more than the capitalists’ in the metropoles, by creating permanent expectations of ‘super-wages’. [23]

Theorists of neocolonialism and unequal exchange like Emmanuel sometimes shared with later postcolonial scholars an impressionistic picture of Western workers as passive recipients of hegemonic imperial outlook. Their neo-Leninist accounts of reformism could reproduce mechanical political thinking, exemplified in Britain by the Revolutionary Communist Group’s belief that the ‘crisis of imperialism will inevitably lead to the disintegration of the Labour Party, as the social base of the labour aristocracy shrinks’. The flipside of this fatalism was a trend of particularly middle-class students and intellectuals seeking to ‘substitute “third world peoples” for the “proletariat” in expressing their messianic expectation’. [24]

The thesis of the ‘embourgeoisement’ of Western workers ‘seduced’ by the new consumerism, which dovetailed in Britain with ideas about the ‘affluent worker’ championed by Labour’s revisionist right-wing, provoked an inevitable backlash from British socialists. More orthodox Marxists particularly chafed at the neo-mercantilist bent of theories that posited a direct causal relationship between the consumption and wage demands of Northern workers, and the degradation of Southern labour. Mike Kidron, the International Socialists’ resident economist, argued that wage differentials simply reflected divergent productivity levels, and that Western workers ‘are richer, but more exploited’ – a claim later echoed by Post.

Kidron further suggested that ‘the outstanding difference’ between Northern and Southern workers ‘lies in the different degrees to which they are culturally enriched’; illustrating the point by arguing that unlike Indian workers the ‘average British worker can be expected to read and drive’. [25] What this firstly neglected is that skill is not a neutral category, abstracted from racialised and (neo)colonial divisions of labour, and secondly, that low wages in the South are also caused by imperialist restrictions on labour mobility. As Walter Daum writes in the Review of African Political Economy, Kidron’s argument reads today as ‘patronizing and chauvinist … Indian (and other Southern) workers can handle concepts and be “culturally enriched” – and yet be paid poorly.’ All too often British socialists extrapolated valid critiques of Manichean Third Worldist politics into a blanket dismissal of Southern Marxists’ contributions to understanding uneven global development and dependencies, as only so many variations of ‘black reformism [sic]’ – in the words of Kidron. [26]

Socialism ‘after empire’?

Belying the embourgeoisement thesis, the late 1960s and 1970s did see openings for radical labour politics in the imperial metropoles, including Britain, where decolonisation also encouraged the breakdown of social hierarchy and deferential culture ‘back home’. There was an upturn in industrial militancy that included workplace revolts by women and racialised minorities, challenging conservative trade union culture.

Though the surge of strike action largely reflected sectional wage struggles by ‘skilled’ manual workers, the same self-confident trade unionists often became involved in international solidarity campaigns. The anti-apartheid boycott eventually overcame the leg-dragging of the TUC, which argued it would hurt British jobs since state-owned manufacturers like Leyland motors had large investments in South Africa. [27] The strengthening of anti-imperialist sentiment was also reflected by the transformed outlook of Tribune, voice of the Labour and trade union left, which left behind its earlier reforming colonialist vision.

Empire socialism had already collapsed by the sixties, its fate tied to the fortunes of sterling which was unable to withstand economic rivalry from Europe and America. In a response to Buchanan’s article, Michael Barratt Brown, an economist of the post-1956 ‘first’ new left and author of After Empire, pointed out that clinging to the old colonial exchange of raw materials for increasingly uncompetitive industrial goods had only compounded Britain’s stagnation. [28] This hastened the City of London’s increasingly prominent role as a global financial broker, and accelerated decline of Britain’s productive base.

In the 1970s Barratt Brown was one of the authors of an Alternative Economic Strategy for the Labour Movement, associated with Tony Benn and the trade union left. [29] In response to financialisation, it proposed a national strategy for industry modernisation with worker control. While ranged against the practices of multinational corporations (MNCs) and the International Monetary Fund, this opposition often took the familiar form of a superficial anti-imperialism, in nationalist guise. This was apparent in Benn’s rhetoric of Britain itself being ‘colonised’ by Washington and the European Economic Community, which rather obscured Britain’s enduring status as a neocolonial power in its own right with capitalist interests spread across the Third World. Through Benn’s nationalist framing, schemes for industrial regeneration could also all too readily sink into the nativist social-democratic mantra of skilled jobs for British workers. According to Cliff, the communist shop steward Jimmy Airlie took the view in 1979 that ‘if Newcastle are losing six ships through disputes, we will build them. If not us, then the Japs will.’

Benn was right that the City had become (and continues to be) an intermediary for Euro-dollar imperialism, and his moral internationalism presented a real challenge to British complicity in neocolonial wars and support for clientelist dictatorships. We can hardly accept the Sun’s rendition of Benn as ‘the last British imperialist rampant, still inhabiting a world in which the poor countries sell us their food and raw materials on the cheap and gratefully purchase our manufactured goods’ (a description indistinguishable from the Revolutionary Communist Group’s view of Benn). [30] Nonetheless, in failing to adopt a robust critique of global unequal exchange, the Alternative Economic Strategy missed a vital opportunity to link up with contemporaneous Southern demands for a New International Economic Order. As a spokesman of the Confederation of British Industry said in 1977, ‘I don’t think the multinationals have got much to worry about yet from the international labour movement.’ [31]

An increasing criticism of theories of neocolonialism was that the industrialisation of much of the South was enabling economic diversification, away from dependency on raw material exports. Kidron believed the ‘diffusion of industrial capitalism’ meant a trend for productivity levels to become ‘increasingly standardised the world over’, so that differences in profit rates deriving from wage differentials between the West and formerly colonised world ‘tended to narrow’. This line of reasoning infamously became, in the hands of Bill Warren, a Marxist argument in favour of imperialism. [32]  As suggested by the extent of poverty and maldevelopment still present in the former Third World, Kidron’s optimistic vision has not been borne out by reality. Questions of dependency and unequal exchange remained unresolved, and the polarised debates of the new left era have cast a long shadow.

We have seen how the British welfare state and apogee of Labour corporatism was built on the foundation of empire socialism. The period brought class-wide economic benefits, though ideas of skill and hierarchies of entitlement were woven into nativist social democracy. Theories of working-class embourgeoisement were belied by Britain’s economic decline in the face of imperialist competition, and the outsourcing of industry to the South. Nonetheless, trade unions remained conscious of Britain’s relatively privileged world position, and as we will see in part three, the nationalist propensities of Bennism have parallels in the British left’s responses to globalisation today.

Part three: Workers and imperialism today

Today the world is in many ways as divided as it was in Lenin’s time, a reality starkly highlighted by the uneven global fallout of climate crisis. However, the onset of capitalist ‘globalisation’ at the end of the twentieth century entailed new, more opaque forms of imperialist exploitation. It has also been accompanied by the neoliberal rollback of social-democratic reforms in the global North, while the last three decades have seen the rise of a Southern economic powerhouse, China.

Has Britain’s deindustrialisation rendered the old labour aristocracy a historical relic? And is Post right, that Northern workers do not receive any material benefits from ongoing ‘super-exploitation’ in the global South?

Imperialism in the 21^st century

In the 1990s and even early 2000s, globalisation was widely (and mistakenly) heralded as the end of old international rivalry and domination. [33] As Sivanandan already observed in 1990, liberal political economy had made invisible the ‘massed-up workers of the Third World, on whose greater immiseration and exploitation the brave new Western world of post-Fordism’ was erected. Recent years, though, have seen a welcome return to economic analysis of imperialism. Published in 2016, John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century updated the insights of the postwar theorists of neocolonialism to demystify the ‘hidden’ values captured today in hierarchical global commodity chains.

Smith was partly responding to theorists in the International Socialism tradition like Alex Callinicos who, drawing on Kidron, argued that the Northern nations’ foreign direct investments (FDI) in the global South had ‘almost dried up’. Post has likewise suggested that these investments are ‘negligible’, when compared to the larger FDI flows between the rich imperialist countries of Europe, America, and Japan. Smith, however, has shown how Western-headquartered transnational companies exploit cheap Southern (including Chinese) workers in outsourced, labour-intensive assembly work making products like iPhones. Alongside superprofits from the traditional extractive industries of oil and mining, the result, as Tony Norfield also highlights, is that rates of return on Britain’s overseas investments in Africa and Asia are far higher than those in the larger European and North American markets.

The continued prevalence of poverty wages (‘super-exploitation’) in the South is the result not just of lower productivity levels by itself, but of the ‘coercive suppression of labour mobility’ – i.e., immigration controls – that remains characteristic of imperialism. [34] Even in the BRICS countries, which are now defined by many Western leftists, including in rs21, as imperialist, super-exploitation accounts, according to Michael Roberts, for 25–30 percent of the workforce. Though China has become a major investor in developing countries, notably in Africa, it is as yet structurally excluded from the imperial ‘core’: it can hardly be said that British workers are exploited by Chinese capital, but the inverse remains true. [35] Today’s more complexly layered international economic and political order has not yet fully erased the old North-South imperialist divide.

As Post protests, few Northern workers, and certainly not the atomised service proletariat, are direct beneficiaries of super-exploitation in the South. We can reject a mechanical neo-Third Worldist politics that still refers to ‘the fundamentally bourgeois class structure of Britain’ at a time when over two million people in Britain are using food banks. [36] Nevertheless, imperialist monopoly privileges have mitigated against the downward pressures on British wages of international competition and rising rates of exploitation, by helping maintain relatively elevated purchasing power. And, despite a decade and a half of austerity, the gains of social democracy have not yet been fully hollowed out.

Post may be right that over the long run, as Lenin of course also believed, ‘the sharpening competition among workers internationally more than offsets the benefits of imperialism for workers in the global North’, a view he reiterates in his rs21 article. As much is suggested by the proliferation of zero-hours contracts and spiralling cost of living in Britain. If empire had assisted in the building of Britain’s social democracy on a capitalist footing, this had nonetheless included the seeds for its future dismantling: as Kojo Koram points out in Uncommon Wealth, ‘the decolonial project was defeated by the same tidal wave of financialisaton that has also eroded the welfare state “back home” in Britain.’

The problem – and this is Arghiri Emmanuel’s old challenge that is less easily dismissed – is that Post’s ‘long run’ is naturally further than most working people are inclined to look ahead, which means that nativist ‘solutions’ to economic crisis have tended to outcompete visions of ending capitalism. [37]

Globalisation and its opponents

Neoliberalism’s crisis of consent has emboldened anti-capitalist sentiment on the left, but more pervasive has been the populist backlash against globalisation, including moral panics about migrant crises. Anxiety caused by the race to the bottom of wages competition has effectively been channelled into nativist anti-immigrant sentiment, rather than international class solidarity. Nonetheless, simplified left critiques of the reactionary motivations that surrounded Brexit can obscure the more complex grievances against social uprooting, and the uneven geographic fallout of industrial collapse.

Portrayals of the ‘traditional’ working class as a unique repository of imperial nostalgia risk playing into both right-wing ventriloquism, whereby reactionary politicians claim to be speaking as the authentic voice of the people, as well as pro-EU liberalism’s ‘dependency on working-class “backwardness” for its own claim to modern multicultural citizenship’. [38] Conservative values attributed to parochial workers also reflect the interests of the old petty bourgeoisie: small businesses and self-employed tradespeople, antagonistic to big capital as well as the professional salaried classes who gained from New Labour’s City orientation and public sector managerialism. However, reformist and populist politicians do still make appeals to workers through emotive notions of skill, entitlement, and Britain’s privileged world position.

This nativist cocktail was evident in Paul Mason’s call for Corbyn to advance ‘a programme to deliver growth and prosperity in Wigan, Newport and Kirkcaldy – if necessary at the price of not delivering them to Shenzhen, Bombay [sic] and Dubai.’ The desire to meet anti-globalisation sentiment and assuage trade union leaders without alienating big business further underlay Starmer’s half-hearted ‘pivot to production’, which promised to compensate for continued slashing of public services by promoting investment in defence and green technology.

While centrist solutions are increasingly tepid, the left’s own response to globalisation has faced difficulty in reaching a non-nationalist critique of liberal imperialism. Back in 2012, a proposed Alternative Economic and Political Strategy coauthored by two of Corbyn’s advisors, Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray, called for an anti-monopoly alliance ‘to defend industries and services and the thousands of small and medium businesses’, while arguing that Britain unshackled from the EU could benefit from ‘historic links’(!) with ex-colonial Commonwealth markets. These suggestions for redressing Britain’s economic decline are a long distance from the Tory right’s imperial revanchist bluster, but without addressing and opposing unequal exchange, they share a familial resemblance to the old mould of protectionist empire socialism.

Particularly troubling today are trade union attitudes to the bloated ‘defence’ sector, a surviving bastion of the imperialist labour aristocracy with some 55,000 workers employed in manufacturing arms like those being used to flatten Gaza. In 2019 Unite’s assistant general secretary Steve Turner stated that reduced military spending and job cuts at arms-contractor BAE Systems would ‘not only undermine Britain’s sovereign defence capability, but devastate communities across Britain who rely on these skilled jobs’. Similar calculations explain Sharon Graham’s present refusal to support calls to suspend military equipment sales to Israel. Unfortunately, this labour-aristocratic revanchism still exerts pressure on the parliamentary left, circumscribing its internationalism. At the launch of Labour’s ‘Build it in Britain’ campaign, Corbyn lambasted the City of London’s ‘dirty money’, whilst reassuring the audience that aircraft carriers for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary would be built in ‘UK shipyards’.

Similar issues have pervaded the reformist left’s environmental strategy. Rebecca Long-Bailey’s proposal for a ‘green industrial revolution’ in 2019, which was endorsed by leaders of the six major trade unions, promised skilled jobs and clean energy domestically, but declined to mention the unequal ecological exchange involved in the requisite extraction of rare-earth metals located in the global South. These concerns are ignored by the recent ‘ecomodernist’ social democratic trend, whose proponents Matt Huber and Leigh Phillips, writing in Jacobin earlier this year, dismiss concerns about exploitation and the ‘imperial mode of living’ by referring to the ‘long discredited theory of a “labour aristocracy”’.

Conclusions

Lenin’s account of the imperialist distortion of the world-economy, and its reflection in class formation, remains relevant for advancing what Paris Yeros and the late Sam Moyo of the African Institute of Agrarian Studies have called ‘a more committed internationalism, which insists on the substantive, not cosmetic, dissolution of hierarchies among nations and proletariats in the struggle against capital.’ [39] It allows us to get beyond a general account of reformism centred on the role of trade union bureaucracy and electoral politics, which are important but insufficient explanations for the poverty of labour internationalism. It further tells us why revolutionary forces have been and will continue to be concentrated in the global peripheries and semi-peripheries of capitalism – but also why progressive socialist, internationalist politics in the imperialist heartlands have their own special importance.

We have, however, seen the limitations of Lenin’s emphasis on the labour aristocracy. It is certainly true that skilled workers in sectors directly tied to imperialism have often played an inglorious role: shipbuilders during the Boer War, or engineers producing arms tech today. But the Leninist account has obscured a more complex interplay between imperialism’s economic and cultural impact on the British working class as a whole, and the state capture of the labour and socialist movement. Crucial was the political role of the trade union and (typically middle-class) socialist officialdom, who in ingratiating themselves to the state pledged allegiance to the ‘national [hence, imperial] interest’. This helps explain why even Mick Lynch feels compelled to pay homage to the monarchy and the Royal British Legion – a display of state loyalism by a left-wing trade union leader with particular implications from the viewpoint of the global South. However, nativist social democracy would not have taken so strong a hold in the North if it did not enable workers to share, in some ways, in the relative economic prosperity of the imperial core. If ‘nationalism soldered social democracy to capitalism’, imperialism was the furnace that fuelled the fusion.

The question of whether or not British workers materially ‘benefit’ from imperialism is somewhat misleading. Post emphasises that imperialism depresses wages and conditions everywhere, because capitalist competition and accumulation ‘constantly differentiate’ labour and production processes, forcing groups of workers to compete against each other. In each period we have discussed, imperialist competition did exert downward pressures on British wages, a fact that was always rightly stressed by socialist internationalists. But this was only one side of the contradictory dynamics of ‘real capitalist competition’, which in creating global uneven and combined development, has resulted in relatively greater structural bargaining power of workers in the rich imperialist countries. Time and again, British workers have responded to threats on their living conditions by seeking to defend their existing wage and welfare gains in exclusionary, nativist terms – in the process undermining their own collective resistance to the power of capital. In a kind of Faustian bargain, when workers have drunk the ‘blood of imperial tribute’ which ‘courses through the veins of the British economy’ giving it a ‘feverish glow’, their acceptance of exploitation abroad has been mirrored in acquiescence to class domination at home, along with the destructive drive towards militarism. [40]

In other words, powerful ‘objective’ economic conditions exist for both nationalist and internationalist impulses among workers, but the political forces of the anti-systemic left are usually outgunned by those of the capitalist status quo. As David Roediger notes, the left has often been hindered by its ‘enervating desire for solidarity to be easy’. This includes a tendency to focus on heroic historical episodes – the Lancashire cotton boycott of the American Confederacy, the campaign against the Meerut trials, the Anti-Apartheid Movement. As was also highlighted in War on Want’s 1978 pamphlet on trade union imperialism, ‘fragments of history have been strung together to add up to an apparently continuing tradition [of internationalism] helping give labour a sense of moral ascendancy’. [41]

It is nonetheless true that working-class internationalism was never wholly suppressed. Corbynism ‘created a huge wave of enthusiasm among hundreds of thousands of people for whom “socialism” and “anti-imperialism” are not dirty words’, while today, many workers join the mass street movement opposing genocide in Palestine and Western complicity, and support daring acts to disrupt the arms flow. To the harms of economic competition are now added the emotive problems of climate change, and the erosion of civil liberties as part of global securitisation processes. The question ‘socialism or barbarism?’ has renewed resonance, but we should remain wary of capitalism’s capacity to resolve system crises through new configurations of power, and to channel dissent into reactionary outlets.

What also clearly emerges from our historical overview is the tendency for anti-systemic energies in Britain to be deflected away from targeting imperialism in its totality, and into nativist (and often explicitly racist) opposition to ‘unpatriotic’ transnational capital as well as immigrant labour. That left-populist critiques of empire and globalisation are highly compatible with national chauvinism and social conservatism, as with George Galloway’s conscription to the ‘war on woke’, shows that an ‘undifferentiated anti-imperialism’ is an inadequate basis for socialist politics.

A strategic approach to socialist internationalism will mean not losing sight of either conjuncture – the contingencies of class and national struggles, and points of anti-imperialist resistance – or structure – British labour’s long, intimate entanglement with empire. As Lenin reflected in 1920, after the failure of revolution to spread westward: ‘The disease is a protracted one; the cure takes longer than the optimists hoped it would.’

[1] Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour (NY: Monthly Review Press, 1964).

[2] Michael Barratt Brown, After Imperialism (London: Heinemann, 1963), p. 8.

[3] Kenneth Lapides (ed.), Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions (NY: International Publishers, 1990), pp. 196–7. Strangely, Eric Hobsbawm wrongly credited Engels with coining the phrase in the 1880s.

[4] Quoted in Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (NY: John Wiley, 1965), p. 290.

[5] Barratt Brown, After Imperialism, pp. 95; 122–3.

[6] As Hobsbawm noted, ‘The further we progress into the imperialist era, the more difficult does it become to put one’s finger on groups of workers which did not, in one way or another, draw some advantage from Britain’s position’. Labouring Men (Lowe & Brydone, 1971), p. 323.

[7] Satnam Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 65.

[8] Stuart Macintyre, Imperialism and the British Labour Movement in the 1920s: An Examination of Marxist Theory  (Our History pamphlet no. 64, 1975).

[9] Partha Sarathi Gupta, Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 1914–64 (NY: Holmes & Meier, 1975).

[10] Tom Nairn, ‘The Left against Europe?’, New Left Review, 1/75 (Sept–Oct 1972), p. 44. As in the case of German ‘revisionist’ Marxism, reformist Fabian socialism was also influenced by the rise of a ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ of white-collar workers.

[11] Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (London: Penguin Books, 1967), pp. 58–65; 88–89.

[12] Gupta, Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, pp. 137–9.

[13] Barratt Brown, After Imperialism, p. 130. Lenin’s analysis offered what Barratt Brown referred to as a ‘composite picture’ of imperialism before 1913, with his stress on monopoly combines being based on the German example, and not really applicable to Britain until the 1920s. Ibid, p. 97.

[14] Lenin repeatedly stressed that the imperialist labour aristocracy was a ‘temporary phenomenon’, causing the ‘temporary decay’of the working-class movement.

[15] John Callaghan, The Labour Party and Foreign Policy: A History (Routledge, 2007), p. 154.

[16] Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire 1918–1964 (Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 134–5.

[17] See e.g. Mark Duffield, Black Radicalism and the Politics of De-industrialisation: The Hidden History of Indian Foundry Workers (Aldershot: Gower Publishing Company Ltd, 1988).

[18] Alastair Bonnett, ‘How the British Working Class Became White: The Symbolic (Re)formation of Racialized Capitalism’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 11/3 (1998), pp. 316–40.

[19] Paul Foot, Race and Immigration in British Politics (London: Penguin Books, 1965).

[20] H. F. Moorhouse, ‘The Marxist Theory of the Labour Aristocracy’, Social History, 3/1 (1978), p. 82.

[21] Ted Grant, ‘The Colonial Revolution and the Sino-Soviet Dispute’, Fourth International 8th World Congress, document presented by the British Section (June 1969).

[22] Keith Buchanan, ‘The Third World—Its Emergence and Contours’, New Left Review, 1/18 (Jan/Feb 1963), p. 22.

[23] Arghiri Emmanuel, ‘The Delusions of Internationalism’, Monthly Review, 22/2 (1970), p. 18.

[24] Samir Amin, Re-Reading the Postwar Period: An Intellectual Itinerary (NY: Monthly Review Press, 1994), p. 10. Amin, an Egyptian-French Marxist, was a prominent dependency theorist and critic of Emmanuel’s approach.

[25] Michael Kidron, ‘Black Reformism: The Theory of Unequal Exchange’ in Capitalism and Theory (London: Pluto Press, 1974), pp. 100–103.

[26] Kidron levelled this charge against the Egyptian Marxist and heterodox dependency theorist Samir Amin – who was himself a critic of Emmanuel. Kidron, ‘Black Reformism’, pp. 115–6.

[27] The TUC even argued that British industry’s investments in South Africa would assist black workers. Roger Fieldhouse, Anti-Apartheid: A History of the Movement in Britain (London: Merlin Press, 2005), pp. 377; 384.

[28] Michael Barratt Brown, ‘Third World or Third Force’, New Left Review, 1/20 (May 1963), pp. 32–36.

[29] Michael Barratt Brown, John Eaton, and Ken Coates, An Alternative Strategy for the Labour Movement (Nottingham: Spokesman for the Institute of Workers Control), 1975).

[30] Quoted in Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 255.

[31] Quoted in Don Thompson and Rodney Larson, Where Were You, Brother? An Account of Trade Union Imperialism (London: War on Want, 1978), p. 114.

[32] Bill Warren, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1980).

[33] John Narayan and Leon Sealey-Huggins, ‘Whatever Happened to the Idea of Imperialism?’, Third World Quarterly, 38/11 (2017), pp. 2387–95.

[34] John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis (NY: Monthly Review Press, 2016), p. 179.

[35] As new left economist Minqi Li points out, while Western multinationals invest in China to exploit its cheap labour and natural resources, much of China’s overseas investments still comprise accumulated dollar reserves, in exchange for which America acquires trillions of dollars’ worth of Chinese goods through ‘seigniorage privilege’.

[36] Zak Cope, The Wealth of (Some) Nations: Imperialism and the Mechanics of Value Transfer (Pluto Press, 2019), 195.

[37] Emmanuel, ‘Delusions of Internationalism’, pp. 14–15.

[38] Chris Haylett, ‘Illegitimate Subjects?: Abject Whites, Neoliberal Modernisation, and Middle-Class Multiculturalism’, Society and Space, 19/3 (2001), p. 365.

[39] Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, ‘Intervention: The Zimbabwe Question and the Two Lefts’, Historical Materialism, 15/3 (2007), p. 173.

[40] Rajani Palme Dutt quoted in Barratt Brown, After Imperialism, p. 285.

[41] Thompson and Larson, Where Were You, Brother?, p. 125.