Ever since capitalism entered its monopoly stage a peculiar feature began to appear: From the working class appeared a stratum of workers that received, in form or another, preferential treatment by the capitalist class. This ”labor aristocracy” as it became to be known was a stratum of workers, which shared to various degrees in the superprofits of the national monopolies and occupies leading positions in the labor movement. This provided the fertile soil on which opportunism was born; the collaboration of working class leaders with their own capitalist class, e.g. the current trade-union leadership, social-democratic members of parliament, ministers, etc. Today this kind of betrayal of working class interests is cloaked in the term ”social partnership”.
This particular feature of capitalism in its highest stage, imperialism, was first noted by Marx and particularly Engels in the English working class. Engels wrote in 1858 in a letter to Marx: ”the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the possession, alongside the bourgeoisie, of […] a bourgeois proletariat. In the case of a nation which exploits the entire world this is, of course, justified to some extent.” (Quoted from Lenin, 1916: Imperialism and the Split in Socialism: page 107)
Lenin generalized this idea as monopoly capitalism spread to the rest of Europe; whereever monopolies have developed they are sharing a part of their superprofits to ”bribe” the leaders of the labor movement. Thus opportunism becomes a common occurance where capitalism has reached its highest stage of development.
This existence of the ”Labor Aristocracy” is the main reason why the working class needs a vanguard party that organizes resistance to such a betrayal of the working class and struggles against opportunism in all organizations of the working class. The interests of the working class can today only be defended by such a vanguard party and not by broad class organizations like the trade-unions alone.