Review: Bromma's "The Worker Elite"

At this year's Historical Materialism conference at York, though I was unable to attend any panels, I had the pleasure of visiting the book table shared by Kersplebedeb and PM Press so as to hang out with the representative of the former.  As some of my readers might know, I have been an avid reader of the titles printed by Kersplebedeb and have reviewed some of them on this blog: Butch Lee and Red Rover's Night Vision, Zak Cope's Divided World, Divided Class (twice, in fact), James Yaki Sayles' Meditations on Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, and J. Sakai's Settlers.  Those familiar with the press will also be aware that it has, among other things, published Kevin "Rashid" Johnson's Defying the Tomb as well as, jointly with PM, the RAF: A Documentary History series.  As a leftist academic who has always been drawn to subterranean marxist traditions I have found the work of Kersplebedeb refreshing, often an enjoyable break from the innumerable dry tomes I find myself slogging through day-in and day-out.

Thus, I was quite happy to complete my visit with Kersplebedeb by purchasing two of its most recent publications: the Bottom Fish Blues collection Amazon Nation or Aryan Nation, and Bromma's The Worker Elite.  The latter, which I will begin reviewing below, I read within a day––in part because it was short, in part because it read well––and have just started the former, which I also plan to review in a later post.

My first encounter with the author of The Worker Elite was a pamphlet, also printed by Kersplebedeb, entitled Exodus and Reconstruction: working-class women at the heart of globalization.  Since I had also enjoyed that essay, I was looking forward to picking up a copy of the author's The Worker Elite since it was another engagement with the concept of the labour aristocracy, a topic that I believe is of considerable importance.  Most recently, and much to the horror of those leftists who would deny imperialist super-exploitation, Zak Cope's Divided World, Divided Class was also published by Kersplebedeb.  My initial worry was that Bromma's book would stay within the boundaries proscribed by Cope's book, perhaps borrowing more obviously from Sakai's Settlers, but would be ultimately little more than a polemical treatise declaring precisely what was theorized in Cope's weightier book.

Only 88 pages including the endnotes!

Thankfully my assumption was proved wrong: although it would be wrong to claim that Bromma's work has nothing to do with Cope's (Divided World, Divided Class is cited twice, after all), it would also be wrong to treat it as doing the same thing or agreeing completely with the theory of net-exploitation.  As the publisher told me, Cope's book provides, through its academic intervention, a certain space for works such as The Worker Elite to exist.  Here, it needs to be said that Bromma's treatise shines as a sharp argument for the existence of the labour aristocracy and class struggle that, unlike Cope's academic analysis, reads as if it is connected to concrete praxis.  (Note: this is not at all a dig at Cope.  Despite my problems with Divided World, Divided Class––that I mentioned in my aforelinked review(s)––I think its sober academic tone and extensive research is necessary to place this kind of political economy on the same level of "academic respectability" that those who reject the concept of the labour aristocracy enjoy.  Again, it opens the space for a debate.)  Really, the book was a joy to read, which is why I finished it within a day (including the underlining and marginal notes!), which is more than I can say for a lot of leftist non-fiction writing, my own included.  There was an immediacy to the text, produced by the personal touch in the very first paragraph.

None of this is to say that The Worker Elite is not without problems, some of which I will address at the end of this review, but no books are without problems.  Perhaps the biggest problem with this book is also one of its strength: its size and immediacy mean that it can only provide a collection of snap-shots on its subject matter, opening up particular regions of debate and discussion.  The author, however, recognizes this problem at the outset and defines the book as "preliminary, partial, and (to be realistic) almost certainly incorrect in some ways."

Of course, there will be those treat the book as "incorrect" for the wrong reasons.  Particularly, there will be those who, beginning with an a priori rejection of the theory of the labour aristocracy, will be incapable of recognizing that such a rejection can actually be explained according to Bromma's theory of the worker elite: these are people who, desiring to hold unto a privileged role within social movements, possess a class consciousness that hampers critical analysis.  Social consciousness, after all, is largely determined by social being.  We only need to catalogue the dishonest reviews of Sakai's Settlers and Cope's Divided World, Divided Class to realize that this kind of criticism often does proceed from particular social commitments and class privilege.

At the same time, there will be those who reject Bromma's book because it argues, while still accepting that the labour aristocracy's existence is due to imperialism and thus accrues at the centres of capitalism, that a proletariat does indeed exist in the imperialist centres.  That is, he does not make what I consider to be the error made by Cope: the conflation of exploitation with super-exploitation.  Such nuance, however, will probably also result in his dismissal on the part of those who abide by a theory of net-exploitation.  These commitments to statistics counting, which often prevent people from realizing that they are adopting philosophical rather than scientific positions, is something I critiqued when I attacked Post's review of Cope's book; it is also the problem with economic theory in general.

With these qualifications in mind, let us return to Bromma and The Worker Elite.  Beyond what they have written, I know little about the author aside from the fact that they are most probably in the same circles as J. Sakai and Butch Lee.  This book begins, however, with autobiographical details that are essential to the book's object of critique: Bromma was part of that group of 1970s radicals who tried to commit "class suicide" by entering the factories.  This experience is significant because it taught them, as it did with those members of Canada's New Communist Movement who are still radical, that these factories were not necessarily sites where revolutionary consciousness was possible.  Bromma's understanding of "the worker elite" comes from this experience.

Ever since Settlers and other similar texts, there has been an argument that the class category of "proletariat" needs to be differentiated from the broader category of "working class".  Bromma's theoretical contribution to this discussion is to divide the working class into three interior classes: the proletariat itself (still the revolutionary subject according to the root marxist definition), the lumpen-proletariat (parasitical on the proletariat, and here he does something interesting with what is usually a tricky term), and the worker elite (a working class that has become an economic middle class, the so-called "labour aristocracy", with a consciousness determined by this social being).  Quite interesting is the tantalizing claim that an adventurist politics results from mistaking the lumpen-proletariat for the proletariat, whereas a reformist/collaborationist politics results from mistaking the worker elite for the proletariat.  Only the latter forms the subject matter for this small volume.

Drawing out an analysis from this class struggle within class produces some intriguing ways of understanding social struggle.  The worker elite functions as a bought-out faction of the working class, initially valorized and empowered by imperialism and the New Deal, but one that finds itself in the typical (following directly from the traditional analyses of the labour aristocracy) position of having to ensure its middle-class status by hoping for proletarian struggles it can co-opt or undermine so as to prove its necessity to the bourgeoisie.  A mythology of the worker elite as proletariat emerges, as well as a particular class autonomy: it is not simply the bourgeoisie's puppet, but has its own interests that sometimes place it in conflict with the bourgeois––such conflict is only when it is facing the loss of its social privilege, the solution to this conflict, for the class as a class, is to prove its ability to staff those worker struggles that threaten the bourgeois order.

This class division of class produces a significant amount of nuance in understanding the labour aristocracy as a whole.  Due to the size and immediacy of the book this distinction is not fully described, but it is still present.  On the one hand we have the description of a context of labour aristocracy (imperialism and super-exploitation); on the other hand we have an investigation of the particular ways in which this general tendency accrues as a worker elite.  Macro and micro levels, the kind of problematic I was attempting (though hastily) to describe in one of my older posts, emerges quite cunningly in what might be called a phenomenology of the labour aristocracy.  The inherent nuance of this approach avoids placing the theory of the labour aristocracy within solely macro-political constraints (i.e. the first world is bourgeois and petty-bourgeois, only the third world possesses the proletariat) while also not submerging this reality within some asinine micro-political discourse (we shouldn't look at the world as a whole, unless we are looking for statistics that justify our position, but only at the class of the first world), and thus provides some space for a discussion that will likely annoy both sides of this debate: Bromma will be a "third worldist" for the dyed-in-the-wool Trotskyist, perhaps even a "first worldist" for some Maoist Third Worldists.

While Bromma still argues (and rightly so) that the worker elite is more common at the centres of capitalism than at the peripheries, at the same time he is able to argue for the location of a proletarian at the centres and, conversely, locate a worker elite at the peripheries.  He does so with the use of "purchasing power parity" [PPP] statistics that he himself recognizes is not entirely accurate, but here it is worth also recognizing that other statistics, due to the fact of their positivism, are also derived from bourgeois economics and thus not, by themselves, scientific.  It is worth noting, however, that the PPP analysis is used by imperialists so as to justify the ways in which they intervene; the IMF is notorious for utilizing such an analysis to understand when and where it must act to undermine possible rebellions against imperialism.  The pattern that emerges from his use of PPP statistics is one that indicates both super-exploitation and rarified exploitation even within imperialist nations.  Again, the size of the book prevents these statistics from being utilized in the same way as the statistics used by Cope.  Then again, Bromma is more interested in charting the ways in which the class struggle within the working class operates.

Aside from the limitations determined by the book's size, The Worker Elite is not without its problems.  First and foremost is the problem of a quasi class essentialism that hampers its nuanced take on the labour aristocracy.  We can locate this possible problem from the outset of the treatise where the author appears to claim their submergence within the working class did not make them a part of even this middle class stratum of workers.  Later there are arguments about how the worker elite, when dragged down to the level of a proletariat, will still see itself as the worker elite class.  There are also statements that seem to confuse class with caste, claiming that it needs to have some level of generational and familial permanence in order to be class.  These all seem to be misunderstandings of class-qua-class considering that the conceptualization of class was tendered against a feudal notion of estates where a person's social essence was determined according to the social position into which they were born.  One could never really alter their social position, according to this view of reality, and the concept of class was raised against this tributary way of seeing the world.

Hence, if someone does reproduce their existence (assuming they aren't "slumming" where they can return, at any time they wish, to a privileged existence) according to the standards of a lower class, then they are no longer members of the class they abandoned.  Similarly, the extremely rare example of the poor person who becomes a millionaire (sometimes this happens, though its possibility is essential to bourgeois ideology) should demonstrate that the formerly proletarian capitalist is not still, essentially, a capitalist.  While we should not neglect some examinations of "cultural capital" we also have to recognize that such analyses fail to comprehend the very meaning of class––that which is made and not found, though made according to very strict boundaries of exploitation and oppression.

This apparent failure to treat class as class sometimes undermines the overall argument of The Worker Elite due to particular contradictions.  Bromma claims that this worker at one point originated from the proletariat and yet is unable, at least in this small book, to discuss the possibility of members of this elite being reproletarianized.  Class as something that is made seems to happen in only one direction––an odd claim considering that more people, globally, are impoverished under capitalism than enriched.  Perhaps this problem can be explained according to the assumption that it is easier, under capitalist ideology, to gain a privileged consciousness than to gain a revolutionary consciousness… But such a problem is, as Althusser once argued, inherent to even those born into proletarian positions since capitalist ideology is predominant: the poorest of the poor, when lacking a revolutionary movement, will be drawn to the ruling ideas of the ruling class.  Here is where, perhaps, Bromma's analysis of first world union movements slightly stumbles.

The second problem I had with this otherwise excellent text, and was less of a problem than my worries about class essentialism, was what appeared to be a flirtation with the Empire thesis: "as it evolves, modern imperialism is… gradually detaching itself from the model of privileged 'home countries' altogether. Finance capital floats above national borders, exploiting an increasingly mobile proletariat. […] Multinational industries, corporations and financial trusts now purchase loyalty and disburse privilege directly, "over the heads" of any specific country or any national ruling class."  While it is the case that imperialism does disdain national borders, it still proceeds from the context of nation-states at the global centres of capitalism.  As Samir Amin has consistently demonstrated since the Empire thesis was first flouted up until the present, imperialism is not at all detached from its countries of origin and that this supposed detachment is an ideology, the permanent dream of capitalism.

Global contradictions between competing imperialist nations still determine the ways in which finance capitalism functions, and the most recent imperialist competition between the US and Russia––which demonstrates that the age of the so-called Triad under the US is being questioned in the imperialist order––should prevent us from thinking that capitalism can ever function without the direction of "privileged 'home countries'."  Only libertarians and those devoted to Hart and Negri would think differently.  But again, such a statement on the part of Bromma might have been made in too much haste due to the immediacy and size of the text.

In conclusion, the aforementioned problems aside, Bromma's The Worker Elite is significant insofar as it attempts to demonstrate how we can understand class struggle within the working class itself––or, to use the terminology of the organization I tend to support, which is different from Bromma's semantics but not at all alien, how to locate the "hard core of the proletariat."  Some of the most significant factions of Canada's New Communist Movement crumbled due to the assumption that the revolutionary proletariat was the same as the worker elite, disintegrating when the members they had designated for "class suicide" (like Bromma) became members of a worker elite and, upon achieving this privilege, dispensed with revolutionary politics.  At the very least, The Worker Elite should be read as an antidote to books such as David Camfield's Canadian Labour in Crisis that, in its refusal to recognize a worker elite (or to define the "labour aristocracy" as, typical of post-Trotskyists and rightly critiqued by Bromma, a layer of union bureaucracy), conflates the working class as a whole with the proletariat and, in this conflation, hopes that social democratic practice as usual will be tantamount to revolution.  Bromma has provided us with more reasons for thinking differently.

As an aside, I also learned (and it also appeared as an advertisement at the end of Bromma's book) that J. Sakai's Settlers is finally becoming a second edition, co-produced by Kersplebedeb and PM Press, in the fall.  For those readers who had problems with the type-setting, dimensions, and design of this classic radical text, this news should be exciting:

Doesn't this look awesome?