V.I. Lenin
Vol. 30 Collected Works, p. 30
"How the Bourgeoisie Utilises Renegades"
1919

"The breakaway of the top strata of the working 
class, corrupted by a middle-class way of life 
and opportunism and bribed by "soft jobs" and 
other bourgeois sops, began to take shape on a 
world scale in the autumn of 1914 and reached its 
full development between 1915 and 1918.  By 
disregarding this historical fact and blaming the 
Communists for the split in the movement, Kautsky 
is only demonstrating, for the thousandth time, 
his role of lackey of the bourgeoisie. 
For forty years, from 1852 to 1892, Marx and 
Engels spoke of part (i.e., the top strata, the 
leaders, the "aristocracy") of the workers in 
Britain becoming increasingly bourgeois, owing to 
that country's colonial advantages and her 
monopolies.  It is clear as daylight that the 
twentieth-century imperialist monopolies in a 
number of other countries were bound to create the 
same phemonenon as in Britain.  In all the 
advanced countries we see corruption, bribery, 
desertion to the bourgeoisie by the leaders of the 
working class and its top strata in consequence of 
the doles handed out by the bourgeoisie, who 
provide these leaders with "soft jobs," give 
crumbs from their profits to these upper strata, 
shift the burden of the worst paid and hardest 
work to backward worders brought into the country, 
and enhance the priviledges of the "labour 
aristocracy" as compared with the majority of 
the working class."

[MC5 comments: This quote is significant for summing
up the TREND in the development of the labor aristocracy.
What started as a small phenomenon spread to other
countries. In 2002, the CIA-bribed and others are busy
trying to kill our communist movement by talking as if
the parasitism has not intensified in the imperialist countries
even more--as it is bound to without socialist revolution.

It's an example of why reading only what Lenin wrote before
"Imperialism" and experienced World War I is perilous. In
particular, the farther back in time one goes, the more one
is justified in merely speaking of false consciousness
in advanced capitalist country workers. As time goes on
through the 20th century, these workers receive more 
and more super-profits to become a petty-bourgeoisie and it 
becomes a concession to the enemy to speak of them as having
merely false consciousness.]