Did Marx underestimate the power of the middle class ?

[Starry Messenger]

4. Marx and Engels wrote each other letters talking about the problem.

There's some bits here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/england/unionism.htm

I think Lenin took up the subject in more detail, since by his time, the problem had become more developed. Hobsbawm has a good introduction on this.

http://monthlyreview.org/2012/12/01/lenin-and-the-aristocracy-of-labor

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But if the argument is in principle more general, there can be no doubt that what was in Lenin’s mind when he used it was the aristocracy of labor. Time and again we find him using phrases such as the following: “the petty bourgeois craft spirit which prevails among this aristocracy of labor” (“The Session of the International Socialist Bureau,” 1908); “the English trade unions, insular, aristocratic, philistinely selfish”; “the English pride themselves on their ‘practicalness’ and their dislike of general principles; this is an expression of the craft spirit in the labor movement” (“English Debates on a Liberal Workers’ Policy,” 1912); and “this aristocracy of labor…isolated itself from the mass of the proletariat in close, selfish, craft unions” (“Harry Quelch,” 1913). Moreover, much later, and in a carefully considered programmatic statement—in fact, in his “Preliminary Draft Theses on the Agrarian Question for the Second Congress of the Communist International” (1920)—the connection is made with the greatest clarity:

The industrial workers cannot fulfill their world-historical mission of emancipating mankind from the yoke of capital and from wars if these workers concern themselves exclusively with their narrow craft, narrow trade interests, and smugly confine themselves to care and concern for improving their own, sometimes tolerable, petty bourgeois conditions. This is exactly what happens in many advanced countries to the “labor aristocracy” which serves as the base of the alleged Socialist parties of the Second International.

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Which brings us to Lenin's Imperialism: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/

For the US, Foster's chapter on class collaboration in union leaders before the Great Crash is interesting.
http://williamzfoster.blogspot.com/2013/01/chapter-seventeen-af-of-l-class.html

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The erstwhile "progressive" or center group in the labor movement vied with the right-wing labor leadership in its enthusiasm for union-management co-operation. The Socialists, too, grabbed it hook, line, and sinker. In fact, in no unions in this country was the speed-up system so highly developed as in the supposedly socialistic needle trades unions. They had complete sets of efficiency engineers, standards of production, and all the rest of the speed-up plans. Leo Wolman, research director of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, thus explained the role of labor unions in this period: "The primary aim of the labor union is to co-operate with the manufacturer to produce more efficient conditions of production that will be of mutual advantage. In some cases labor unions will even lend money to worthy manufacturers to tide them over periods of distress."

FORD VERSUS MARX

In order to drive ahead with the speed-up, "rationalization" plans and to demoralize the labor movement still further, blatant American imperialism put forth during the Coolidge period a whole series of "prosperity illusions" designed to befuddle and confuse the workers. Never in the whole history of American capitalism did the bosses give birth to so many glowingly Utopian ideas of social progress as in the hectic boom times of the 1920's.

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Ruling class illusions permeate the working classes unless they are forcefully counteracted, no where near as badly as in the most imperialist countries in the world. It's no coincidence that at the same time the capitalists were selling the middle class on this bill of goods, reds and radical trade unionists were being scoured and persecuted out of the unions.