Labor aristocracy (also aristocracy of labor) is a concept in Marxist discourse that describes a section of the working class (labor) who is bought-off by the bosses in order to stave off their revolutionary fervor.

While this tendency can occur on a small scale (for example, bosses paying white workers better than their Black counterparts in order to foment racial disunity and discontent) the term is most useful in the Leninist analysis of imperialism, where workers of the high-income economies are paid-off to weaken solidarity with their fellow proletarians in the low-income economies.