>
> I think the problem is that marxism (small-m) wants it both ways.
>
> It wants to establish a functional relationship between classes
> and economic outcomes, where class is defined by relations
> to production,
If you are going to talk about "marxism (small-m)" you had better talk about marxistS (some marxists) rather than marxism. Marx himself did argue pretty specifically that distribution was derivative from production relations, and this here marxist holds to that.
and on the other hand it wants to paint the
> working class as immiserated,
I myself have never worried much about this. It is fairly obvious that a rather large proportion of the world's population lives a rather precarious existence, and that for almost everyone reality (i.e., the meaning of action) lies in the future (investment is the image for that relationship) rather than in the present exercise of human faculties (including for many, of course, the faculty of eating and staying warm!).
The desire of _some_ marxists to insist on immiseration, or on the imminent collapse of the economy, or of other empirical proofs of the evil of capitalism I assign in part to lack of understanding of marxism and in part to not really believing all or most of Marx's fundamental principles. Hence they are constantly looking for more "evidence" that capitalists are bad et cetera.
I'm not bothered by (or even much interested in) the existence of well-off workers. And whether a revolutionary force is made up of the more immiserated or the more comfortable or some mixture is not a matter of theory but of contingencies revealed by practice.
In the case of the Chinese Revolution it is _equally_ true to say that the main force was the poor peasantry and that the main force was the middle peasantry. (It seems to have been that part of the middle peasantry who were able to see that their interests were best served by being subordinated to the interests of the poor peasantry.)
In France 68, the last workers to give up their occupation of their work places were the TV technicians, announcers, writers, etc. Marx speaks of a working class that does not protect its interests inside capitalism as being reduced to one mass of wretches incapable of any higher purpose. So he more or less assumed the necessity of some fairly well off workers, and many other workers not too badly off.
Carrol
inviting sociological hair-
> splitting about what level(s) of income and wealth signify
> working class.
>
> mbs
>