On Dec 1, 2010, at 8:03 PM, SA wrote:
> So Marxists and populists each have their respective blurry areas - small business owners on the one hand, highly paid skilled workers on the other. Maybe Marxists are more self-aware about their contradictions, but there are still contradictions on both sides.
Don't know where the highly paid skilled workers came into it. My point is that there's some real sociological and economic precision to the Marxist definition of class - one's relation to property and power. (Consciousness, well, that's another story.) Populism, though, takes many forms. In some versions, poor people are as parasitical as the rich, and the real virtue resides in the middle ranks. In some versions, it's people who live in the heartland who have the virtue, and the urban dandies are the parasites. What's pathognomonic of populism is the vagueness and slipperiness of the roles and the reliance on mystical formulations of The People (as in "The People, Yes!").
Doug