I think SA's reacting to the number of times Marxists, including many here, have taken the position that the true proletariat is the blue collar working class such that middle income professionals are assumed to be reactionary and always side with capital or side with the working class only until the stakes get genuinely high at which point they are assumed to turn tail and return to their masters, the folks they aspire to be like. The fact that Marxists have dealt with this issue in a diverse range of variously interesting ways seems to escape SA... but he's right in that often times rather vulgar positions are expressed and/or taken w/r/t highly paid skilled/professional workers in Marxist fora. (PS: I am not saying that working class organizations haven't regularly been sold out by or coopted when in coalitions with middle income professionals.)
On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 8:42 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> 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
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-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319