On 12/1/2010 8:42 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> 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.
I was about to say that it's unfair to give an intellectual critique of populism, since populism (unlike Marxism) is not a doctrine or social theory developed by intellectuals. But then I decided to look over the Sam Smith essay at the start of this thread and I was reminded that there are a lot of people on the US left who embrace populism *as if* it were a coherent alternative to other political ideologies. Hanging around people in the Kucinich campaign and other precincts of that world, I often heard appeals for "more populism." So both populism's critics and its defenders start from an assumption that puts populism at an inherent disadvantage - namely, that it's a coherent theory or ideology that can be held up to or tested against other theories. It's not, really.
When the defenders of populism contrast it with liberalism, they're actually just thinking of two different *styles* of politics, but the two styles have identical content. Sam Smith says:
> There have only been two Democratic presidents over the past
> three-quarters of a century who have gotten significantly more than
> 50% of the vote: Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, each of whom
> received 61% in one election. While neither fit the definition of a
> populist, many of their programs - from FDR's minimum wage and social
> security to LBJ's war on poverty and education legislation - were part
> of a populist agenda.
>
> Since LBJ, the party has increasingly deserted its populist causes and
> been trapped between defeat and a tantalizing break-even division with
> the GOP.
How is Social Security a populist agenda, but not a liberal agenda? How was LBJ, whose political career almost literally began where Texas Populism left off, not a populist? Frances Perkins, the mother of Social Security, was a Bostonian Mount Holyoke grad with a Master's in sociology. The whole distinction is meaningless, except stylistically. A liberal is just a populist with a bowtie and no charisma.
As for Marxism, let's be honest. Classical Marxism was very simplistic. I have unbounded admiration for Erik Olin Wright's much more sophisticated "Marxist" theory of contradictory class locations, but its practical import leads to something like, "The People, Yes!" Precisely because classical Marxism was so simplistic it had to be revised almost immediately once the Marxist parties had won some initial success -- so party leaders had to awkwardly explain why it was necessary to seek alliances with peasants and shopkeepers, why they were, sort of, among the exploited too. Until the 1950's, the majority of Socialist departments in France were rural. By the 1920's the French Socialist Party was a party of teachers, civil servants, small farmers and shopkeepers. That didn't stop Blum from leading the Popular Front. In 1959, the German SPD officially declared itself a "people's party" -- therefore, Willy Brandt was technically a populist (?).
Again, Marxism in any form is, almost by definition, a more sophisticated social analysis than "populism," because populism isn't a social analysis. (Although you could probably find pamphlets with social analysis by Populists, if you went to the archives.) But as a political *practice*, I'm not sure how sharp the distinction is. So I tend to see all sides in the "populism vs. marxism vs. liberalism" debate as partaking to some extent in identity politics.
SA
> 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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