[lbo-talk] INSTANT POPULISM: A short history of populism old and new

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Thu Dec 2 11:47:12 PST 2010


On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 2:30 PM, Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com>wrote:


> Somebody: Marxism has problems dealing with low wage service industry
> workers just as it has with high wage skilled workers. Like Wojtek pointed
> out, geographic dispersion and lack of concentration matter as much, at
> least, as class position. In fact, class as a unit of analysis really only
> succeeds when dealing with the bourgeoisie, the most cohesive and
> self-conscious class in history.
>

What do you mean by "dealing with"? What Marxism are you talking about? This issue was and has been a major concern within the sociological and geographic efforts to develop a political economy of agriculture since the 1970s - there's a huge literature on this in general and a good bit on ag labor organizing.

Are you saying that Marxist theorists and groups don't understand the issues of low wage service industry workers because of dispersion and lack of concentration or that Marxist theorists and groups find it difficult to organize such folks because of geographic dispersion and lack of retail concentration or something else? If it is the latter, there are counter examples associated with the variously successful efforts to organize dispersed migratory agricultural laborers in an unconcentrated industry in the 1930s and the 1970s.



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