On 12/2/2010 2:17 PM, Alan Rudy wrote:
>
>> I think I may have misinterpreted you as accepting what I (perhaps wrongly)
> took to be SA's suggestion that the union-based reform parties were
> Marxist. I don't think they were and so am not sure how they fit in a
> critique of Marxism for being unable to deal with the problem of high wage
> skilled workers.
I'm not sure which parties you're talking about. I'm talking about e.g. the German SPD - which was led by Marx's proteges, and whose 1891 Erfurt Program was drafted under Engels' direct guidance and criticism. Kautsky's pamphlet commentary on that program, _The Class Struggle_, was published in every European country and treated as the "catechism" of social democracy. If you read The Class Struggle, you'll find the standard classical-Marxist analysis of class structure under capitalism: everyone who is not already a proletarian or a capitalist - e.g., the educated worker, the small farmer, the shopkeeper - is on his way, thanks to the iron laws of capitalist development, to becoming part of the undifferentiated proletariat.
This Marxism is "classical" because it was challenged by "revisionism," which disputed (among other things) the idea that capitalism was inexorably simplifying the class structure in this bipolar way. Bernstein and other revisionists argued that social democrats needed to revise their theory and practice to take into account the permanence of a complex and differentiated class structure, to formulate an appeal to farmers, shopkeepers, the lower middle class, etc. The classical Marxists complained, more or less, that this would have the effect of rendering the socialist appeal a mere "The People, Yes!"
For decades this debate continued and the classical Marxists were consistently wrong on these points. Gradually and grudgingly, party theory and practice was changed over the years to accommodate the dawning realization that Bernstein was right. So while "populism" - being a mere political style, not a theoretical apparatus - is necessarily less precise or sophisticated than "Marxism," Marxism in fact proved too simplistic and had to be revised in what you might call a "populist" direction. I shouldn't need to point out that I'm talking about history here - the history of Marxist politics, not any given person's fantasy-baseball team of Marxist theorists. If we're playing rotisserie Marxism here, I'll take Erik Olin Wright's theory of class structure.
SA