On 2010-12-02, at 7:38 PM, SA wrote:
> 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…
Actually, the Marxists were more prescient than most in anticipating that farmers, shopkeepers, and other small propertyholders would be progressively displaced in numbers and political influence by the burgeoning class of wage and salary earners.
Where they erred was their parallel conviction that the capitalist system had exhausted its historic potential, that the working class would become increasingly immiserated, desperate, and radical, and that the epoch they were living through was one of social revolution which would put paid to the system of private ownership, crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions.
Capitalism instead proved to be remarkably and unexpectedly resilient, and living standards rose rather than fell over subsequent generations. The social democratization of the labour and socialist movement, beginning with Bernstein and Kautsky, represented nothing other than its accommodation to an expanding system which was able to satisfy the immediate needs of the working class for better factory conditions, social insurance, and the democratic right to vote and to organize its own independent institutions - the exceptional and historically short-lived Russian and Chinese revolutions, as well as the regular economic and political crises and outbreaks of social protest which are integral to the system, notwithstanding.