The latest trend in the vagaries of Leftist politics is the weird movement of MeToo. The Left, however, should learn from the rise of Rightist populism, because WeToo can play the populist game…
We are repeatedly told that Left populism is de facto winning and it works. But where and how does it work? Everywhere where it became a serious force, from Latin America to Spain’s Podemos, it stumbled upon a fatal limit. As for Corbyn’s Labour Party, its politics cannot be called populist in any meaningful way. (Plus, it hasn’t yet come to power; only once this happens will the real test come). Against Rightist populist passions (from Nigel Farage to Boris Johnson), today’s Labour politics is precisely a triumph of rational pragmatic argumentation, where one can disagree with some proposed measures, but the line of argumentation is always clear. Can one imagine a politician less prone to outbursts of passion than Corbyn, which, to avoid a misunderstanding, is for me what makes Corbyn great?
This fact alone renders problematic Left populist reliance on the opposition between cold pragmatic-rational argumentation and passionate confrontation. Although Left populists insist that there are limits to this confrontation, they remain within the democratic frame: according to them, antagonisms should be transposed into agonistic competition in which all sides obey basic democratic rules. But what if these rules are no longer accepted by all agents?
When, two years ago, I was answering questions posed by the readers of Sueddeutsche Zeitung about the refugee crisis, the question which attracted by far the most attention concerned precisely democracy, if with a rightist-populist twist. After Angela Merkel made her famous public appeal inviting hundreds of thousands of immigrants into Germany, what was her democratic legitimization? What gave her the right to bring such a radical change to German life without democratic consultation? My point here, of course, is not to support anti-immigrant populists, but to clearly show the limits of democratic legitimization. The same goes for those who advocate a radical opening of the borders to refugees: are they aware that, since our democracies are nation-state democracies, their demand equals the suspension of democracy, since they encourage a gigantic change, which should be allowed to affect a country without democratic consultation of its population?
I remember watching George Soros some time ago on TV where he advocated the idea that Europe should accept another million refugees. Despite his best humanitarian motifs, one aspect did trouble me: what right does he, a billionaire, have to promote such a large displacement of people without even raising the question of what the local population in Europe may think of it? Yuval Harari points out how the ongoing troubles with immigrants in Germany confront us with the limits of democracy: how are we to counter anti-immigrant populists who demand a referendum on immigrants, assured that the majority of Germans will vote against them? Is the solution, then, to give the voting rights also to immigrants? To whom among them? To those who are already in Germany, to those who want to go there…? At the end of this line of thought, we get the idea of world-wide elections which is self-defeating for a simple and precise reason:»People feel bound by democratic elections only when they share a basic bond with most other voters. If the experience of other voters is alien to me, and if I believe they don’t understand my feelings and don’t care about my vital interests, then even if I am outvoted by a hundred to one, I have absolutely no reason to accept the verdict. Democratic elections usually work only within populations that have some prior common bind, such as shared religious beliefs and national myths. They are a method to settle disagreements between people who already agree on the basics.«1Where this “agreement on the basics” is missing, the only procedure at our disposal (outside an outright war, of course) are negotiations. That’s, incidentally why the Middle East conflict cannot be solved by elections but only by war or negotiations. And negotiations by definition imply the overcoming of the antagonistic logic of Us against Them. According to Left populists, the main reason for the defeat of the Left is the non-combative stance of rational argumentation and lifeless universalism in theory epitomized by the names of Giddens, Beck, and Habermas. This post-political Third Way cannot combat in an efficient way the agonistic logic of Us against Them, successfully mobilized by anti-immigrant Rightist populists. Consequently, to combat this Rightist populism effectively is to have recourse to Left populism which, while retaining the basic populist coordinates (agonistic logic of Us against Them, of the “people” against a corrupted elite), fills them in with a Leftist content: Them are not poor refugees or immigrants but financial capital, technocratic state bureaucracy, etc. This populism moves beyond the old working-class anti-capitalism, as it tries to bring together a multiplicity of struggles from ecology to feminism, from the right to employment to free education and healthcare, etc., as Podemos is doing in Spain…
With regard to a pragmatic and dispassionate politics of rational compromise, one should first note that the ideology of neoliberalism (also in its liberal-Left version) is anything but “rational.” Quite the contrary, it is EXTREMELY confrontational, inasmuch as it brutally excludes those who do not accept it under the pretext that they are dangerous anti-democratic utopians. Its expert knowledge is ideology at its purest. The problems with the Third Way Left, which endorsed neoliberal economics, was not that it was too pragmatic-rational, but that it was precisely not truly rational, seeing that it was permeated by unprincipled pragmatism which in advance endorsed the opponent’s premises. Leftist politics today does not need (just) confrontational passion; much more than that it needs a true cold rationality. Cold analysis and passionate struggle not only do not exclude each other, they need each other.
The formula of agonistic politicization, of a passionate confrontation directed against lifeless universalism, is precisely all too formal, ignoring as it does the big question that lurks in the background: why did the Left abandon the agonistic logic of Us against Them decades ago? Was it not because of the deep structural changes in capitalism, changes which cannot be confronted by means of a simple populist mobilization? The Left abandoned antagonistic confrontation because it failed in its struggle with capitalism, because it accepted the global triumph of capitalism. As Peter Mandelson said, in economy, we are all Thatcherites, so all that remains to the Left is the multiplicity of particular struggles: human rights, feminism, anti-racism, and especially multiculturalism. (It is interesting to note that Ernesto Laclau, the theoretical father of Left populism, first enthusiastically greeted Blair’s Third Way politics – as a liberation from class essentialism, etc. -, and only later targeted it as the mode of non-antagonist politics.)
Podemos undoubtedly stands for populism at its best: against the arrogant Politically Correct intellectual elites which despise the “narrowness” of the ordinary people who are considered “stupid” for “voting against their interests,” its organizing principle is to listen to and organize those “from below” against those “from above,” beyond all traditional Left and Right models. The idea is that the starting point of emancipatory politics should be the concrete experience of the suffering and injustices of ordinary people in their local life-world (home quarters, the workplace, etc.), not abstract visions of a future Communist, or whatever, society. Although the new digital media seem to open up the space for new communities, the difference between these new communities and the old life-world communities is crucial. The old communities are not chosen, I am born into them, and they form the very space of my socialization, while the new (digital) communities include me into a specific domain defined by my interests and thus depending on my choice. Far from making the old communities deficient, the fact that they do not rely on my free choice makes them superior with regard to the new digital communities since they compel me to find my way into a pre-existing not-chosen life-world in which I encounter (and have to learn to deal with) real differences, while the new digital communities depending on my choice sustain the ideological myth of the individual who somehow pre-exists a communal life and is free to choose it.
Even if this approach undoubtedly contains a (very big) grain of truth, its problem is that, to put it bluntly, not only, as Laclau liked to emphasize, society doesn’t exist, but “people” also doesn’t exist. This thesis is not to be taken as an abstract theoretical statement about the inconsistence that traverses the social body. Rather, it refers to a quite concrete, even experiential, fact. “People” is a false name for the social totality. In our global capitalism, totality is “abstract,” invisible; there is no way to ground it in concrete life-worlds. In other words, in today global capitalist universe, a “concrete experience” of being a member of a particular life-world with its customs, living links, forms of solidarity, etc., is already something “abstract” in the strict sense of a particular experience which obliterates the thick network of financial, social, etc., processes that rule and regulate this concrete particular world. Here Podemos will encounter problems if it at some point takes power: what specific economic measures (beyond the standard Keynesian bag of tricks) will it enact to limit the power of capital?
Therein resided the difference between Syriza and Podemos. Syriza touched the Real of our global order. It threatened the reign of Capital, which is why it had to be humiliated without mercy. The heroism of Syriza was that, after winning the democratic political battle, they risked a step further into disturbing the smooth flow of the reproduction of Capital. The lesson of the Greek crisis is that Capital, though ultimately a symbolic fiction, is our Real. That is to say, today’s protests and revolts are sustained by a combination (overlapping) of different levels, and this combination accounts for their strength: they fight for (“normal” parliamentary) democracy against authoritarian regimes; against racism and sexism, especially the hatred directed at immigrants and refugees; for welfare-state against neoliberalism; against corruption in politics and economy (companies polluting environment, etc.); for new forms of democracy that reach beyond multi-party rituals (participation, etc.); and, finally, questioning the global capitalist system as such and trying to keep alive the idea of a non-capitalist society.
Two traps are to be avoided here: false radicalism, proclaiming that what really matters is the abolition of liberal-parliamentary capitalism, while all other fights are secondary, as well as false gradualism, asking us to fight against military dictatorship and for simple democracy, to forget Socialist dreams, which will come later – maybe… When we have to deal with a specific struggle, the key question is: how will our engagement in it or disengagement from it affect other struggles? The general rule is that, when a revolt begins against an oppressive half-democratic regime, as was the case in the Middle East in 2011, it is easy to mobilize large crowds with slogans that one cannot but characterize as crowd-pleasers – For Democracy! Against Corruption!, and so forth. But then we gradually approach more difficult choices: when our revolt succeeds in its direct goal, we come to realize that what really bothered us (our un-freedom, humiliation, social corruption, lack of prospects for a decent life) persists in a new guise.
In Egypt, protesters succeeded in getting rid of the oppressive Mubarak regime, but corruption remained, and the prospects of a decent life moved even further away. After the overthrow of an authoritarian regime, the last vestiges of patriarchal care for the poor can fall away, so that the newly gained freedom is de facto reduced to the freedom to choose the preferred form of one’s misery. The majority not only remain poor, but, to add insult to injury, are also being told that, since they are now free, poverty is their own responsibility. In such a predicament, we have to admit that there was a flaw in our goal itself, that this goal was not specific enough – say, that standard political democracy can also serve as the very form of un-freedom. Political freedom can easily provide the legal frame for economic slavery, with the underprivileged “freely” selling themselves into servitude. We are thus brought to demand more than just political democracy: we have to admit that what we first took as the failure to fully realize a noble principle (of democratic freedom) is a failure inherent to this principle itself. Understanding this is a big step of political pedagogy.
The double U-turn that the Greek crisis took in July 2015 cannot but appear as a leap not just from tragedy to comedy but, as Stathis Kouvelakis noted, from tragedy full of comic reversals directly into a theatre of the absurd. Is there any other way to characterize the extraordinary reversal of one extreme into its opposite that would bedazzle even the most speculative Hegelian philosopher? Tired of the endless negotiations with the EU executives in which one humiliation followed another, Syriza called for a referendum on Sunday July 5 asking the Greek people if they supported or rejected the EU proposal of new austerity measures. Although the government itself clearly stated that it supported the NO, the result was a surprise for the government itself: the overwhelming majority of over 61% voted NO to European blackmail. Rumors began to circulate that the result – victory for the government – was a bad surprise for Tsipras himself, who secretly hoped that the government would lose, so that a defeat would allow him to save face in surrendering to the EU demands (“we have to respect the voters’ voice”). However, literally the morning after, Tsipras announced that Greece is ready to resume negotiations, and days later Greece agreed to a EU proposal which was basically the same as what the voters rejected (in some details even harsher). In short, he acted as if the government had lost, not won, the referendum. Here we encounter the truth of populism: its failure to confront the real of the capital. The supreme populist moment (referendum victory) immediately reverted into capitulation, into confession of impotence with regard to the capitalist order. There is no simple betrayal in this reversal, but the expression of a deep necessity.
Laclau insisted on the need to construct some figure of the Enemy as immanent to populism, not as its weakness, but as the resource of its strength. Left populism should construct a different figure of the Enemy, not the threatening racial Other (immigrant, Jew, Muslim…) but the financial elites, fundamentalists, and other “usual suspects” of the progressives. This urge to construct the Enemy is another fatal limitation of populism. Today, the ultimate “enemy” is not a concrete social agent but in some sense the system itself, a certain functioning of the system, which cannot be easily located into agents. Years ago, Alain Badiou wrote that one doesn’t fight capitalism but its concrete agents: therein resides the problem, since the true target IS capitalism. Today, it seems easy to say that the Enemy is neo-Fascist anti-immigrant nationalism or, in the US, Trump. Still, the fact remains that the rise of Trump is ultimately the effect of the failure of liberal-democratic consensus, and so, although one should, of course, not exclude new forms of “anti-Fascist” alliances with the latter, this consensus remains THE thing to be changed.
It is because of their focus on concrete enemies that Left populists seem to privilege national sovereignty, the strong nation state, as a defense against global capital (even Auferstehen in Germany basically follows this path). In this way, most of them not only (by definition) endorse populism but even nationalism, presenting their struggle as a defense against international financial capital. Some Left populists in the US already used the term “national socialism.”2 While, of course, it would be stupid and unfair to claim that they are closet Nazis, one should nonetheless insist that internationalism is a key component in any project of radical emancipation. Whatever critical remarks one makes against Varoufakis’s DIEM, the movement at least sees clearly that resistance against global capital has to be itself global, a new form of universalism.
There definitely are enemies and the topic of conspiracies is not to be simply dismissed. Years ago, Fred Jameson perspicuously noted that in today’s global capitalism, things happen which cannot be explained with a reference to some anonymous “logic of the capital.” For example, now we know that the financial meltdown of 2008 was the result of a well-planned “conspiracy” of some financial circles. However, the true task of social analysis still remains to explain how contemporary capitalism opened up the space for such “conspiratorial” interventions. This is also why references to “greed” and the appeal to capitalists to show social solidarity and responsibility are misplaced: “greed” (search for profit) IS what motivates capitalist expansion; the wager of capitalism IS that acting out of individual greed will contribute to the common good. So, again, instead of focusing on individual greed and approach the problem of growing inequality in moralist terms, the task is to change the system so that it will no longer allow or even solicit “greedy” acting.
The problem we are facing is best exemplified by what took place a couple of years ago in Croatia. Two public protest gatherings were announced: trade unions called for a protest against the exploding unemployment and poverty, felt very much by ordinary people; Rightist nationalists announced a gathering in order to protest the re-introduction of the official status of Cyrillic writing in Vukovar (because of the Serb minority there). To the first gathering, a couple of hundred people came, and to the second gathering, over one hundred thousand people showed up. Poverty was experienced as a daily-life problem much more than the Cyrillic threat by ordinary people, and the rhetoric of trade unions didn’t lack passion and confrontational spirit, but…
One has to accept that some kind of especially strong economy of jouissance is at work in the identification with one’s own “way of life,” some core of the Real which is very difficult to rearticulate symbolically. Recall Lenin’s shock at the patriotic reaction of Social-Democrats to the outburst of World War I. People are willing to suffer for their way of life, up to today’s refugees who are not ready to “integrate.” In short, there are two Reals (the real of capital; the real of ethnic identification) that cannot be dissolved into the fluid elements of a symbolic hegemony.
Let’s take an (artificially) clear-cut case. Imagine a democracy, in which a large majority of voters succumb to the anti-immigrant populist propaganda and decide in a referendum to close borders to the refugees and make life more difficult for those who already are within a country. Imagine, next, a country, where, despite such propaganda, voters assert in a referendum their commitment to solidarity and their will to help the refugees.
The difference is not just objective, i.e., it is not just that, in one case, voters made a reactionary racist decision and, in the other case, they made the right choice of solidarity. The difference is also “subjective” in the precise sense that a different type of political passion is at work in each of the two cases. One should not, however, be afraid to posit that, in the first case, no matter how sincerely convinced they appeared to be, they somehow know “in their heart of hearts” that what they are doing is a shameful act, while all their agitated reasoning just covers up their bad feelings. And, in the second act, people are always somehow aware of the liberating effect of their act: even if what they are doing is risky and crazy, they do achieve a true breakthrough.
Both acts in a sense achieve the impossible, but in an entirely different way. In the first case, the public space is spoiled, the ethical standards are lowered. What has been up to that moment a matter of private dirty rumors, inacceptable in the public space, becomes something one can talk about publicly: one can be openly racist, sexist, preach hatred and spread paranoia… Today’s model of such “liberation” is, of course, Donald Trump who, as they say, “says publicly what others are only thinking about.” In the second case, most of us are ashamed that we didn’t trust people more: before the referendum, we were silently expecting a defeat, and the ethical composure of the voters surprises us. Such “miracles” are worth living for.
But how are we to prepare the ground for such “miracles”? How are we to mobilize “our” people to fight for the rights of the refugees and immigrants? In principle, the answer is easy: we should strive to articulate a new ideological space in which the struggle for refugees would be combined with the feminist struggle, ecological struggle, etc. However, such an easy way out is purely rhetorical and runs against the (ideologically determined, of course) “experience” which is very difficult to undo. More profoundly, the catch is that today’s constellation doesn’t allow for a direct link between a program and the direct experience of “real people.”
The basic premise of classic Marxism is that, with the central role of the proletariat, humanity found itself in a unique situation in which the deepest theoretical insight was echoed in the most concrete experience of exploitation and alienation. It is, nonetheless, questionable if, in today’s complex situation, a similar strategy is feasible. Left populists would, of course, insist that this is precisely why we should abandon the Marxist reliance on the proletariat as the privileged emancipatory subject and engage in a long and difficult work of constructing new hegemonic “chains of equivalences” without any guarantee of success. (There is no assurance that the feminist struggle, the struggle for freedom, and the struggle for the rights of immigrants will coalesce in one big Struggle). But my point is that even this solution is too abstract and formal. Left populists remind me of a doctor who, when asked by a worried patient what to do, tells him: “Go and see a doctor!” The true problem is not one of formal procedure – a pragmatic search for unity versus antagonist confrontation – but a substantial one: how to strike back at global capital? Do we have an alternative to the global capitalist system? Can we even imagine today an authentic Communist power? What we get is disaster (Venezuela), capitulation (Greece), or a controlled return to capitalism (China, Vietnam).
Official attempts at Marxist social theory in China try to paint a picture of today’s world which, to put it simply, basically remains the same as that of the Cold War: the worldwide struggle between capitalism and Socialism goes on unabated, the fiasco of 1990 was just a temporary setback, so that today, the big opponents are no longer USA and USSR but USA and China, which remains a Socialist country. The rise of capitalism in China is read as a gigantic case of what in the early Soviet Union they called NEP politics, so that what we have in China is a new “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” but still a Socialism (the Communist party remains in power and tightly controls and directs market forces).
Domenico Losurdo elaborated this point in detail, arguing against “pure” Marxism, which wants to establish a new Communist society directly after the revolution, and for a more “realist” view which advocates a gradual approach with turnarounds and failures. Roland Boer evokes a memorable image of Losurdo drinking a cup of tea on a busy Shanghai street in September 2016:“In the midst of the bustle, traffic, advertising, shops, and clear economic drive of the place, Domenico said, ‘I am happy with this. This is what socialism can do!’ To my quizzical look, he replied with a smile, ‘I am strongly in favor of the reform and opening up’.”1Boer then goes on to resume the argument for this “opening up”:“Most efforts had been directed at the relations of production, focusing on socialist equality and collective endeavour. This is all very well, but if everyone is equal simply because they are poor, few would see the benefit. So Deng and those working with him began to emphasize another dimension of Marxism: the need to unleash the forces of production.”2For Marxism, in turn, “unleashing the forces of production” is not “another dimension” but the very goal of transforming the relations of production. Here is Marx’s classic formulation:“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.”3The irony is that, while, for Marx, Communism arises when capitalist relations of production become an obstacle to the further development of the means of production, so that this development can be secured only by a (sudden or gradual) progress from capitalist market economy to a socialized economy, Deng Hsiao-Ping’s “reforms” turn Marx around: at a certain point, one has to return to capitalism to enable the economic development of Socialism… There is a further irony here that is difficult to surpass. The Left in the twentieth century was defined by its opposition to two fundamental tendencies of modernity:1) the reign of capital with its aggressive individualism and alienating dynamics; and 2) authoritarian-bureaucratic state power.What we get in today’s China is exactly the combination of these two features in their extreme form: a strong authoritarian state, coupled with wild capitalist dynamics. And this should be the most efficient form of Socialism today…
From this standpoint, the economic success of China in the last decades is not interpreted as a proof of the productive potential of capitalism but as a proof of the superiority of Socialism over capitalism. To sustain this view which also counts Vietnam, Venezuela, Cuba, and even Russia as socialist countries, one has to give this new Socialism a strong socially conservative twist, and this is not the only reason why such a rehabilitation of Socialism is blatantly non-Marxist, totally ignoring the basic Marxist point that capitalism is defined by capitalist relations of production, not by the type of state power.4
One must, nonetheless, concede a partial truth in this Chinese position: even in the wildest capitalism, it matters who controls the state apparatuses. Classical Marxism and the ideology of neo-Liberalism both tend to reduce the state to a secondary mechanism which obeys the needs of the reproduction of the capital; they both thereby underestimate the active role played by state apparatuses in economic processes. Today, perhaps more than ever, one should not fetishize capitalism as the Big Bad Wolf which is controlling states. State apparatuses are active in the very heart of economic processes, doing much more than just guaranteeing legal and other (educational, ecological…) conditions for the reproduction of capital.
In many different forms, the state is active as a direct economic agent, for instance, when it helps failing banks, supports certain industries, orders defense and other equipment, and so on. In the US today, around 50% of production is mediated by the state, while a century ago, the figure was between 5% and 10%. Marxists should have learned this lesson already from state Socialism where the state was a direct economic agent and regulator, so that whatever it was, it was a state without a capitalist class (Marxist analysts often used a suspicious term “state capitalism” to account for it). But if we can get a capitalist state without capitalists as a class, to what extent can we imagine a non-capitalist state with capitalist playing a strong role in the economy? While the Chinese model cannot serve as a model for emancipatory struggle – it combines exploding social inequalities with a strong authoritarian state -, one should not exclude a priori the possibility of a strong non-capitalist state that resorts to elements of capitalism in some of the domains of social life. It is, therefore, possible to tolerate limited elements and domains of capitalism without allowing the logic of capital become the over-determining principle of a social totality.
So what happens with populist passion here? It disappears, and it has to disappear. When populism takes power, the choice is, to designate it with names, Maduro (a passage from genuine populism into its authoritarian version with social decay) or Deng Hsiao-Ping (authoritarian-capitalist normalization and an ideological return to Confucius). Populism thrives in a state of emergency, which is why, by definition, it cannot last. It absolutely needs the figure of an external enemy.
Let us take Laclau’s own precise analysis of why one should count Chartism as populism:“Its dominant leitmotiv is to situate the evils of society not in something that is inherent in the economic system, but quite the opposite: in the abuse of power by parasitic and speculative groups which have control of political power – ‘old corruption,’ in Cobbett’s words. /…/ It was for this reason that the feature most strongly picked out in the ruling class was its idleness and parasitism.”5In other words, for a populist, the cause of the troubles is ultimately never the system as such, but the intruder who has corrupted it (financial manipulators, not capitalists as such, etc.); not a fatal flaw inscribed into the structure as such, but an element that doesn’t play its role within the structure properly. For a Marxist, on the contrary (like for a Freudian), the pathological (deviating misbehavior of some elements) is the symptom of the normal, an indicator of what is wrong in the very structure that is threatened with “pathological” outbursts. For Marx, economic crises are the key to understanding the “normal” functioning of capitalism; for Freud, pathological phenomena like hysterical outbursts provide the key to the constitution (and hidden antagonisms that sustain the functioning) of a “normal” subject. That’s why populism tends to be nationalist in calling for people’ unity against the (external) enemy, while Marxism focuses on the inner split that cuts across each community and calls for international solidarity because we are all traversed by this split.
The hard fact to accept is that “ordinary people” do NOT “know.” They possess no authentic insight or experience; they are no less confused and disoriented than all others are. I remember, in the debate after a talk of mine, a brief exchange with a supporter of Podemos who reacted to my claim that the demands of Podemos (getting rid of corrupt power structures, authentic democracy, which is rooted in people’s actual interests and worries) are without any precise ideas on how to reorganize society. He replied: “But this is not a reproach, since Podemos wants just this: not another system but a democratic system that would actually be what it claims to be!” In short, Podemos wanted the existing system without its symptoms, to which one should retort that it’s OK to begin with this, but then, sooner or later, comes the moment when we are forced to realize that symptoms (corruption, failure, etc.) are part of the system, so that in order to get rid of the symptoms we have to change the system itself.
The third version of radical politics today is waiting for a catastrophe. Many of my radical friends are telling me privately that only a big ecological catastrophe, economic meltdown, or war can mobilize the people to work for radical change. But is this very stance of waiting for a catastrophe not already a catastrophe, an admission of utter defeat? In order to find a proper orientation in this conundrum, one should become aware of a fateful limitation inherent to the politics of interests.
Parties like die Linke in Germany effectively represent the interests of their working class constituency, demanding better healthcare and retirement conditions, higher wages, etc. This puts them automatically within the confines of the existing system, and is therefore not enough for authentic emancipation. Interests are not to be just followed; they have to be redefined with regard to ideas which cannot be reduced to interests. This is why we witness again and again the paradox of how Rightist populists, when they get to power, sometimes impose measures which are effectively in the workers’ interests, as is the case in Poland where PiS (Law and Justice, the ruling Rightist-populist party) has managed to enact the largest social transfers in Poland’s contemporary history. PiS did what Marine le Pen also promises to do in France: a combination of anti-austerity measures (social investments no Leftist party dares to consider) plus the promise of order and security that asserts national identity and deals with the immigrant threat. Who can beat this combination, which directly addresses the two big worries of ordinary people?
We can discern on our political horizon a weirdly perverted situation in which the official “Left” is enforcing the austerity politics (while advocating multicultural etc. rights), while the populist Right is pursuing anti-austerity measures to help the poor (while pursuing the xenophobic nationalist agenda). That is the latest figure of what Hegel described as die verkehrte Welt, the topsy-turvy world. The obvious (not only) populist reaction to this is: should we not reestablish the “normal” state, i.e., should the Left not enact the anti-austerity measures that the populist Right is enacting, just without the accompanying racist-nationalist baggage? “Logical” as it may sound, this, precisely, is what cannot be done by the Left: the Right can do it, precisely, BECAUSE its anti-austerity measures are accompanied by racist-nationalist ideology, and this ideological coating is what makes anti-austerity acceptable.
This logic is vaguely similar to the fact that, as a rule, it is only a great Rightist leader who can make a historical agreement with Leftist forces. Only Nixon could establish links with China or achieve peace in Vietnam; only de Gaulle could recognize the independence of Algeria. For a Leftist leader, such a step would have been self-destructive. Today, we also have the opposite example: only the Leftist Syriza was able to implement austerity measures in Greece. If a Rightist government were to do it, it would have triggered an explosion of protests. What this means at a more general level is that, in a hegemonic chain of equivalences, the position of elements is overdetermined by the composition of other elements: the recognition of a radical anti-colonialist struggle by the colonial power is more easily compatible with a general conservative orientation than as an element of a much more “natural” chain where it is coupled with Leftist politics.
Populism ultimately NEVER works. In its Rightist version, it cheats by definition: it constructs a false figure of the enemy – false in the sense that it obfuscates the basic social antagonism (“Jew” instead of “capital,” etc.) – and, in this way, its populist rhetoric serves the very financial elites it pretends to oppose. In its Left version, it’s false in a more complex Kantian sense. In a vague but pertinent homology, we can say that the construction of the Enemy in an antagonistic relation plays the role of Kant’s schematism: it allows us to translate theoretical insight (awareness of abstract social contradictions) into practico-political engagement. This is how we should read Badiou’s statement that “one cannot fight capitalism”: we should “schematize” our fight into activity against concrete actors who work like the exposed agents of capitalism. However, the basic wager of Marxism is precisely that such a personalization into an actual enemy is wrong. If it is necessary, it is a kind of necessary structural illusion. So does this mean that Marxist politics should permanently manipulate its followers (and itself), acting in a way it knows is misleading? Marxist engagement is condemned to this immanent tension, which cannot be resolved by claiming that now we are fighting the Enemy and later we will move to the more fundamental overhaul of the system itself. Left populism stumbles upon the limit of fighting the Enemy the moment it takes power.
The obvious Left-populist counter-argument is, of course: but is not the fact that Left populism does not provide a detailed vision of an alternative society its very advantage? Such an openness is what characterizes a radical-democratic struggle. There are no prescriptions decided in advanced; re-arrangements are going on all the time with short-term goals shifting… Again, this smooth reply is all too easy, in that it obfuscates the fact that the “openness” of the Left-populist struggle is based on a retreat, on avoiding the key problem of capitalism.
So why persist in a radical struggle, if today radical change is unimaginable? Because our global predicament demands it: only a radical change can enable us to cope with the prospect of ecological catastrophe, with the threats of biogenetics and digital control of our lives, etc. The task is impossible, but all the more necessary.
Decades ago, in a debate in the Irish parliament, Gerald Fitzgerald, the PM at that time, rejected a proposal with a nice Hegelian reversal of the commonplace wisdom “This may be good in theory, but it is not good in practice.” His counter-argument was: “This may be good in practice, but it is not good enough in theory.” This is how things stand with Left populism: without fully endorsing it, we should treat it as part of a short-term pragmatic compromise. We should support it (when it is at its best, at least, as is the case of Podemos), but without any illusions, knowing that it will ultimately fail and hoping that through this failure something new may emerge.Footnotes
1. https://stalinsmoustache.org/2018/07/01/the-passing-of-domenico-losurdo/.
2. Op.cit.
3. Quoted from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm.
4. For this view, see, among others, Vol. 7 / No 1 (March 2017) of International Critical Thought (Routledge), especially the texts by Domenico Losurdo, William Jefferies, Peggy Raphaelle, and Cantave Fuyet.
5. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, London: Verso 2005, p. 90.
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