Populism [Entry in Keywords of Radicals (AK Press, 2016)] Stefan Kipfer As a phenomenon, “populism” is as omnipresent as it is conceptually vague. This, at least, is the case with understandings that posit “populism” as a form of political engagement that mobilizes a de-differentiated “people” (populus or plebs in Latin) against an equally amorphous elite or establishment. Indeed, the ambiguity of populism alerts us to the challenge of pinning down the meaning of the “popular” in social life and political discourse. Movements seeking to speak to the majority of the population like Occupy, Indignados, and Podemos did face this challenge, too. In societies that view themselves as “democratic” (at least nominally, based on that other, Greek notion of the people, the “demos”), populism should be uncontroversial. Why, then, the anxiety about populism among the self-proclaimed guardians of democracy in Euro-America? Editorialists from the Financial Times to Le Monde have deployed “populism” as an insult to label divergent political phenomena—the Tea Party and the Campaign for America’s Future in the US, the Front National and the Front de Gauche in France, and Golden Dawn and Syriza in Greece (Dion 2012; Seguin 2014). Associating left wing with hard right projects in this way discredits challenges to neoliberal orthodoxy while minimizing the genuine threat of far-right populism and fascism. According to radical French philosopher and May ’68 alumnus Daniel Bensaïd, editorial anxieties about populism reveal that genuine democracy represents a “permanent scandal” for the bourgeoisie (2011). Indeed, such anxieties attest to the difference between defending liberal, representative democracy and supporting democracy in the original sense, in which the people (demos) run their own affairs (Wood 1995). At an even deeper level, bourgeois distrust of democracy is often rooted in a fear of “the people,” understood as an unsophisticated, irrational, and irresponsible mass. The growing acceptance of “popular culture” as a legitimate field of Euro-American capitalist development has reoriented but not done away with bourgeois fears of the popular (Williams 1976). In an age of acute social polarization, intermittent revolt, and imperial war, dominant critiques of populism attest to the ongoing fear of the “dangerous” classes and ‘races’. In turn, this fear fuels the very populist anti-elitism it opposes. Between the early-twentieth century and the 1970s, many on the revolutionary left— including Lenin (2001)—associated populist cross-class claims with middle-peasant strata in peripheral or semi-peripheral regions and with small farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers in the so-called advanced capitalist world. But populism can radiate beyond its primary social bases, and its techniques, styles, and sensibilities can be translated into different historical situations and political strategies. This, at least, was Ernesto Laclau’s point about the relationship between Peronism and socialism in Argentina (1977). The fact that populism can flourish in different contexts and guises makes it necessary to analyze the determinate social and political forces that produce it in any given situation. 1 Since the late 1970s, radicals have had to grapple with what Stuart Hall described as an “authoritarian” form of populism (1988). This brand of populism established itself as a form of elite bourgeois rule (by winning elections) or exerted significant influence on politics (by operating as a force of opposition). Key examples include Thatcher and the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in Britain and Ronald Reagan’s Republicans and the Tea Party in the US, the Reform and new Conservative Parties in Canada, Narendra Modi’s BJP in India, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP in Turkey. Authoritarian populism operates with a profoundly anti-democratic conception of the people (ethnos): an inert mass of taxpayers, families, nationals, or believers invoked from above by folksy or fiery leaders mobilized by demagogy and fear-mongering directed against internal or external enemies (Rançière 2013). When authoritarian populists claim a direct line to the people, they typically do so by exploiting resentment against existing establishments but symbolically stacking it with subaltern figures. One of the distinct features of recent right-wing populism is its close connection to economic liberalism. New populists like Thatcher were not only at the forefront of the neoliberal turn but also had intimate links to aggressive segments of finance capital. More recently, figures like Erdogan, Modi, and Nicolas Sarkozy played a key role in radicalizing neoliberalism. Nevertheless, authoritarian populism has never been solely about liberalization, privatization, and class struggle from above. As Stuart Hall pointed out, authoritarian populists raised the stakes for the left by articulating economic liberalism to a wide variety of gendered and racialized projects (1988). In this, they have tried—quite successfully—to reorganize the terrain of struggle and the very meaning of class. In fact, today’s right-wing populisms remind us that liberalism has a long history of complex imbrication with nationalism, patriarchy, and colonialism (Losurdo 2011). What explains the rise of today’s right-wing populisms? Formative for the AngloAmerican world, discussions about Thatcherism have underlined the need to explain populism with reference to the complex relationships between economic restructuring, socio-political struggle, and ideology. Useful references for such approaches have included Karl Marx’ analysis of the Second Empire and Napoleon III in France (2010ab), Antonio Gramsci’s writing about Mussolini (1971), and Frantz Fanon’s critique of newly independent regimes in North and West Africa (2004). According to these perspectives, conservative populism is a particular response to the inability of states to govern in the face of challenges from below or tensions among ruling circles magnified by economic crises, war, or imperial intervention. From this perspective, the rise of rightwing populism in the late 1970s was a reply to the impasse of the postwar imperial world order and the challenges emanating from the “long 1968” in both the global South and North. While populism has become a self-reproducing technology of rule (e.g. the deployment of “wedge issues” during elections), the current resurgence of right populism also arises from the inability of either existing regimes or the left to organize a credible response to the economic and ecological crisis (Solty 2013). What is there to be done about authoritarian populism? The fact that it arises from instability is hardly comforting since it is bent on exploiting and intensifying—not managing—crisis. From Hungary to India, explicitly fascist elements have asserted themselves within right populism or outflanked populist parties outright (Löwy 2014; 2 Bannerji 2014). Left responses therefore need to come to terms with the thorny question of subaltern support for populism and fascism. Many authoritarian populist and fascist parties are built on the support from ruling class fractions (e.g. the Tea Party, the AKP, and BJP) and resonate most strongly with the old or new middle classes. In various cases, however, they have managed to garner support from among the dominated classes— workers, the unemployed, and even immigrants and minorities. Ascertaining the precise extent and nature of bottom-up support is thus vital. Does authoritarian populism require a left-populist response? Certainly, the prospects of left or socialist populism have been debated fervently in those parts of the global South— especially Latin America—where older left-leaning anti-imperialist and anti-colonial populist traditions have been reactivated. There, debates had to come to terms with leftwing populist elements (e.g. charismatic leadership, heterodox economic policies) in Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela, Evo Morales’ Boliva, and Néstor and Cristina Kirchner’s Argentina (Spronk and Webber 2014). In South Africa, meanwhile, debates about ANC rule under Jacob Zuma and the challenge posed by Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters have shown that one cannot always draw a clear line between left- and rightwing populisms (Hart 2014). In Euro-America, the Indignado and Occupy movements exemplified populism in their counterposition of the people and the power bloc. By stressing the common interests of the majority (e.g. “the 99%”) against a small minority (e.g. “the 1%”), these movements highlighted existing social polarization. In promoting such an analysis, some—like Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias—have expressed interest in replacing class categories with a “plebeian” politics (2015). Others want to redirect the language of right populism. Comparing Occupy Wall Street to the Tea Party and early-twentieth-century progressive US populism, Dorian Warren claimed that Occupy was “the first anti-authoritarian populist movement in this country” because it prioritized direct-democratic assemblybased decision making over charismatic leadership (cited in Goodman 2011). Similarly, Paolo Gerbaudo (2013) described Occupy as “anarcho-populist” for its attempt to fuse anarchist sensibilities with majoritarian ambitions. Attempts to sustain these amorphous mobilizations have confronted various obstacles. In English North America, left populisms face popular disorganization. As a result, they tend to fall back on existing party machines (like New York mayor Bill de Blasio’s Democratic Party) or succumb to the allure of “great men” (like Jack Layton of the Canadian New Democratic Party). Meanwhile, the European situation demonstrates the difficulty of reclaiming national politics from conservatives and fascists. In France, the experience of the Front de Gauche under Jean-Luc Mélenchon showed that making appeals to “the people” risks legitimizing ethno-nationalist forms of populism despite advocating for a political rather than an ethnic conception of national citizenship. A populist response to the fragmentation of subaltern life may not always be the most advisable—or possible—option. Indeed, it may represent a dangerously voluntarist effort to find a shortcut to substantial alternatives to neoliberalism and right-wing populism (Kraniauskas 2014, 33). Still, any radical politics that aspires to become majoritarian cannot do without appeals to the people. Socialist politics can only become hegemonic by 3 linking particular dominated and exploited groups—workers, the unemployed, peasants, and others—to whole social formations. Various strategic thinkers, including Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon, have insisted that building such a bloc entails a transformation of the very social bases of opposition. Because of their dialectical and differentiated understanding of “the people” and its component parts, such projects are better called “popular-democratic” rather than “populist” (Hall 1988, 146; Hart 2013). While radical attempts to make claims to the people cannot avoid a measure of ambiguity, these claims cannot be indeterminate. This is well illustrated by the experiences of Syriza in Greece and the electoral coalitions that won municipal elections in Spain in 2015 (Barcelona en Comù and Ahora Madrid, which include Podemos). Originally energized by base-democratic movements (the Indignados and the Movement of the Squares), they had to articulate in collective terms multiple projects with heterogeneous social bases (Candeias 2015; Rehmann 2013). For organizational and programmatic reasons, they thus needed to combine claims to “the people” with concrete references to movements (e.g. labor, feminist, ecology) and social groups (e.g. workers, students, the unemployed, migrants, the oppressed) (Syriza 2015). These examples allow us to identify two basic conditions for a popular democratic politics. First, working with a notion of the people that is diametrically opposed to the one championed by authoritarian populists: a people that, as “demos,” is not a pre-given “ethnos” defined from above but rather organized from below through open-ended forms of egalitarian decision-making (Rançière 2013). The planning processes in the barrios of Caracas, the movements of the squares in Greece, and the neighborhood committees of the Indignados all show how “the people” come into existence through political mobilization and democratic experiments. Rather than expressing the fully formed views of a pre-existing entity called “the people,” radicals strive to make the people into a political subject. The second condition involves refusing to overlook the socially differentiated dimensions of popular democratic politics. Desocializing claims about the political make it easier for “the people” to be invoked in the abstract, homogenizing, and even paternalist ways of populism—authoritarian or otherwise (Kipfer and Hart 2013). They make light of class and gender divides and ignore the fact that, in an imperial world, “the people” are often counterposed to those deemed non-people because they are on the wrong side of (neo-) colonial divides, national borders, and twenty-first-century color lines (Khiari 2013). A popular democratic project must therefore account for the differentiated and uneven relations among dominated groups by, for example, combining moments of autonomy with moments of alliance. 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