Why the theories of ‚left-populism‘ can’t be a basis for working class politics
Dave Stockton
Left populism as a theory has its roots in the work of the Argentine and French post-Marxist political philosophers, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their 1985 work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.
Post-Marxism rejects Marxism’s materialist understanding of modes of production and their struggle between exploited and exploiting classes, as the fundamental determinant underlying society, and hence, under capitalism, the agency of the working class for a revolution not only to replace capitalism, but to abolish a society based on classes.
Consequently, post-modernists seek to ‘free’ politics from the supposed ‘economic determinism’ of Marxism’s understanding of state power, culture and social identities by replacing it with a concept located ‘beyond’ class, or where class is simply another identity.
Much of what is called ‘identity politics’ rests upon this fundamentally idealist method, i.e. movements based on ideas ‘discovered’—in fact generated—by intellectuals ‘free’ of parties identified with class. But their ideas are not free of the bourgeois academy, i.e. universities that are themselves businesses. This is where they were nurtured.
A crucial origin of Laclau and Mouffe’s thought was a project of achieving ‘radical and plural democracy’ that rejects class antagonism, and rejects a final goal—the overthrow of one class by another. Instead they replace this with what they call ‘agonism’, i.e. an unending struggle.
They also alluded to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, i.e. how a ruling class or ideology maintains dominance by using cultural and intellectual means, creating a ‘common sense’ etc. not just by using coercive force. Mouffe pointed to how Margaret Thatcher constructed a neoliberal hegemony by co-opting popular demands and redefining common sense. She argued that the left should learn from this strategy to build its own counter-hegemony.
Marx of course recognised that ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.’ The ideas are ruling because the class that needs them is ruling. This includes controlling the schools, the media, the academy, the churches and, importantly, the trade union and reformist leaderships of the workers’ movement too. Populism does not aid but hinders the ideological class struggle against these ideas.
Yet Lenin used the term hegemony to refer to the leadership that the working class movement (if led by a revolutionary party) could give to other exploited classes and oppressed peoples (the peasantry, the nationalities) in the struggle to overthrow their common enemy, at that time Tsarism and landlordism. Gramsci too, though he stressed the ideological cultural struggle to achieve leadership over other ‘subaltern classes’, saw its goal as achieving power for the proletariat, not simply creating a ‘counter-hegemony’ for the purpose of winning elections.
For their part, Mouffe and Laclau claimed hegemony is established when political groups ‘articulate’ social demands to build a common political project. It is true that Thatcher had first to win a hegemonic battle within the ruling class (i.e. within its historic instrument, the Tory party). But for an oppressed and exploited class to counter, i.e. break this hegemony, Engels says, requires three spheres of class struggle: economic, political, and ideological. Intervention into these areas of struggle are the tasks of working class parties struggling for power.
Left populist ideology also has definite material roots. It took off in the early 21st century after the collapse of Stalinism and Blair’s attack on ‘old’ Labourism. There was an infatuation amongst the intelligentsia with left-Bonapartist regimes, like Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, Evo Morales’ Bolivia, Castro’s Cuba. From these, European left populists developed their own ‘charismatic’ leaders, Alexis Tsipras (Syriza), Pablo Iglesias (Podemos), Jean-Luc Mélenchon (La France Insoumise). According to James Schneider, Jeremy Corbyn, with his ‘For the many Not the Few’ slogan, should count among them.
Of course, there is no chasm between left populism and left Labourism, reformist socialism or Eurocommunism. But their ‘socialism’ always was, and is already closer to the utopianism of Robert Owen, Charles Fourier and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon than to Marx and Engels’ scientific socialism. Left populism and its variants require no class struggle beyond electoralism and no forcible expropriation of the bourgeoisie as a class, let alone the smashing of the capitalist state machine. That is why the working class should reject it.