Rearticulating Contemporary Populism
Class, State, and Neoliberal Society
In: Historical MaterialismSearch for other papers by Michael Bray in
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Oriented, descriptively, by recent liberal definitions of populism, this essay pursues a historical-materialist definition that grounds populist antagonisms in class struggles as ‘crystallised’ in the capitalist state. A critical assessment of Laclau’s early equation of populism and socialism inaugurates the reading of Poulantzas’s relational account of class and state as a nascent framework for a theory of populism, centred on the state and its ideological crystallisation of individualisation, the mental/manual-labour division and the ‘people-nation’. This framework is then expanded to articulate the political-economic core of populist antagonisms, the specific character of ‘neoliberal populism’ today, and the potential, in relation to theories of ‘popular politics’ and a ‘communist people’, that left-wing populism might hold as a process of new political productions of class. This reading provides for a more expansive account of such movements’ potentials, beyond a threat to or correction of pre-determined democratic or Marxist schemas.
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Duménil Gérard & Lévy Dominique The Crisis of Neoliberalism 2011 Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press
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Dussel Enrique Ciccariello-Maher George Twenty Theses on Politics 2008 Durham, NC Duke University Press
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Ellner Steve ‘Social and Political Diversity and the Democratic Road to Change in Venezuela’ Latin American Perspectives 2013 40 3 63 82
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Evans Brad & Reid Julian Evans Brad & Reid Julian ‘Fascism in All Its Forms’ Deleuze and Fascism – Security: War: Aesthetics 2013 London Routledge
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García Linera Álvaro Plebeian Power: Collective Action and Indigenous, Working-Class and Popular Identities in Bolivia Historical Materialism 2014 Leiden Brill Book Series
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Germani Gino Authoritarianism, Fascism and National Populism 1978 New Brunswick Transaction Books
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Goodwyn Lawrence Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America 1976 New York Oxford University Press
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Gudynas Eduardo Dávila Rhon, Schuldt, Acosta & Barandiarán ‘Diez tesis urgentes sobre el nuevo extractivismo. Contextos y demandas bajo el progresismo sudamericano actual’ 2009 cedla Bolivia, Bebbington, Alayza and Gudynas 2009
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Jessop Bob Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Strategy 1985 New York St Martin’s Press
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Jessop Bob State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in Its Place 1990 Cambridge Polity
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Jessop Bob State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach 2008 Cambridge Polity
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Kalb Don Kalb Don & Halmai Gábor ‘Introduction’ Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe 2011 New York Berghahn Books
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Laclau Ernesto Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism 1977 London New Left Books
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Laclau Ernesto On Populist Reason 2007 London Verso
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Lapavitsas Costas Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All 2014 London Verso
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Lo Clarence Y.H. Rosenthal & Trost ‘Astroturf versus Grass Roots: Scenes from Early Tea Party Mobilization’ 2012 2012
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Modonesi Massimo Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy: Constructing the Political Subject 2013 London Pluto Press
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Motta Sara C. ‘Populism’s Achilles’ Heel: Popular Democracy Beyond the Liberal State and the Market Economy in Venezuela’ Latin American Perspectives 2011 38 1 28 46
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Mudde Cas & Kaltwasser Cristóbal Rovira Mudde Cas & Kaltwasser Cristóbal Rovira ‘Populism and (Liberal) Democracy: A Framework for Analysis’ Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective for Democracy? 2012 Cambridge Cambridge University Press
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Rhon Dávila Francisco, Jürgen Schuldt, Alberto Acosta & Alberto Barandiarán cedla Bolivia, Anthony Bebbington, Alejandra Alayza and Eduardo Gudynas Extractivismo, política y sociedad 2009 Quito CAAP/CLAES
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Roberts Kenneth M. de la Torre Carlos & Arnson Cynthia J. ‘Parties and Populism in Latin America’ Latin American Populism in the Twenty-First Century 2013 Washington, DC Woodrow Wilson Center Press
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Röpke Wilhelm The Moral Foundations of Civil Society 1996 New Brunswick Transaction Publishers
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Rosenthal Lawrence Trost Christine Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party 2012 Berkeley University of California Press
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Shanin Teodor Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and ‘The Peripheries of Capitalism’ 1983 New York Monthly Review Press
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Spronk Susan Webber Jeffery R. & Carr Barry ‘Neoliberal Class Formation(s): The Informal Proletariat and “New” Workers’ Organizations in Latin America’ The New Latin American Left: Cracks in the Empire 2012 Lanham, MD Rowman and Littlefield
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Streeck Wolfgang Camiller Patrick Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism 2014 London Verso
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Veltmeyer Henry & Petras James The New Extractivism: A Post-Neoliberal Development Model or Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century? 2014 London Zed Books
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Weyland Kurt ‘Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics’ Comparative Politics 2001 34 1 1 22
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Žižek Slavoj In Defense of Lost Causes 2008 London Verso
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2
Motta 2011.
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5
Weyland 2001, pp. 11, 14.
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6
Taggart 2000.
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7
Canovan 1999 and 2002.
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8
Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2012, p. 8. This definition was first formulated in Mudde 2004.
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10
Laclau 1977, pp. 143–98.
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11
Laclau 1977, pp. 196–7.
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12
Raby 2006; Cammack 2000.
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13
Laclau 1977, p. 159.
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14
Germani 1978; Di Tella 1965.
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15
Laclau 1977, pp. 150–1.
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16
Laclau 1977, p. 161.
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17
Laclau 1977, pp. 172–3.
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18
Laclau 1977, p. 165.
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19
Laclau 1977, p. 108.
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20
Laclau 1977, pp. 104–5.
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21
Laclau 1977, p. 107.
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22
Laclau 1977, p. 106.
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23
Mouzelis 1978, p. 57.
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25
Laclau 1977, p. 167. See also Laclau 1977, p. 196: ‘the resolution of “the people”/power bloc contradiction can only consist in the suppression of the State as an antagonistic force with respect to the people.’
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26
Laclau 1977, p. 171.
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29
Laclau 1977, p. 69.
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30
Poulantzas 1975, p. 21. I follow Bob Jessop here in emphasising ‘strategic-relational’ elements as the most fruitful, if still provisional, aspects of Poulantzas’s work. See Jessop 1985 and 2008.
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31
Cf. Balibar 1994, p. 140: ‘there is no “pure” process of exploitation: there is always some domination involved. In fact, the idea of “pure exploitation,” the purely calculable difference between the value of labour-power and capitalizable surplus value, is nothing but an illusion resulting from the contractual form in which the “seller” and “buyer” of labourpower “exchange” their respective “properties.” ’
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32
Poulantzas 1980, p. 19. This conception of the state encompasses the ‘extended’ or ‘integral’ concept of the state that Gramsci first developed, i.e., ‘state + civil society’.
-
34
Poulantzas 1980, p. 62.
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35
Poulantzas 1980, pp. 65–6.
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36
Poulantzas 1973, pp. 188–91; Poulantzas 1980, pp. 63–5.
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37
Poulantzas 1980, p. 73.
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39
Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, p. 96. The ethnic character of each people-nation highlights the central intersection of populism (but not only populism) with nationalism and racism, a connection manifest in most right-wing populisms but also present (if more obscured or ‘historicised’) in left-wing forms. If all modern states are racial (Goldberg 2002), then so must be all people-nations (and all ethnic formations, as both Balibar and Goldberg highlight, are also gendered/sexualised, especially though their (imaginary) connections to kinship and family). Populism, in other words, is located at the core of ‘the confrontation, as well as the reciprocal interaction, between the two notions of the people’: ethnos, ‘the “people” as an imagined community of membership and filiation’, and demos, ‘the “people” as the collective subject of representation, decision making, and rights’ (Balibar 2004, p. 9). A full rearticulation of contemporary populism must reckon with the specific effects and implications of this confrontation and interaction. In a few subsequent notes, I gesture towards elements of such an account but the principal focus here is on the intersection of class antagonisms and demos. A full critical engagement with the notion of ethnos and, ultimately, how to understand the tensions and intersections between the two, is the second core element of my book project on contemporary populism, of which this article represents the first. What should be avoided, above all, is the presumption that populism is intrinsically more racist than other modern political forms. This presumption merely combines ‘neo-racism’, which posits a ‘natural’ basis of xenophobia (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, p. 26), with a ‘class racism’, which posits the more ‘natural’ or ‘primitive’ character of the dominated classes.
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40
Poulantzas 1980, pp. 128–9.
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41
Poulantzas 1980, p. 75.
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42
Poulantzas 1980, p. 56. Also Poulantzas 1975, pp. 233–4: ‘[T]his division . . . forms, in every mode of production divided into classes, the concentrated expression of the relationship between political and ideological relations . . . in their articulation to the relations of production . . .’ It is not grounded in the technical character of specific forms of labour – as if there were pure ‘manual’ work that involved no thought, or ‘mental’ work of a incorporeal mind. Rather, the division itself is the (shifting) product of ideological-political forms that constitute the relations of production.
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43
Balibar 2014, p. 10. See also Cammack 2000, p. 153.
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44
Poulantzas 1980, p. 56.
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45
As Bob Jessop notes (cf. Poulantzas 1980, p. 63), Poulantzas’s account of the unity of the state never escapes an implicit functionalist presumption – the state unifies because that is its necessary function – and so tends to eclipse any account of precisely how such unity is constructed. What populism suggests is that such unity is inherently fragile and contested. The nation-people can become a term in an antagonist confrontation, as much as the integrative term for a fragmented set of individuals. The inverse side of this critique is that Poulantzas ‘overlooks the implications of the “isolation effect” for the creation of hegemony in favor of a class reductionist account of political forces and ideologies’ (Jessop 1990, p. 188). Populism is precisely one of the key such implications, especially, as argued below, given neoliberalism’s intensification of that effect. At the same time, the homogenising character of race is a central factor in the construction of such unity (Goldberg 2002).
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46
Quoted in Modonesi 2013, pp. 16–17 (Q25, § 5: 2289).
-
47
Jessop 1990, p. 96.
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48
Roberts 2013, p. 42. Despite his identification of ‘economic’ initiating causes, Roberts retains a liberal, discursive definition of populism.
-
49
Cammack 2000, p. 155.
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50
Poulantzas 1975, p. 311.
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51
Poulantzas 1980, p. 89.
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53
Poulantzas 1980, p. 168.
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54
Poulantzas 1980, p. 169.
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55
García Linera 2014, pp. 294–5.
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59
Pollack 1990; Konings 2011.
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61
Fraser and Gordon 1994.
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62
Pollack 1990, p. 13.
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65
For a range of accounts, see Lapavitsas 2014, Kliman 2012 and Duménil and Lévy 2011.
-
66
Castel 2002, p. xv.
-
67
Lapavitsas 2014.
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69
Barker 2013, p. 43.
-
72
Hayek 2014, p. 307.
-
73
Mirowski 2013, p. 81.
-
74
Röpke 1996, p. 159.
-
75
Davies 2014, p. 89. This basic change allows a number of ‘discoveries’ in economics and state regulation, including that large corporations do not impede ‘competition’ and that situations that are not, strictly speaking, ‘markets’ can be rationalised through the application of market-logics of assessment and rational choice.
-
76
Frank 2000, p. xiv.
-
78
See, amongst many others, Krippner 2012.
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82
Streeck 2014, pp. 79–82.
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83
Angosto-Ferrández 2014.
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84
The obvious exception is Laclau 2007, which defines populism as the ground of all politics. The account offered here suggests that the plausibility of such a claim lies rather in the historical conditions of neoliberalism. For elements of a critique of Laclau’s later account of populism, see Bray 2014a.
-
85
D’Eramo 2013, p. 20.
-
86
Dussel 2007, p. 4.
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87
Badiou 2010; Dean 2012; Bosteels 2011.
-
91
Dean 2012, p. 98; Compare Dussel 2007, p. 12.
-
92
Dussel 2008, p. 74.
-
93
Dean 2012, p. 80.
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94
Dean 2012, p. 97.
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95
Dussel 2008, p. 76. I find more unresolved tensions in Dussel’s use of ‘potentia’ and ‘potestas’ than Ciccariello-Maher suggests. Compare the claim that ‘without organization, the power of the people remains pure potential . . . objective nonexistence, ideal voluntarism, and anarchism’ (Dussel 2008, p. 98).
-
97
Dussel 2008, p. 76.
-
98
Dean 2012, p. 69.
-
100
Žižek 2006, p. 269.
-
101
Muhr 2011, p. 41.
-
102
Sassen 2014.
-
103
García Linera 2014, pp. 229, 238, 308.
-
104
García Linera 2014, p. 239.
-
105
Ellner 2013, p. 65. The question of whether ethnic/racial identities might undergo analogous (re)formations, through such processes, in such places, must remain an open one here. Something similar, at least, seems to be projected in Goldberg’s query as to whether states (or peoples?) could become ‘the principal terrains in which social life is played out in all its cultural – what one might characterize as ethnoracial – thickness’ (Goldberg 2002, p. 274).
-
107
Lo 2012. Also Davidson 2013, p. 292: ‘The people organized by such movements may well be morally and politically misguided, but it is patronizing – and, above all, politically useless – to pretend that they are simply being manipulated by élite puppetmasters’.
-
108
Agarwala 2008; Spronk 2012.
-
109
Davidson 2013; Kalb 2011, p. 15.
-
110
Konings 2011, p. 52.
-
113
García Linera 2014, p. 156.
-
114
Gudynas 2009; Veltmeyer and Petras 2014. On the ‘magical state’, see Coronil 1997.
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Rearticulating Contemporary Populism
Class, State, and Neoliberal Society
In: Historical MaterialismSearch for other papers by Michael Bray in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Oriented, descriptively, by recent liberal definitions of populism, this essay pursues a historical-materialist definition that grounds populist antagonisms in class struggles as ‘crystallised’ in the capitalist state. A critical assessment of Laclau’s early equation of populism and socialism inaugurates the reading of Poulantzas’s relational account of class and state as a nascent framework for a theory of populism, centred on the state and its ideological crystallisation of individualisation, the mental/manual-labour division and the ‘people-nation’. This framework is then expanded to articulate the political-economic core of populist antagonisms, the specific character of ‘neoliberal populism’ today, and the potential, in relation to theories of ‘popular politics’ and a ‘communist people’, that left-wing populism might hold as a process of new political productions of class. This reading provides for a more expansive account of such movements’ potentials, beyond a threat to or correction of pre-determined democratic or Marxist schemas.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 1506 | 325 | 54 |
| Full Text Views | 500 | 66 | 8 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 482 | 150 | 21 |
