Left Populism, Why Not? (part one)
Arthur Borriello and Anton Jager (henceforth B+J) have written an excellent short book, The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession (Verso 2023), evidently intended as a supplementary text for an undergraduate political science course. They make important points about the nature of contemporary left populist electoral parties in Western Europe, and about the allegedly left populist Corbyn movement within the UK Labour Party and the left populist Bernie Sanders movement within the US Democratic Party.
B+J do not directly discuss the radical left that mostly leads extraparliamentary protests, but take it as given (correctly in my view) that the left populist parties are what they say they are -- a translation of the politics of the post-2008 financial crisis radical protesters into the electoral politics arena. More specifically, they note that both the electoral and protest wings of the current left view political democracy as the most important solution that the left has to offer to any and all societal problems.
Left Populist Electoral Parties Express the Politics of Post-2008 Protest Movements
B+J sketch the rise and fall of several left populist parties between 2015 and 2022 (mostly Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain and La France Insoumise in France) in quick strokes, and do the same in even less detail for the Corbyn and Sanders movements. They use these five cases to demonstrate their findings about what the left populist parties share as distinguishing features. They then compare and contrast current left populist movements with past socialist movements. Unfortunately, they choose not to also compare and contrast left versus right populist movements (I hope this will be included in Jager’s upcoming book on the history of populism).
There are many insightful points throughout B+J’s book (so I urge you to buy it). B+J imply that the left has reached a point of diminishing returns for the strategy-tactics of left populism. What can and should come next? This article presents the highlights of the B+J analysis. In the next article I present a critique of B+J, but mostly I critique left populism itself, and make some suggestions about how we can move on from it, that follow from B+J’s insights.
There are three points that I think are especially important: first, that both the protest wing of today’s radical left, and the electoral parties that were built out of those post-2008 protest wave movements, share a politics that can be described as populist; second, that the distinguishing feature of left-leaning populist movements historically is that they “sought to secure political rather than economic democracy” (p6); third, that the left was most powerful when it organized itself into mass political parties, that fostered an entire ecosystem of mass participation popular organizations, that were linked politically and organizationally to the party/ies, and to one another.
Today’s Protest Left and Electoral Left Share a Populist Politics
Borriello and Jager (B+J) describe the quick rise and equally quick decline in the political fortunes of left populist electoral parties as follows:
(1) Syriza, Podemos, La France Insoumise (LFI), the Sanders campaign and progressive bloc within the US Democratic Party, the Corbyn-led UK Labour Party are all examples of a politics that became widespread and hegemonic within the left from 2015-16 onwards. B+J argue persuasively that those politics can be described as (left) populist, although they also qualify this by saying that there was a (mostly very downplayed) admixture of earlier traditions of socialism and communism (p37).
B+J identify the key defining characteristics of the populism by making two comparisons. They highlight what today’s populists have in common with the classic populist movements of the late 19th century. And they point out key differences between today’s populists and past socialist and communist parties in 20th century Western Europe.
What today’s left populists share as a defining characteristic with past populist movements is the idea that a merger between top individuals in the Economy and State has constituted a coherent conspiring Elite that has rendered an hitherto more or less (liberal) democratic State into an Elite (One Percent) controlled one. Left populists aim to reverse this takeover, and in so doing win the leverage to reverse the neoliberal policies that the Elite has imposed on The People (the Ninety-Nine Percent). The essence of their promise to their voters and activists is this: A thoroughgoing democratization of the political system of Western liberal democracy can restore governments that work for the Ninety-Nine Percent instead of just for The One Percent.
Populists Claim that Economic and Political Elites Have Seized Control of the Economy and State.
More specifically, they promise that they will change the existing liberal democracy system in two ways. They will make the democracy more direct (unmediated, more Participatory Democracy and less Representative Democracy), and they will make it less formally structured and hierarchical (more “horizontalist”). The People in the private sphere of Civil Society will be empowered to oblige those who rule politically to be directly responsive to their wants and desires, with the minimum of bureaucracy getting in the way. And/Or more and more of the debate and decision-making, and doing of things that governments and States currently do, will be done directly by Civil Society, by The People themselves organized into voluntary associations of all kinds. (Actually, B+J note that the left populist parties mostly pay lip service to seeking this supposedly perfect democracy, and present themselves to voters as seeking the more practical and short-term goal of being a government that reverses the One Percent serving neoliberal policies.)
“A rival tradition opted for a different tactic altogether. Rather than acting in the name of the working class, American and Russian populists in the late nineteenth century consciously represented a ‘people’ of small property owners and farmers who sought to secure political rather than economic democracy.” (p6)
“[P]opulists have always been more interested in expanding and radicalizing the scope of democratic principles than seizing the means of production. They have always pushed for the inclusion of the popular sectors by granting them equal civil, political, social and economic rights and fostering their participation through assemblies, cooperatives, and, in today’s politics, digital forms of direct democracy. Capitalism and representative democracy were never populism’s prime adversaries; oligarchic corruption always was. Populism always remained uneasy about setting up a politics around the capital-labor matrix, and instead preferred oppositions between debtors and creditors, elites and peoples.” (p34)
Socialists Give Priority To Fighting Capitalism and Class Exploitation. Populists Seek to Win Democratic Rights With a Cross-Class Coalition.
(2) B+J argue that what makes today’s left populist movements different from past socialist and communist parties is what I would call their ‘strategy for power’ – which social groups do they seek to champion the interests of, and which groups do they seek out as allies. Socialist parties saw ending the economic exploitation of wage labour by Capital as their primary goal, and hence built their strategic coalition around organizing and politically educating a leading class, the working class. Their goal was to achieve control over the means of production by the workers, to achieve “economic democracy”, by first winning political control over the capitalist State, “political democracy”, by one or more (socialist) parties based in the popular organizations of the working class. Socialist parties also sought to champion the interests of all other groups in society who were systematically oppressed in any way . They therefore built alliances around their working class socialist movement with movements of peasants, women, racial and religious minorities, middle class people etc.
A populist party refuses the idea of seeking to serve the interests of any one social group or class more centrally than another, and declares that it is for all of the variegated particular interests and identity-based aspirations of everyone equally. They are against The Elite and for The People (everyone outside The Elite).
“The populist and socialist traditions have always competed to offer their own response to the same substantial dilemma of the left: With what base and what ideology can it grow its majority? Whereas socialism crowns the industrial working class as the sovereign around which all others must coalesce (peasantry, middle class), the populist approach has always been different… Rather than forging a social bloc around a class -- which presupposes the existence of an acute class consciousness of itself and its historical mission [to end capitalist exploitation] – populism articulates a coalition across classes. As a result, populisms’s political subject is both broader and vaguer than socialism’s proletariat: populism’s people is an abstract subject that all too easily merges with the subject of democracy. No wonder democracy is the true cornerstone of populism’s ideology” (p33).
There is a Contradiction Between the Orientation of Many Social Justice Movements and the Populist Idea that the Only System Change We Really Need is Athenian-style Political Democracy.
To put the same point more sharply, (left) populist theory rejects the idea that there are any irreconcilable conflicts between the interests of capitalists and workers, or between any other disadvantaged social (collective identity) group and an advantaged group. All differences can be worked out through processes of political democracy, if only we can purge the (hidden, bad) Elite. There is no need for revolutionary private society transformations, for systemic changes in capitalism and related but distinct systems of imperialism, patriarchy, systemic racism etc. The left of the left actually disagrees with this populist idea – privately, or off center stage. There is a contradiction between our populist foregrounding of Athenian democracy, as the only system change that we really need, and the orientation of a large number of social justice movements.
(3) B+J argue that the post-2008 left parties are also populist in their political tactic or “style”, and that they share this style with all other parties in most Western liberal democracy States. They share a tactic, a means, if not substantive policy goals, with all the non-populist parties. Mostly this means that they at least seek to appear to represent all of The People politically (a) with as little indirectness (mediation, delegating of decisions to political representatives) as possible and (b) with as little reliance on a hierarchical bureaucratic organization as possible (the party should be seen as a flat ‘movement’ of individual activists).
All Parties Follow the Populist Playbook. They Rely on a Strong Leader to Make a Personal Connection to Atomized Individuals.
All parties today get individuals to vote for them by the digital marketing of a Brand by professional marketers. They seek to make as direct, and as upfront and personal, a connection as possible between the Charismatic Leader of their party and each potential voter. Each voter is understood to be an “atomized individual” that thinks like an atomized individual, that differs from other voters only in their personal tastes, just like an individual consumer supposedly does in an economic marketplace. They rely on a “Swarm” of Just in Time volunteers, rather than on long-term party members and an extensive party organization, to win electoral campaigns. All of this makes them appear to be a Movement of the People, not an aloof hierarchical Party of politicians and bureaucrats.
“[T]he antiestablishment rhetoric, the strong leadership, the plebiscitarian modes of decision, the direct channels of communication and the weak party structures are not specific to populist actors. Rather they characterize any new actor eager to thrive in our present environment… ‘Men resemble their times more than they do their fathers’ as the Arab proverb has it” (p38).
“The populist turn of the 2010s was no perfect replica of its Russian, US and Latin American predecessors. Rather four decades of declining turnout, plummeting party membership, discredited ideologies, and a generally atomized society had considerably changed the coordinates of political activity. Western democracies had endured a slow but steady process of disintermediation [as] the bodies (parties, unions, churches, clubs etc.) that used to link the citizens to society declined everywhere, thereby causing the extreme fragmentation and disorganization of the social groups to which the left used to appeal” (p37).
“Populism is, then, simply one of the various species inhabiting this new political ‘ecosystem’ of disorganized democracy – alongside the new radical right and the liberal technocrats” (p38).
Why Did the 2008 Financial Crisis Result in Populism Instead of a Revived Labour Movement Seeking Democratic Socialism?
(4) According to B+J, “disorganized democracy” is the long term outcome of the unravelling of the “organized democracy” that prevailed in Western Europe in the first decades after World War Two. Was it inevitable that this long-term unravelling, combined with the 2008 financial crisis, would trigger a general swing to populism (at least in electoral ‘style’) by all political parties? Was it inevitable that the left parties created out of the 2011-2015 extraparliamentary protest movements had to choose to present themselves to voters as populist (rather than, say, a new kind of socialist)?
B+J say no. Three major factors led to left radicals choosing to present as populists, and to shift their energies somewhat away from protest towards winning elections with an electoral party.
First, the 2008 crisis was a debt crisis. It intensified conflicts between creditors and debtors (between international banks and national governments, national banks and individual consumers) much more visibly than between private employers and their workers.
Second, the Tony Blair and Bill Clinton Third Way center left parties that had promoted ‘neoliberalism with a human face’ were discredited among many of their voters by the crisis, and by their failure to organize a mass fightback against the austerity policies that followed 2008.
Third, while the 2008 crisis degraded the economic situation of working class people even more than that of middle class people, the long decline in the organized labour movement meant that a strategy of mass mobilization of workers alongside middle class groups was not organizationally feasible.
From 1946 to 1976 Both Left and Right Parties Developed Ecosystems of Voluntary Organizations Aligned With their Party that Fostered a Shared Social and Political Consciousness. No More.
“When the stock market unexpectedly collapsed in 2008, nobody guessed that it would spur the outbreak of a populist moment across the Western world. Things could have unfolded entirely differently. The crisis could have caused a paradigm shift among political elites, turning them away from neoliberal economics and generating a new consensus around neo-Keynesian solutions [but instead political and economic elites doubled down on neoliberalism] … It could have provoked expressions of authoritarian, nationalist and xenophobic sentiment among the population – and, to a certain extent, it did. It could have regenerated the labor movement and revived its political organizations – and, in some places like Portugal, it also did. Given the extreme fragmentation and atomization of the left’s social base, however, the main result was quite different: it gave rise to a wave of protests firmly expressed in the language of democracy…” (pp48-49).
“With no powerful institution like the labor movement to call upon, leftists were forced to take the battle to the electoral arena… [The 2011-2015 protest movements were already arguably populist in their politics, as] expressed in mottoes such as ‘We are the 99 percent’, ‘They do not represent us’, or ‘They call it democracy and it is not’. Their main targets were not capitalists and multinational corporations per se. Instead they attacked the unholy alliance between economic and political elites – the ‘caste’” (p45).
“Populist breakthroughs usually happen when a spark – economic recession, fiscal reform, or modernization/globalization – first ignites a crisis of representation. Then a broad swath of the society comes to see democracy as having been perverted by an oligarchic minority’s plundering of public resources. Populism rides in as the white knight of ‘real democracy’… “(p36)
Increasing Economic Inequality Was a Key Issue After 2008. But Loss of Faith in Socialism as a Solution Has Led the Left to Seek Political Equality Instead.
(5) What was the political effect of the choice by left radicals to make political democracy their primary goal, and to present their electoral parties as populist?
The activists in the protest wave of 2011-2015 had challenged the increasing economic inequality produced by the intensified neoliberal privatization and social spending cut policies that followed 2008. Their proposed solution was to replace the rule of the top individuals in the economy and the top individuals in the State, the One Percent networked together as The Caste, with the unmediated and non-bureaucratic rule of the Ninety-Nine Percent.
The left wing of this movement, like the left wing of the “anti-globalization” and anti (Western imperialist) war movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, was also anti-capitalist. But the anti-capitalists had lost faith in any notion of a socialist economy and society that might replace capitalism. This only reinforced the decision to say in effect “We don’t have an alternative to the current capitalist system, but we can agree that The People should decide on all economic and social policies, and neoliberal policies should at least be reversed back to before Thatcher-Reagan progressive Keynesianism”.
The 2011-2015 protest movements mostly sought to organize their own left activist organizations and their major protest events on the basis of horizontalism and participatory democracy. The left populist electoral parties created out of those movements did not hesitate to make the shift to organizing their political party in the ‘style’ of populism shared by all the other electoral parties in 2015 to now. B+J sum up the style as follows: “hyperleaderism” and “verticalism”, a Swarm of Just in Time activist volunteers, political messaging and on the fly shifts in policy and tactics dictated by a Charismatic Leader who ideally incarnates the brand, and the digital marketing of a Brand to “atomized individuals” by media experts.
Electoral Left Parties Still Believe in Horizontalist Participatory Democracy. But They Shift Pragmatically to HyperLeaderism and Verticalism When the Goal is Winning Power.
B+J say that this apparently abrupt shift was due to a pragmatic realism. The activist core of the new parties quickly recognized what had to be done to be nimble enough to zig and zag announced policies and brand messages during campaigns, in response to polling about public opinion and the zigs and zags of their electoral opponents. In the event, all of the new parties or left blocs within existing parties adopted this style and were very successful in achieving a quick rise in voter support, largely at the expense of the (Third Way leadership of ) established center left parties.
The left populist parties also continued to declare their support for horizontalism and participatory democracy as the ideal of the democracy that they were working toward, and maintained various ways of consulting their members that formally aligned with those principles. Most importantly (and I am extending B+J here), they practiced what they preached at the crunch moments, when faced with a choice of upholding the right of the people to decide on major issues, or using the excuse of keeping the decision-making to existing ‘representative democracy’ bodies to capitulate to the centrist neoliberals and conservatives.
Syriza rallied the Greek people to refuse the terms of debt repayment imposed by Germany and the EU, holding a referendum where they promised to resign if defeated, and then calling an early election after they were forced to accept the deal that the people voted against.
Syriza, Podemos, Corbyn et al Stood By Direct Democracy on Issues of Austerity and National Self-Determination, Even Though It Hurt Them Politically.
Podemos upheld the right of the Catalan and other Spanish regional nationalists to exercize their right to self-determination by holding plebiscites or referenda, even though this galvanized the Francoist hard right and stopped Podemos’ rise in relation to the existing center-left PSOE (although their rise also slowed because the PSOE’s Pedro Sanchez moved his party to the left enough to slow down the Podemos advance).
The Corbyn-led Labour party might have followed Corbyn’s own instincts to respect the outcome of the Brexit referendum, and to call for a “Lexit” (Labour Exit). A Lexit would have retained maximum ties with the EU, while exercizing increasing independence in economic and social policies (being less neoliberal and pro Western Alliance than the EU and the Blairites). But they made what I have argued was the major tactical error of letting the faction of Remainers seeking a second referendum prevail. Yet Corbyn still indicated respect for the right of the Scottish people to vote for independence, and the right of the Irish people to vote for reunification, not to mention the right of the Palestinian people to their own State. Corbyn’s anti Western imperialism stance was the main underlying reason why both the moderate mainstream of the Labour party and the entire rest of the political spectrum were united in seeking to rid UK politics of Corbynism. For the Corbynites, it was a simple matter of the democratic rights of oppressed peoples to self-determination and decolonization.
Left Populist Parties Won Voters By Promising More Democracy and Less Neoliberalism. They Worked to Restore Old-Style Social Democracy.
All of these principled stands in favour of a more direct democracy by Syriza, Podemos, Corbyn etc contributed to a quick rise in voter support. But they also eventually contributed to a quick decline back down to the level of support that left socialist or communist parties had achieved in many Western European countries up to the 1960s and 1970s.
The result overall was to create new left parties with significant voter support that revived the politics of the social democratic parties of the 1960s and 1970s, and added the stress on political democratization guided by the principles of horizontalism and participatory democracy. The new parties are explicitly against the neoliberal model of capitalism that has prevailed globally since Thatcher-Reagan. They champion an extensive welfare state and Keynesian economic policies. They do not call for replacing the capitalist system with a socialist “economic democracy” one (even in the long term).
“Retrospectively, the populist left’s role across the 2010s seems, indeed, to have consisted in revitalizing the left, after its main social democrat representatives had surrendered to the siren calls of neoliberalism. Contra those who cried wolf about populisms’s alleged ‘radicalism’, it was never designed as a revolutionary form of politics. Rather it was an attempt at updating the reformist project by other means… The left’s populist turn did not result from a sudden radical surge; it was made possible by the opening of a representative void which it sought to fill. This void was the outcome of a twofold process: the long-term erosion of political representation in Western democracies, and the management of the subprime crisis by political elites, including the established center-left.” (p172)
In 1946 to 1976 Left Parties, Like Right Ones, Had Ecosystems of Politically Aligned Mass Organizations to Foster a Collective Consciousness and Political Ideology in the Groups Supporting Them.
(6) B+J allege that The Populist Moment was just that, a moment. This implies that it was a fever that has now subsided, or at least a tactic that has accomplished the creation of greatly expanded progressive blocs within existing center left parties, or the creation of new rival reformist parties to their left, but no more than that. Where should the left of the overall left go from here?
B+J seem to believe that the answer may lie in reviving what they refer to as the “total parties” of the past. Total parties had mass memberships, and they operated within an ecosystem of mass participation popular organizations politically aligned with the party. This enabled the party and the popular organizations to politically socialize their mass base, and to mobilize mass campaigns where the working class played a major active role.
B+J sketch the story of the changes in Western liberal democracy from the beginning of the 20th century to now. Before World War Two, there is the rise of mass labour organizations and mass membership parties on the left. The first generation of “total parties” arise as movements to replace capitalism with socialism. The second generation total parties are fostered by the United States and Western European pro-West and pro-capitalism forces as a Cold War strategy to pre-empt the rise of anti-capitalist left parties after the war. After two world wars and a Depression that threatened the capitalist system and the hegemony of the US empire and its Western European allies, the Western states developed more extensive welfare states, and a political settlement with labour and the left that B+J call “organized democracy”. It is this 1946-1976 system of “political representation” that B+J describe as having sharply declined to the point that the political system has become more of a “disorganized democracy”.
“A more careful integration[between left and right, between capital and labour] was agreed on in the aftermath of World War II. Capital had to agree to distribute parts of its profits back into state coffers which would fund working class consumption. Radical working classes would not meddle with property rights and would leave the ruling class to rule. An intricate list of pacifying civil institutions was set up from trade unions to mass parties, which sought to make sure that capitalism would grow for, and not against, the working classes. As ever, the presupposition was that the system would deliver perpetual growth – there would always be a bigger and bigger pie to share.
The Quid Pro Quo in the Cold War period: A Welfare State and Unions to Negotiate Higher Wages in Exchange for Anti-Communism at Home and in the Third World.
By 1968, cracks were appearing in this compact [as political support for anti-capitalism and anti Western imperialism were on the rise again]… By 1973 [the Keynesian welfare state economic model was failing to maintain profit rates and thereby economic growth – there was stagflation, stagnant economic growth combined with wage-driven price inflation]… By 1980, the options were clear: either cut ties with existing civil society organizations and suppress the inflationary threat, or face deep restructuring [i.e. extensive business failures] and ballooning public debt… each country chose its own path… All of them, however, required breaking the control that organized civil society [especially left parties and trade unions] had over the state” (pp 66-67).
The pro-fascist political science theorist Carl Schmitt argued in 1927 that a total State would be necessary to defeat the rise of the first generation anti-capitalist left-wing “total parties”:
“We do not have a total state but a plurality of total parties [on both left and right]. Each party realizes in itself the totality, totally absorbing their members, guiding individuals from cradle to grave, from kindergarden to burial and cremation, situating itself totally in the most diverse social groups and passing on to its membership the correct views, the correct ideology, the correct form of state, the correct economic system, and the correct sociability on account of the party” (p68).
“[Gaspar Tamas further described left-wing total parties as] the creation of a counter-power of working class trade unions and parties, with their own savings banks, health and pension funds, newspapers, extramural popular academies, workingmen’s clubs, libraries, choirs, brass bands, engage intellectuals, songs, novels, philosophical treatises, learned journals, pamphlets, well-entrenched local governments, temperance societies – all with their own mores, manners and style” (p69).
“[A 1930s social-democratic total party is described as including] a party organization, a trade union with affiliated theatre club, a child welfare committee called Children’s Friends, the Society of Free Thinkers, the Flame (a cremation society), a cycling club, the Workers’ Radio Club, the Workers’ Athletic Club, the Wrestling Club, the Young Socialist Workers, the Republican Home Guard, the Workers’ Library, the Rabbit Breeders’ Association, and the Allotment Owners’ Association” (p68).
It is these popular organizations and activities, ideologically and organizationally linked to the political party, that infuse a collective consciousness in the masses of otherwise disconnected and only weakly conscious individuals.
‘The Populist Moment’ Explains a Lot About Left Populism and Why Left Radicals Have Turned to It. If the Moment is Actually Over, What is Next?
CONCLUSIONS
Borriello and Jager have written a book that presents us with three very important insights into the nature of the new electoral parties (or blocs within parties) on the left, and by inference into the nature of the politics of the overall left in Western Europe and beyond. First, both the electoral parties and the post-2008 protest movements that they came out of can be described as having populist politics. Second, the most important defining characteristic of populist politics is to seek political democracy instead of economic democracy. Third, the most important cause of The Populist Moment since 2008 is the long-term decline of the “organized democracy” system of political representation through “total parties” that was set up in both Eastern and Western Europe in the first thirty years after World War Two.
B+J’s analysis is not perfect. I will critique it in part two. My main purpose will be to argue that left populism is a highly problematic politics to stick with. We can and should move on from it to something better. B+J’s book will help guide us in doing that.
See Left Populism, Why Not? (part two).