This is the third in the series on the big issues a new left or Polanski-led Green Party will face, posted the day Zarah Sultana announced her resignation from Labour and her intention to found a new party with Jeremy Corbyn. You can also read part one on elections vs base building and part two on making party democracy good again.
Left populism is an old idea, and has been well practised by Bernie Sanders in the USA, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, Pablo Iglesias in Spain and Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in Mexico.
Theorised by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in the 1970s and 80s, left populism was one part of the New Left’s response to the exhaustion of orthodox Marxism. A move away from identifying a revolutionary class, based on workers as workers, and an attempt to construct a broad coalition behind left electoral projects instead. Out went the proletariat and in came the people, always juxtaposed against a corrupt elite rather than the capitalist class per se.
To achieve this, Mouffe backgrounded socialist politics and foregrounded “floating signifiers” – concepts such as democracy or freedom that are widely understood but mean different things to different people – in an effort to cohere divergent social groups, interests and struggles not through a shared ideology or programme but through their opposition to a specific set of elites.
Bernie Sanders’ Oligarchy Tour is a case in point. Leveraging the lack of leadership by establishment Democrats and the nakedly oligarchical nature of Trump’s presidency, Sanders is attracting huge crowds in red states, many far larger than when he ran for president and including lots of normie, liberal democrats. This is an example, Laclau and Mouffe would argue, of populism’s ability to create overwhelming coalitions through its flexibility and comfort with difference, in stark contrast to the minoritarian purism of the revolutionary sect. This breadth gives it power, and makes it a tempting strategy for socialists contesting elections.
However, there are many good criticisms of Laclau and Mouffe. Their re-interpretation of Gramsci and emphasis on hegemony means battles of words and framing take precedence over material conditions and how they shape us. Constructing broad coalitions can lead to triangulation, taking people as they are rather than trying to change them. There is also a fundamental instability to populist coalitions. In their diversity they have many contradictions, often easily exploited by opponents. They have a tendency to burn bright and then explode.
Most of all, populism’s emphasis on elites can disappear under capitalism and discourage systemic thinking. Of course Elon Musk is our enemy, but the real agency remains with capital, and one of the most powerful things a socialist can do is shine a bright white light on the systems that really govern us.
Nevertheless, I think Slavoj Zizek is right when he says that while populism is not good enough in theory, it may be good enough in practice. It’s clear that anti-elite anger rages on after briefly subsiding during the pandemic. Just knock on any door across the country and you’ll hear a version of the same story – politicians are corrupt, they don’t care about me, the system is broken and needs to change. Even Starmerites acknowledge this now, and you only have to look at the surging populist right to see its potential.
A populist approach, while primarily a communications strategy, should be leveraged by socialist parties in specific, targeted ways. We must preserve class politics and our analysis of capitalism, while adapting our messaging to connect with people’s complex, sometimes contradictory identities, addressing them as more than just workers.
If our project is to rebuild class identity, populism can be a well-set stepping stone that helps newcomers, who might otherwise recoil at the red flag, dip their toes in the torrents of the left.
With this in mind, a new left party should:
■ Invoke the people and name elites. For Podemos in Spain this was la caste, for Sanders the 99% vs 1% and Corbyn tried the many vs the few. The aim is to unite a broad coalition of different class fractions against a well defined elite of billionaires, establishment politicians and Whitehall mandarins, always naming names. This is the fundamental battle of political discourse. While Farage tries to draw dividing lines between the people and muslims, migrants and woke graduates, we must draw clear and bright lines between the people and the billionaires, big corporations and their corrupt politicians. It’s worth noting that the theory bears out in practice. Studies by progressive communications experts in the US and UK also come to very populist conclusions.
■ Embrace conflict and fight the attention war. Liberal, technocratic politics tries to suppress conflict through rational argument and management. If consensus is ever ‘achieved’ it is only through the managing of and distracting from class conflict. We must openly acknowledge that society is divided between the people and the elite and embrace the conflict that ensues.
This is far more credible to many voters than putting on a suit and talking like a politician. Leaders at every level, but especially at the top of the party, must have an appetite for conflict and be on the hunt for spectacular fights that position the people against the elites.
For left media fatalists who argue we can never reach the people on billionaire owned platforms and in the mainstream press, the popularity of Ocasio-Cortez, Mick Lynch, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Die Linke’s Heidi Reichinnek, the most popular politician in Germany who spurred Die Linke on to a recent historic result, are strong evidence to the contrary.
Any left party that only fights the attention war, relying on media spectacle instead of base building, will be frail and fleeting. But in an increasingly mediatised world where we spend more time on our own and with our screens than ever before – ignoring the attention war completely will also condemn us to failure.
■ Embrace emotion and feel with people. People feel angry, frustrated and uncared for, and our leaders need to acknowledge these emotions and give them voice. Correct policy positions aren’t enough and facts don’t resonate. People need to feel that you feel it too. Politics has a deep irrationality and Marxists in particular can forget that. We’re building a coalition of flawed, chaotic human beings, not robots who add up and subtract policy positions. Leaders need to offer opportunities for catharsis. Trump is the master at this and Farage isn’t bad either.
Melenchon’s phrasing of ‘furious but not fascists’ is interesting, and hints at the question of which emotions and passions are productive for a left project. Overcoming apathy and nihilism is our primary task, and perhaps anger, rage and a desire for vengeance are our best tools. Hope simply spoken can seem impossibly naive, even though we must try to rekindle its small, sputtering flames in moments of local solidarity and occasional national wins. If we want to both tear down and build, we need to harness passions that will fuel this creative destruction.
■ Create a chain of demands centred on popular economics. Downwardly mobile graduates stuck in the service sector and unable to get a mortgage, working class people suffering high rents, high prices and bad pay, migrant workers whose precarious visa status enables exploitation at work. All suffer the effects of wealth hoarding billionaires. Rent controls, price controls, lower bills and freezing taxes for the working class alongside widespread nationalisation and wealth taxes are very popular, and all other demands can and should be linked to them.
This creates in Mouffe’s language a “chain of equivalence” where demands for climate action, trans-rights and feminism are bundled with popular, economic demands in the hope they become mutually reinforcing. The climate movement has succeeded in this over the last decade, moving from moralising about polar bears to linking green energy with lower gas and electricity bills.
You can do this for nearly any issue. Trans people need funding for specialised medical care, women need good schools, childcare and domestic violence shelters, black people need police to stop criminalising their kids and investigate elite tax avoidance instead. All of us need a secure home and dignified work. Bernie Sanders is the master at this. I can hear it so clearly: transgender workers need to buy eggs too. Consistently and relentlessly, we must link issues with economic demands that everyone can relate to.
■ Pay leaders a workers wage, reject billionaire money and show we’re with the people. Good populist messaging is important, but we also have to demonstrate in the here and now that we’re on the side of the people. Rejecting billionaire money is an obvious start, but we should also be good trotskyists and restrict our leaders to a workers wage, a clear dividing line with establishment politicians that can really resonate.
We can even promise to impose this on all members of Parliament when in government. Labour MP Nadia Whittome already takes a workers wage at £35k a year. Angela Egan, the left candidate for Unison General Secretary, has pledged to do the same. Both of them were carers before entering politics.We should also prioritise candidates from working class backgrounds, and ban all commercial lobbyists, property developers or landlords from standing.
This advice isn’t only for leaders and candidates. All of us should be trained in populist communications so we can talk to residents, workers and new recruits using language that works.
However, we should also be wary of how seductive populist leaders can be. The desire for someone to fight on behalf of us is strong, and it’s so easy to fantasise about a ‘Mick Lynch Party’ being one simple trick to solve all our problems, as I have in the past.
Leaders like Lynch are important for fighting the attention wars, but we cannot make the mistake of the 2010s and rely on them to cohere our coalition. Corbynism made Corbynites instead of socialists, and this was a big problem. That our entire project rested on the reputation of one man was an even bigger problem. This time around, serious base building and political education work is needed to cover off these weaknesses.
A final piece in the series on drawing a clear bright line between socialism and social democracy will be published next week.
Great piece Joe