Bound to fail? Assessing contemporary left populism
Dados Bibliográficos
| ID | 6248574 |
|---|---|
| Autores | Giorgos Venizelos (0000-0002-4007-4245, School of Political Sciences Aristotle University Thessaloniki Greece, autor correspondente), Yannis Stavrakakis (0000-0002-5682-7547, School of Political Sciences Aristotle University Thessaloniki Greece) |
| Ano | 2023 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Fascículo | 3 |
| Páginas | 290-308 |
| Data de publicação | 2023-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Sim |
| Open Access | Sim |
| Tipo | ARTICLE |
| Periódico | Constellations (JOURNAL) |
| Identificadores do periódico | ISSN: 1351-0487 • E-ISSN: 1467-8675 |
| Editora | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-8675.12638 |
| OpenAlex | W4282913689 |
| Idioma | EN |
| Citações recebidas | 17 |
| Referências citadas | 51 |
It has been more than ten years since the first signs indicating the contemporary (re)emergence of left populism were observed: the proto-populist movements of "the squares" such as the Indignados in Spain, Aganaktismenoi in Greece, the Occupy Movement in the United States, and the various uprisings of "the Arab Spring." A variety of political formations succeeded them, channeling their energy onto electoral representation with mixed results—such as SYRIZA in Greece, PODEMOS in Spain, the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn within the Labour party in the United Kingdom, the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders in the United States, but also the comeback of left populism in the Latin American continent. The whole experience seems to have resulted in evident skepticism in left-wing circles about the effectiveness of "populism" as a political strategy for the left. In this context, the rise and fall of SYRIZA, and in particular its failure to materialize its economic promise to cancel a Eurozone-enforced austerity, became emblematic of the supposed end of "the populist moment." The American left magazine Jacobin, for example, recently dedicated a whole issue to left populism. The dominant (skeptic) strand of authors maintained that "[s]hort-lived and cruel, Europe's experiment in left populism had ground to a halt" (Jäger, 2019a, p. 127). As Jäger concludes, the left had "bet the house on populism – and lost" (Jäger, 2019a, p. 124). The solution put forward for the left that experimented with the temptation of populism seems to involve a return to its original socialist values (Sunkara, 2019). Skepticism about populism is indeed prevalent in left academic and political circles. The "left critique" of left populism seems to be grounded on the hypothesis that more "class politics" and less "populist politics" is the answer for a successful future trajectory for the contemporary left. Populism is often perceived as a form of left reformism that contaminated at some point an originary class-based purity and for this reason is (necessarily) bound to fail (Seferiades, 2020; Sotiris, 2019). To tackle these questions, our starting hypothesis is that a re-emerging nostalgia of unmediated class purity may be of little help here. Arguments according to which left populism fails because it contaminates left purity seem to reoccupy an essentialist and reductionist terrain, ultimately misrecognizing the articulatory (impure) character of political formations and collective subjects. Such is the link established between populism (form) and the left (ideological and policy content). A link established, in fact, very long ago, well before Laclau and Mouffe, on the basis of registering the failure and gradually abandoning a prior logic of necessity. Arguably, a rigorous evaluation of left populism cannot be exclusively limited to an assessment of this particular theoretico-political project (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985) and should be debated within a much broader terrain that also encompasses a long tradition going back to Marx himself.1 To reintroduce the logics of necessity and contamination seems to betray an obsolete reductionist rationale; it also indicates a rather selective memory. For the articulation between the left and populism emerged precisely on the ground of this prior failure of left/class purity (see Laclau & Mouffe, 1985, especially the first two chapters). The reasons for this failure have not been lifted; if anything, they are more pertinent today and this cannot be disavowed in elaborating left strategy. On the other hand, although such an articulation may still be able to help left strategy within particular (mainly electoral) contexts, it cannot—at least not in isolation, not on its own, through the opposite reduction of the left to an essentialist, a priori triumphant populism—guarantee a rosy emancipatory future. We are thus firmly located within an ambivalent articulatory space overdetermining strategy within competitive and antagonistic political terrains. Our central argument is that the bumpy but not inconsequential applications of left populism (often revealing its limitations, but also, as we shall see below, the limitations of "the left" itself) neither suffice to command retreat nor can they guarantee progressive social change with other means (class-based purity). Our argument rests on a series of alternative assumptions. First, one needs to distinguish—analytically at least—populist form from ideological and policy content and their successful or unsuccessful implementation in different moments (elections, governmental terms, etc.). Only by defining anew what exactly is "left" and what is "populist" and how they become articulated can one develop rigorous criteria of (relative) success and failure. Second, against a background that betrays a linear and deterministic view of history, we argue that political antagonism follows a contingent choreography and is subject to unpredictable sedimentation(s) and reactivation(s) (Laclau, 1990). Thus, the question of the suitability of populist strategy cannot be resolved a priori at an abstract level ignoring the historico-political context. Only by articulating a more comprehensive, open-ended, and less arrogant historical sensibility could we perhaps arrive at more pertinent strategic suggestions. Accordingly, this paper is structured as follows: the first section attempts to differentially identify left populism in a rigorous way, highlighting the form/policy parallax and formulating specific criteria for assessing its success/failure. The second section offers an overview of the trajectory that contemporary left populism followed (mostly but not exclusively in Europe). Drawing on the conceptual apparatus deployed in the first section and the empirical overview articulated in the second section, the third section discusses the assumption that populism constitutes a strategy incompatible with the left in the sense that it will inevitably fail to implement a radical program in power, signaling the eventual death of the populist moment for the left. The discussion brings to the fore the historically intimate relationship socialists, including Marx, kept with populism. It argues that political cycles are always historically contingent and subject to reactivation, while it also highlights the need to seriously discuss the limitations of both leftist orientation(s) and populist strategy(s) in contemporary times. Populism's dismissal, we argue, seems to be influenced by the profoundly anti-populist liberal mainstream that has influenced the left too. In this section, we attempt to define left populism. Our conceptual strategy unfolds in two steps. By inquiring into the two notions that comprise our conceptual dyad, "left" and "populism," we first seek to disentangle and approach each notion individually. First, we theorize populism, to which we refer predominantly as form; second, we theorize the left component to which we will refer as content—that is to say, the programmatic and ideological component that accompanies populist strategy. In the final part of this section, we discuss the extent to which these two sides are analytically distinct to each other, but also the extent to which they can be combined.2 The burgeoning literature on populism points to an emerging consensus on a set of distinct features that are omnipresent in populist phenomena (Canovan, 1999; Laclau, 1977; Mudde, 2004; Stavrakakis, 2004). These are people-centrism and anti-elitism. Following the perspective advanced by the Essex School of Discourse Analysis, we ought to highlight here that "the people" and "the elite" are not mere rhetorical references in a political actor's narrative. Such an understanding misses the dynamic and performative status of political discourse, which is critical in understanding the construction of political identities and the passionate attachments they can generate (Venizelos, 2021). In our Laclau-inspired conceptualization, populism—like all political discourses with hegemonic pretensions—allows the formation of a salient collective identification through which heterogeneous social demands and exclusions find a way to establish links allowing them to challenge effectively the status quo. This would be impossible if all the social sectors and subjects involved insisted on their particularistic differences. In other words, "the people" is called forth in order to facilitate the process of strategic unification necessary to increase the chances of social and political change.3 Populism thus performs the task of extending politics beyond narrow class interests and translating it into a project relevant at the national-popular plane—where the legacy of political modernity has located most of decision-making and the ensuing sociopolitical struggles. Schematically, one could represent left populism as pursuing antagonism on a predominantly vertical (bottom/up) axis of political competition rather than the "classical" (horizontal) left/right axis, or the right-wing populist/nationalist plane of ethnic out-grouping (De Cleen & Stavrakakis, 2017; Ostiguy, 2017): "the people" are framed as politically subaltern and are thus perceived as located at the bottom of society, and "the elite," which is framed as nefarious and illegitimate, is seen as placed at the top. This vertical structure of populist discourse does not necessarily put left politics second; on the contrary, it often constitutes the condition for their broader appeal and salience. Through populism, a left program is framed as "common sense" and is articulated as "a politics of the people," for "the people," and "by the people." A left program that promotes redistribution, free health care, or free education, for example, can frame these demands in a populist way: that is, by establishing them as properties of "the people" (i.e., properties of the differential-particular bodies and psychosocial entities that are individually and simultaneously deprived from them) against an "establishment" (that prohibits "the people" from accessing these resources and fully enjoying them). The common and simultaneous source of deprivation (located at the action or the inaction of the "establishment") introduces a common point of identification and creates the conditions for a shared struggle; the latter is energized by an embedded promise to regain popular sovereignty (neither national sovereignty nor class hegemony) and often facilitates a unification process based on the creation of equivalential linkages.4 Political science has devoted significant efforts to define the left component of populism drawing on the criteria set forth by key theoreticians who sought to distinguish left from right-wing politics. Such classificatory criteria are, for example, Bobbio's (1996) notion of "equality" as a regulative ideal (i.e., "the left" stands in favor of social equality and seeks to eradicate social inequality) and Alessandro Pizzorno's (1993) "inclusion/exclusion" classification (i.e., "the left" champions more inclusion in terms of redistribution, social rights, political participation). More recently, Dani Filc (2010) developed an analytical mechanism that distinguishes left from right (populist) phenomena that is widely used in research on populism. Hence populism's ideological orientation can be identified on the basis of three distinct dimensions of inclusion and exclusion: (1) the material dimension (who is included/excluded from the material redistribution of resources), (2) the political dimension (who is included/excluded from processes of participation and social rights), and (3) the symbolic dimension (who is included/excluded from the symbolic and cultural pillars of a community). In this sense, one could speak of "inclusionary populism," which best describes left populist phenomena (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2013). Overall, as Luke March (2011) put it, the "left" element of leftist populism signifies populism's relationship with traditional left-wing themes such as social justice, welfare-ism, internationalism, and, above all else, equality. The populist element is related to the form we analyzed earlier. Thus, left populism can be defined as "one way" in which a leftist programmatic package can be articulated (regardless of its degree of left radicalism), within a certain context, in order to construct a popular collective subject and acquire a form/shape potentially able to undermine the status quo. Its aim is to expand representation/inclusion and increase participation, strengthening (symbolic and affective) identification. Consequently, "[a]lthough populism is [often] presented as incompatible with pluralism, the truth is that left-wing populism, in general, advocates for plurality and diversity in society, as the left has usually done" (Agustín, 2020, p. 11). Taking into account the conceptual clarification offered so far, what becomes evident is that, analytically at least, there are two distinct components in the syntagma "left populism": the left component of a concrete political project and its populist strategic shaping. Each involves its own typologies. With respect to "leftist radicalism," one could identify degrees of intensity related to how much redistribution of wealth is envisaged and with what means; with regard to populism one identifies degrees depending on how deep and intense is the polarization between "the people" and "the elite" posited; or the extent to which the equivalential overdetermines the differential axis expanding or, at least, keeping intact over time the aforementioned processes of unification and empowerment. Needless to say, these two components, the leftist one and the populist one, can be, once more, combined together in different degrees (more/less populism, more/less leftism). This argument directly challenges the belief that populism is to be a priori equated with reformism. Following this rationale, all revolutionary, communist, socialist, social-democratic, and radical-leftist projects can employ and adopt a populist pattern as long as they predominantly pit "the people" against "the elite." This is why what historically emerged in the left has been a set of very different populisms, from revolutionary (Narodniki in Russia) and Popular Front ones (the coalition led by Leon Bloom in France) to idiosyncratic social-democratic ones (Papandreou in Greece). Thus, to accuse populism of being inherently reformist (class-based critique) tends to misunderstand populism. The latter is a mobilizational strategy based on the logic of equivalence (creating paratactical antagonisms between groups of demands and values) and not on the logic of difference (prioritizing administration, tackling each demand in its particularity in order to diffuse its potential alliances with other unsatisfied demands). Hence, it seems that not all populists are "reformists" and not all reformists are "populists" to the extent that reformism would, in most cases, involve a movement from equivalence to difference. Indeed, the variety of left populist phenomena "highlights the importance of taking diverse sociopolitical contexts into account in order to understand how populism is embedded within different left-wing traditions" (Agustín, 2020, p. 12). As we shall see toward the end of this text, not only populism does not constitute a strange bedfellow for the left but even Marx had flirted with the idea of (revolutionary) populism. Although there is often a tendency to articulate the notions of "radical left" and "populism" as two opposing entities in the conceptual ladder, in this subsection we sought to clarify the conceptual features of both. It is not only that "radical left" and populism fail to incarnate a strong antithesis; they can also be combined with each other, while each notion can sustain different degrees (of populism and radicalism respectively) rendering visible a variety of typologies. In the next subsection, we will focus on the relationship between populism and policy because the "left argument" positing the ultimate failure of populism is most often grounded on a particular "failure" to implement policy orientations premised on the aforementioned features. It may accept that populism can work as an oppositional strategy, but sees populism as hindering policy implementation, when a governmental term is examined. Does populism necessarily fail in power? What exactly do we mean by failure? Is this failure rooted in its inherently reformist nature? Scholarship that focuses on the "causes and effects of populism" has admittedly offered further knowledge with regard to how different populist parties respond to the challenges of institutionalization and governance. Albertazzi and McDonnell (2015) investigate empirically whether populist parties can manage to implement policy with relative success and survive "discounts" on their programmatic promises once they move from opposition to power. Their affirmative conclusion goes against prominent assumptions such as those made by Canovan (1999) and Mény and Surel (2002) who essentially argued that, once in power, populist parties will necessarily fail to implement their promises and will eventually vanish and become like other mainstream parties (also see Mudde, 2017). The conclusion of the former seems more in line with the empirical reality of numerous concrete examples, highlighting the resilience of populism in as in Latin populism has become an and of governance. their conceptual and analytical strategy seems In Albertazzi and "the success or of populist parties in on the policy rather than on the (populist) component of the Their are premised on whether experience the ideological in their of the Is it, the that a as populist and its assessment success or failure in In our the answer is we have to return to the analytical of populism. As we have the of sociopolitical phenomena as "populist" rests on the identification of the two people-centrism and anti-elitism. Thus, in order to identify populist phenomena in one should to the very the very is "the people" the central point of of a articulation or some other for example, "the Is the articulation equivalential in that it to sustain links established differential framed as politically subaltern and by some dominant Is the sociopolitical space still between "the people" and "the elite" when in power? the successful implementation of policy still strong hegemonic although it cannot be by its In the of Albertazzi and more or to the "left critique" of is, once more, the policy that is examined. research that focuses on the relative success or failure of populist to policy to their programmatic promises in order to the success or failure of populism the conceptual of in what it to is not the populist component but the policy This has critical conceptual and political in that the success or failure of "populism" is ultimately through an analytically strategy, which essentially focuses on other than the it is supposed to It needs to be that there is policy that is populist populism is the that programmatic content in one way and not but not least, there are also contingent the supposed of populism" to its promises that may be to the and not to As we highlight these usually have to do with the historical and and the of political political and so we will return to this point toward the end of this The that we put between populism and rests on move to distinguish form from in the two As Laclau the logic of populism not to be in political or ideological content into the of the of particular but in a particular of articulation of or ideological In our argument in words, "a movement is not populist because in its politics or it as (Laclau, p. A argument is also to be in the of populism that, its limitations, highlights that populism does not constitute a but is rather combined with very different and other p. In this sense, we find back in the between form and content programmatic Following the articulatory understanding of left populism developed in this conceptual section, a "failure" to the populist element should rather be as the to an popular and the effectively different of in the construction of a collective subject able to challenge the status in the long on the other hand, a left populist fails to implement economic and political that are to a "leftist this should be in the first as a failure in the implementation of the left component of the left populist project and not necessarily as related with its populist of the latter in power, at least, the two strategic one and the programmatic and should be kept distinct and before being as a is populism necessarily bound to fail once it the and should be seen as an incompatible strategy for the left in power? In conceptual terms the answer is a but what about concrete sought conceptual as to the of left populism, we will to the trajectory contemporary left populism followed in the of the in order to further this populism in of the social and political in the years the The movements in Spain, the United as well as various that part of the Arab a in the politics of the These movements put forward demands in favor of and economic justice, and a distinct and for the contemporary left. the legacy of the movement onto the electoral these proto-populist movements the political the in political and the return of "the to the of decision-making 2017). Following this numerous electoral of the (often to a class-based became evident in the left of participation and on of and 2017). a more and a of both 2017). for more radicalism in terms of their left discourse and like and presented degrees of populist as to socialist like the Corbyn leadership of the Labour & 2019). are also or cases, such as the and in although populist have been by the two populism cannot be as the logic that these two left-wing parties as its seems to be a of an of In the of the and distinguish between and strong populism. In the of and how degrees of populism on the discourse is as well as on which of the party In one an of populism with very left program with on the and the of its 2019). The of left populism "the left" and in that references to "the were framed as against the left that needs to be exclusively This of left politics to a rather of or as would it, that on the notion of "the as a key of articulation and simultaneously for the of and into its sociopolitical What becomes evident is that contemporary left populism a of political that often shared little in terms of their of and programmatic their logic of articulation profoundly people-centrism and and to different by traditional class-based leftist left populism a political and that beyond those of both the left and the It the status and sought to it about the and of the left and its strategy in of the by the of and it "the and the back onto the of the and, it set a demand to rather than abandoning the central political & or the of and challenges by the left to into two specific left populist parties that significant academic and and trajectory framed as the end of the populist moment for the left. PODEMOS could be as a of left-wing populism. The party placed at the of its discourse the promise to popular and between as the who are and from political and as the PODEMOS original of political and by the and strategic of Laclau and and by the Latin American populist experience p. This evident in the of in discourse and the that maintained with (see & PODEMOS sought to into an which the within a its a to the political PODEMOS the Its even in the opposition of the by critical and its electoral leadership a series of between the who the left of the party and the who the populist with the various attempts to form with that the party part of "the well as the rise of and "populist" such as and PODEMOS much of its In PODEMOS an with the social-democratic to form a on a progressive social policy The most of populism SYRIZA in The party emerged of the of popular to demand and the of The were as were
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| Intervalo de citações | 2023 - 2026 (4) |
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