I write this article in reference to the recently published “What really is populism?” of the companion Albert Borras
If Albert has chosen an analytical, descriptive and explanatory perspective of the concept of populism, I will choose one political perspective of the same.
Very much in vogue in the mass media and in the political and business elites of our country to try to discredit Podemos, the reviled populism seems to be back on the order of the day. There has been a lot of talk about far-right populism in Europe and now it seems that the political winds of left-wing populism from Latin America are blowing strongly in our territory.
Why is populism so criticized?
As Albert explains well, it is usually equated with demagogy (gain political support through favors to the people) but it obviously has a very different component. There is something common to far-right and far-left populism that is often overlooked: both They are born from the political passions of the “people ”.
What have passions traditionally been opposed to? To reason, and, more specifically, to the scientific and bourgeois reason born of the French Enlightenment. The debate of passion/reason or rationality versus irrationality has long been overcome but we still suffer its impacts. If populism is criticized so much by the financial and political elites of our country, it is because of a structure of thought that comes from afar: passions would be the “lowest” part of the human being and reason would be the highest, almost the very essence of the human condition, that which would distinguish us from the “beasts”, from the animals.
For me, one of the most abject essays that clearly reflects this thought is crowd psychology by Le Bon. The masses have always been assimilated to irrationality and base political passions. This has always been opposed by a privileged elite, an elite of people who will position themselves above the crowd and who will believe themselves to be the possessors of Truth and Reason, always distant and necessarily independent from the crowds. And that, for this reason, they establish themselves as our sovereigns and as our rulers (and I add, to control us).
When we read and interpret society following the classic and modern scheme of an uncultured, passionate people, low against/opposed to a rational, “meritocratic” elite and separated from the crowds we find ourselves with the hard core of the debate we are having right now around populism. It is the very scheme of modern sovereignty that we also find in the analyzes of our own psyche (the will for our “consciousness”, our “rational” consciousness to be sovereign over the body, over our decisions, over our “instincts” to which who would object).
What is so fascinating about the National Front? Why is it so strong among the French working classes?
The conventional argument to explain these phenomena is: “simple and miraculous solutions are offered to complex problems.” We have to avoid this type of explanation for two reasons that, in my opinion, reinforce the current structure of domination.
First reason: By stating that you convince people with simple things when faced with complex problems, you are implicitly stating that people are imbeciles and that they are not capable, on their own, of understanding this world and what they themselves suffer. That is, you are saying that you, as a good enlightened person, are smarter than the rest and that we should leave the space for political decisions to technocrats who would understand the complexity of our world. This is a very classic right-wing paternalism, which was used as an argument to prohibit the poor, African Americans, women and children from voting during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
Second reason: When conventional wisdom states that “for complicated problems, simple solutions” it is affirming its own framework of analysis rather than the idea it is transmitting. This framework continues to be that of bourgeois rationality: I make an observation of reality, being an external element to it, and I can classify, describe, certain problems. This reproduces the illusory position of the observer who observes without influencing the process itself (an idea that quantum physics has already disproved).
We people suffer in our flesh the effects and oppressions of this system. No one has to come and tell us how or how oppressed we are, it’s something we already know. If the National Front has won an election it is not because it offers solutions, it has to do with a different political rationality that comes from the demos themselves, from the people themselves, although in this case it has a character of social decomposition. Marine Le Pen does something that the rest of us politicians are not used to: she speaks with passion. She speaks like many of us speak in our streets and neighborhoods. She is aggressive. Many people from the popular classes can feel identified with her because she uses the same expressions, the same passionate force that already exists in the streets. This is neither bad nor good per sehas a very transgressive component, which is to combat bourgeois rationalism, that false game of interests and well-domesticated university people who would sit around a table to debate the evils of the world while sipping their cups of coffee or hot tea.
Whatever the social background of Marine Le Pen, she is indifferent, she enunciates and speaks as the popular classes speak, while generating a new framework of oppression. And that is why she is a danger, that is why she has strength and for those reasons in France they are going to have a huge problem. Few people, and even fewer in the political sphere, seem to recognize Le Pen that she has the merit of having created a terrifying bond with the popular, middle and upper classes of France. She is always attacked from a position of liberal elitism instead of recognizing her as an adversary, as a party and ideas that are equal. We should not put ourselves hierarchically or intellectually above Marine, because we fall back into the game and into the terrain of liberal parliamentarism, we must fight it from the popular and oppressed classes. She is a real threat, a threat that resides in the sad passions (in the Spinozist sense) of the crowd.
Podemos and populist rationality
Podemos, on the other hand, goes much further than that. It does not make a passionate exaltation of rags and hatred towards social minorities Podemos creates and is realized through a populist rationality, a rationality that arises from the demos, from the multitudes. If the National Front remains in the populism of the modern people – of ONE people, with ONE idea, that makes ONE decision, that is closed and limited in itself, that creates a separation between its people and the rest of the people – We can open to the people so that it becomes a multitude, so that there are no sovereign retreats, so that many decisions are made and many rationalities emerge. In addition, it reinforces joyful passions, generating social composition and increasing collective power.
The populism of the National Front aspires to once again make the many a primary, pre-conflict state unit (pre-class struggle constitutive of the capitalist order). On the other hand, as Paolo Virno asserts in Grammar of the Multitude: “the multitude is furrowed by antagonisms, it can never be a unity. “The many subsist as many without aspiring to state unity.”
Channeling and trying to confine the passions of the multitudes into a game of liberal and bureaucratic interests is a crude attempt by the elites to be able to manage and subjugate us with the subterfuge of bourgeois Reason (Cartesian, Enlightenment, elitist). So that everything can become identifiable and can be fixed, so that everything falls into its rules, so that they are the ones who determine those rules and for those who can use them without changing them, those who continue to decide from above how to govern us. It is an update of the Platonic Idea. Reason and passion are always chained and juxtaposed.
The problem is never what is rational or what is irrational, but who determines what is rational or irrational and in view of what objectives or in order to justify what social structure
We, the citizens, the multitudes, generate political reason from below, a new “reason” far removed from the usual mechanisms of libidinal repression. We separate ourselves from the old axes: reason/passion, rational/irrational, left/right. We want to constitute a new world of the commons and for this reason we also carry out and continue the pertinent criticism of those structures that are arbitrarily erected above us, be they kings and absolute monarchies that were carried out by divine reason, that is, by a hierarchical positioning of a a certain type of Reason, of pure reason that imposes a false dichotomy between reason and passion but that in truth continues to be its bourgeois reason against our reason of the people, of the multitudes.
