Date: Sun, 12 Feb 95 21:25:32 CST From: Rebecca Hill <hillx018-AT-maroon.tc.umn.edu> Subject: Re: Neo-Populism? John Beasley's Murray's definition of populism as class politics I think articulated in the "interests" of another totality (i.e. the people/the nation etc.) seems right to me (and fairly similar to my original point, actually). I still like to be specific and tie it to a particular brand of quasi-nationalist agrarianism. These movements may not be entirely "popular" in shape however, and are often influenced by leaders from the ruling class who claim membership with "just plain folks" in the manner of a Ross Perot. Perot, I think is more of a populist rhetoritician than Reagan, whose show of wealth and whose ties to "making the business of America be business" seems to put him more in the Louis Bonaparte category. However, the actual populist party in the United States had the goal of creating a union between industrial and farm workers (a good book on this is Lawrence Goodwyn's _The Populist Moment_) departed from the model of "populism" However, the basic hostility to conspiratorial elites/ and "outsiders" was still there, and eventually could be exploited by racist demogogues such as Tom Watson, who used a rhetoric of the people to attack Catholics, Jews, and African-Americans. Basically, I think populism is an "aestheticization" of class in the terms described by Walter Benjamin in his essay on Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. To a degree, this kind of "aestheticization" is necessary - according to Laclau it's a "discursive" move creating an antagonism between us/them that creates a "populist rupture" and which is ultimately ideologically neutral. However, I think Laclau uses "populist" too loosely in that essay (Populist Rupture and Discourse) because surely, every split between "us/them" is not an articulation based on "the people" vs. the "foriegn" - this would imply that every articulation of one's oppression was "aesthetic" (discursive?), and not based in *any* material conditions - thus all politics are "aesthetic" and therefore "populist." But, being not really post-Marxist, I still believe that some politics are more "cultural" than others. Oh me. I find Laclau's work very hard to understand, so I could be way off here. -Rebecca Hill p.s. on Narodnaya Volya debate: I looked up more on the Russian Populists after getting the heated reply that the pamphlet must be a forgery from Justin Shwartz and found that not only has the document been discussed at length by historians (Dave Offord, for one), but Kropotkin, Korba, and Lavrov have all publicly denounced this pamphlet written by Exec. committee member Romanenko in writing. One member of the party, Figner destroyed rather than distributing the pamphlet, and then Jewish Populist, Pavel Axelrod (later to be a Menshevik) was discouraged from replying to the pamphlet by Narodnik Chernoperedeltsey on the basis that such a reply from a Jew might "alienate the peasants." Axelrod became a social democrat not long after this. So, Why defend the populists? Do we need saints? It is better to recognize existing flaws and mistakes than to ignore them and risk making a model out of a potentially problematic political ideology. Also, J. Shwartz has confused his Russian populist history. Narodnaya Volya of pre 1881 and of post 1881 were somewhat different. The time of greatest Jewish membership occurred after 1885, when some urban Jewish radicals attempted to revive what one historian referred to as a "dying party." During the time of the 1881 pogroms, the executive committee had only 3 Jewish members out of 31. I think that if the populists (if they were anything like the rest of the Russian population of the time) were probably invested enough in anti-semitic culture to marginalize those 3 Jews pretty thoroughly. The point is not to demonize the Russian populists to the core, but rather to demonstrate that a rhetoric based on "the people" vs. "the foriegn conspiracy of capitalists" often lends itself to classic anti-semitism. -Rebecca Hill --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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