File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1995/95-02-28.000, message 116


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



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