The People's Populism posted by Meaders

Bat, below, has a rare and momentary disagreement with the tremendously fashionable Slavoj Zizek. Opposing Zizek's call to stand "Against the Populist Temptation" proffered by top dog post-Marxist, Ernesto Laclau, Bat writes:

...as crazy as it may sound, we have to side unflinchingly with populist movements and affirm their communist potential in the face of all this desperate mud-flinging by bien pensant neo-liberal ideologues. Only from this position, embedded in the movement, is it possible to make some political sense of Zizek's criticisms of Laclau-style populism.

To support this distinctly Leninist stick-bending, Bat finds a real Leninist example: the slogan, raised by the Bolsheviks in mid-1917, of "Sack the Ten Capitalist Ministers": these being the pro-capitalist participants in a mixed Provisional Government of social-democrats and liberals.

I say it's "stick-bending": Bat, I assume, is not wholly serious that populism per se is to be sided with "unflinchingly". I have the odd twitch when Kilroy-Silk is around. Just as he accuses Zizek, however, of a certain political timidity, I'm slightly inclined to wag a finger in Bat's direction, on similar grounds. I don't think he pushes the concept of populism far enough, historically, to make the thing function.

"Populism" is not just, as K-Punk says, "the complement to administrative post-politics." There's a definite sense in which populism is a necessary step in the development of political organisation. Bat indicates one populist moment, between the Revolutions of February and October 1917; but protean examples can be found everywhere under capitalist society, from its inception. The formation of the British Independent Labour Party, for example, is tied to the highly populist moment of New Unionism: the match girls' and the dockers' strikes, for example, created and depended upon the popular mythology of the Bad Boss and the Honest Worker. Support for both strikes spread across all sections of society, far beyond any obvious barriers of class - though it was the autonomous, working-class core of New Unionism that gave the movement its solidity.

The period of New Labour's foundation saw a similar moment; Blair's manipulation of the death of Princess Diana was a masterpiece of populist mythologising: she was, after all, the People's Princess, a poor downtrodden creature set upon by the atavistic Few; the very emblem of the kind of Britain New Labour wished to create for us:

We are today a nation in a state of shock, in mourning, in grief that is so deeply painful for us. She was a wonderful and a warm human being, although her own life was often sadly touched by tragedy. She touched the lives of so many others in Britain and throughout the world with joy and with comfort.

How many times shall we remember her in how many different ways - with the sick, the dying, with children, with the needy? With just a look or a gesture that spoke so much more than words, she would reveal to all of us the depth of her compassion and her humanity.

I am sure we can only guess how difficult things were for her from time to time. But people everywhere, not just here in Britain, kept faith with Princess Diana. They liked her, they loved her, they regarded her as one of the people. She was the People's Princess and that is how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and our memories for ever.

My apologies. It is a sickening thing to behold - but it is indisputably populist in its intent, and it is impossible to understand New Labour without understanding the importance of the peculiarly creepy fortnight that followed Blair's eulogising. New Labour (semi-)consciously modelled itself as populist movement.

If populism was there at New Labour's birth, it was there at its death. "No blood for oil" was a populist slogan: it captured a fundamental truth of the situation, far more so than any number of learned exegetical tracts from the British far left have done, but it did not, of itself, express a clear class character. The anti-war movement went beyond that populism, whether assessed on its leadership, its organisational character, or the composition of its support. But the populist tie remained.

It's partly for those reasons that the desire to transcend populism, to escape its characteristic reformism, is understandable, but probably misdirected. Either we deal with its consequences, or we end up chasing an illusory (if supposedly more radical) political purity.