From Jacobin flaws to transformative populism: Left populism and the legacy of European social democracy
2023; Wiley; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1467-8675.12698
ISSN1467-8675
Autores Tópico(s)Critical Theory and Philosophy
ResumoIn the established landscape of research in the social sciences, populism is seen as a type of politics that chiefly revolves around the distinction between the "people" and the "elite".1 Within this, different forms of populism can be distinguished—ranging from right-wing and authoritarian to liberal-centrist and religious varieties. In the camp of the political left, populism is often cast as essentially a democratic endeavor. Drawing on a conception of inclusive peoplehood, which is not opposed to other vulnerable social groups "below" but solely to the "elite above", many authors emphasize that it is crucial to pursue a populist strategy in order to overcome existing hegemonies, democratic deficits, ossifications, and class-rule (Grattan, 2016; Howse, 2019; Kempf, 2020; McCormick, 2001; Mouffe, 2018). Throughout the past few decades, the landscape of research on left populism has grown considerably. Various studies have investigated the history of anti-establishment popular movements of the 19th century, such as the Narodniki in Russia or the American Populist Party (Canovan, 1981; Kazin, 1995). Further, research has also looked at how, from the 1990s, anti-neoliberal alliances in Latin America had their momentum, entered governmental office, and established a far-reaching renewal of constitutional orders (Linera, 2014; Weyland, 2013). And in particular, in the last decade, the rejuvenation of left politics in Europe and the United States has often relied on populist approaches (Katsambekis & Kioupkiolis, 2019). Taking a more systematic stance, theories of radical democracy have sought to demonstrate that politics in modern societies is structured around the embodiment of the "people" as an empty signifier. From this perspective, it is not by accident that left varieties of populism can be recurrently observed; their persistence reflects that politics is, at its heart, not only concerned with policy-issues but with "constructing the people" (Laclau, 2014). Thus, populism may not be episodic, accidental, or a specific ideology that brings the vital interests of ordinary people to the fore. Rather, it must be seen as a generalizable discursive strategy—in the words of Ernesto Laclau: the "royal road"—when it comes to the strive for political power (Laclau, 2005, p. 67).2 In recent years, a neo-Machiavellian strand of research has emerged that is not so much concerned with the discursive construction of peoplehood, instead focusing on the materiality of social power. Drawing inspiration from the political philosophy of Early Modernity and Niccolò Machiavelli's insights on the exercise of political rule, these approaches assume that societies are constantly split between the "plebian" people and the ruling elites (McCormick, 2001; Vergara, 2020a). Against this backdrop, populism amounts to a plebian politics that "springs from the politicization of wealth inequality in reaction to systemic corruption and the immiseration of the masses, an attempt to balance the scales of social and political power between the ruling elite and the popular sectors" (Vergara, 2020a, p. 238). However, the historical balance sheet of left populisms remains ambivalent. Though recurring attempts to change society through mobilizing the people against the elite can be observed, they have often revealed self-defeating dynamics:3 the collapse into authoritarian government once populism is in power, the inability to account for how complex modern societies actually operate by adhering to an all-too simple people/elite binary distinction; and the arising incapacity to identify reasons for political failure and success apart from stressing that popular mobilizations played a key role (when successful) or were diluted (when unsuccessful). In the current debate on left-populism, however, a broader camp of anti-populist critiques mainly advances objections from a normative angle (Arato, 2016; Cohen, 2019; Urbinati, 2019; Müller, 2014). It is argued that populist forms of politics are, in principle, incompatible with central achievements of liberal democracy, such as pluralism, the separation of powers, or parliamentary representation. They seem to be unavoidably entangled in authoritarian politics and, therefore, in need of being rejected as a course of political action. This article aims to move beyond the rigidified divide between appraisals and rejections of left populism by shifting the field of inquiry: instead of investigating the relation of populism and the political as such or evaluating whether populism is compatible with principles of liberal democracy, it conducts a reconstruction of discussions in the broadly conceived camp of European Social Democracy in the "long 19th century" (Hobsbawm). Thereby, it focuses on how the leading intellectuals of this political current were reflecting on the practical potentials and limitations of a politics that is centered on the popular will. As emphasized by contemporary discourse theoretical approaches to the study of populism, politics in modern societies largely revolves around the role of the people and the conflicts that surround its articulation.4 Therefore, a wide range of people-centered politics can be identified—popular, populist or folky. While the article echoes the definition of populism as people-centered politics that opposes the elites, it stresses not only its inevitability but also its limitations. It scrutinizes populism's internal pitfalls and how it reacts to the contradictions and problems inherent to the structure of the given societal order. Thereby, the article aims at circumventing a transhistorical per se perspective and at a closer examination of the respective social circumstances. The ambition is not to provide an encompassing investigation of the whole theoretical landscape of social democracy, but to look for how some of the leading intellectuals grappled with the problems of a people-centered politics in the light of practical experiences in political struggle. It will be argued that we can identify an intellectual trajectory that dealt with the question of whether a politics that is centered on the popular will as opposed to the elites is able to incite social transformation and collective learning processes or, to the contrary, thwarts them. Admittedly, one should not overlook that there are severe differences between the social democratic mass parties of the 19th century and the contemporary disorganized party landscape. However, the article encourages an investigation that overcomes the juxtaposition of left populisms and other variants of progressive politics such as social movement politics (Arato & Cohen, 2021) or class-politics (Seferiades, 2019). Drawing on the recent work of the historian Christina Morina, European Social Democracy is understood in the following as a broader social movement that extended from the mid-19th century to the First World War (Morina, 2022).5 It was characterized by the advent of new forms of political organization, most notably trade unions and social democratic mass parties. Despite severe internal conflicts, it was driven by a shared approach to history and society that was drawn from the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The defining feature of European Social Democracy was located in a specific mode of social inquiry. As stressed by Morina, activists and intellectuals may have engaged in controversies around a whole set of issues. They all assumed, however, that modern societies take part in the course of historical evolution and that a sound type of political action must be derived from a comprehensive inquiry that clarifies the scopes for social transformation at a given historical moment. The common denominator that constituted coherence within the movement was the assumption that societies undergo a historical development (often described as "stages") and that a tenable conception of political action must react to the objective problems and contradictions inherent in this process. According to Morina, the "attraction lay not primarily in a vaguely suggested utopian perspective, but in the concretely demanded scientific relevance to the present. They [the leading intellectuals and activists of European Social Democracy] drew from Marx's work primarily a promise of knowledge geared to the here and now, not a belief in the future oriented only to tomorrow. For them, Marxism was actually a never-completed study of the real world […]" (Morina, 2017, p. 16). This was the unifying thread of European Social Democracy that spread from the works of Marx and Engels to very different activists and intellectuals, such as Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Ilych Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg.6 It needs to be noted that the Second International was a broad political movement. Not the least, syndicalist and anarchist ideas were prevalent in many countries and the theories of Marx and Engels were not the only intellectual resources available at the end of the 19th century.7 However, if it comes to reconstruct the overall mindset that ultimately coined the characteristic controversies within the European labor movement, the "invention of Marxism" (Morina) played a crucial role. This article reconstructs how this political movement dealt with the potentials and short-comings of populist approaches: Section 2 demonstrates that, initially, the young Marx and Engels of the 1840s and 1850s took a skeptical stance on people-centered politics. Quarrelling with the insurrectionist movements of their time, they identified Jacobin flaws that tended to construct considerable hurdles for achieving social transformation. In contrast to this critique, demonstrated in Section 3, European Social Democracy in both its reformist as well as its more radical ramifications returned to mobilize the popular will from the 1870s onward. Section 4 investigates how Rosa Luxemburg—an important figure of European Social Democracy—reacted to the rising constitutionalization of politics and society through a proto-populist restatement of social democracy as Volksbewegung around the 1900s. This transformative populism was meant to mobilize the people, but it should also overcome the Jacobin flaws by establishing collective learning processes. Section 5 presents the argument that European Social Democracy's trajectory can be seen as a learning cycle itself with regard to potentials and pitfalls of left populisms. Contemporary controversies should be sensitive to these insights and thus engage in more context-dependent inquiries. Studies on the history of populism demonstrate that social movements have often relied on the distinction between the people and the elite: ranging from the different attempts to mobilize the populus dei (people of god) against the system of offices in the catholic church to the popular city revolts in early modernity, and then from bourgeois revolutions to large segments of the early labor movement, the reference to the people as opposed to the elites has always played a pivotal role (Dupuy, 2002; Hermet, 2001; Möller, 2020). As the French intellectual historian Pierre Rosanvallon has argued, the 19th century was a decisive stage for the spread of a people-centered politics. National statehood was consolidated and struggles for its constitutionalization became a central site of political conflict. Questions concerning how to conceive of the popular will and how it can be represented amounted to a controversial issue: "Since 1789 the instituted and the instituant, the people moving in the streets and the people embodied in representative institutions, the diversity of social conditions and the unity of the democratic principle were opposing each other" (Rosanvallon, 1998, p. 17). Though partial at the outset, nascent constitutional states established forms of popular legislation and reflected themselves as being authorized by the people as constituent power. Not least, the reference to the people was a point of departure within a politics that conceptualized under the category of "Bonapartism" and "Caesarism".8 The latter combined personalized leadership with plebiscitarian legitimation, as was the case in Louis Napoleon III's ascent to power that toppled France's democratic revolution in 1848 and paved the way for a "unitary combination" of popular sovereignty and monarchical authority (Groh, 1972, p. 732). However, the overall turn to the people was only one part of the story. From the early 19th century, a rather critical engagement with popular sovereignty could be identified as well. One could delve at this point into the classical works of the nascent discipline of sociology, but it was probably none other than G. W. F. Hegel who took, in his "Philosophy of Right," a rather critical stance on popular sovereignty. After an inquiry into the differentiation of social spheres, such as the state, the family, and the market, he advocated for a mixed constitution that should regulate the complexities of modern society instead of subordinating them to the sovereign will of the people. Hegel suspected the latter would lead to totalizing and, ultimately, destructive effects by imposing a political voluntarism that disregarded the historical achievements within these social spheres. He qualified popular sovereignty as "one of those confused thoughts which are based on a garbled notion [Vorstellung] of the people" (Hegel, 1991, §279, 319). He explained that, since popular sovereignty ran the risk of relying on "a formless mass," it was likely to undermine the "internally organized whole" of the state (Hegel, 1991, §279, 319). With this argument, Hegel set the scene for a whole strand of discussions revolving around the relationship between politics and popular sovereignty. Admittedly, it was not his defense of the state, but the skeptical remarks on achieving historical progress through a people-centered politics that were taken up by Left- and Young Hegelians and then migrated into activist circles.9 From then on, attempts to change society had to deal with a fundamental problem: on the one hand, society could be characterized by a differentiation of social spheres. Against this backdrop, holistic approaches to transforming this ensemble as a whole were considered as being likely to exert destructive effects. But on the other hand, society was conceived as a totality and, hence, a transformative politics required searching for "levers" or windows of opportunity that still transcend the whole context. The main question was: to what extent is a politics that relies on the popular will a viable course of action for overcoming the societal contradictions of modern society? Most importantly, Marx and Engels, whose works became the intellectual base for European Social Democracy, instigated a shift in evaluating popular politics. It has become a certain trend in recent political philosophy to make use of Marx's early writings in order to think about democracy and social freedom (Abensour, 2011; Honneth, 2016; Leipold, 2020). However, there is no running away from the fact that Marx critically discussed political action. Indebted to Hegel, he started from the assumption that bourgeois societies are regulated by an interplay of different forms in politics (state form), law (legal form), and civil society.10 Thus, Marx not only defended a bold conception of "true democracy" (Marx, 2010e, p. 30) in his early writings, but he was also interested in providing an explanatory model for how the hegemony of the emerging capitalist economy and its ideological tenets were consolidated through a mutual coupling (and separation) of the political, the economic, and the legal sphere. This point of departure had huge repercussions when it came to clarifying the role of political action. Given the circumstances of modern society, a people-centered politics could not be seen as the privileged site for inducing sudden social change. This led to political tensions within the circles of the early labor movement: as noted by Alan Gilbert, Marx adopted "a long-term strategic view and openly disdained immediate popularity" (Gilbert, 1981, p. 122). His "views differed fundamentally from those of more short-sighted democrats, anarchists, or communists who demanded instant victory (Weitling, Heinzen, Bakunin, Kriege, Ruge)" (Gilbert, 1981, p. 122). Marx remained ambivalent: on the one hand, he lauded democracy as the "solved riddle of the constitution" and defended popular sovereignty against Hegel's conception of statehood in the "Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts" (Marx, 2010b, p. 29). On the other, he was highly critical of approaches to political action that aimed at resurrecting the Jacobin legacy of the French Revolution.11 This critical attitude can be reconstructed from his critique of French insurrectionism in the 1840s.12 By French insurrectionism, one has to understand the circles of revolutionaries—mainly inspired by Filippo Buonarroti's Jacobin activism in the late French Revolution and his later published book "Babeuf's Conspiracy for Equality" (Buonarroti, 1836)—whose aim was to incite an insurrection in the city of Paris and, thereby, commence a revolutionary process "in the name of the sovereign will of the people" (Deppe, 1970, p. 47).13 A central figure was the revolutionary Auguste Blanqui who amounted to political leader in France's revolution of 1830 and from then on stuck to an insurrectionist political strategy (Draper, 1986, 120 ff). Marx and Engels argued that the French insurrectionist circles undermined the "process of revolutionary development" because they envisaged launching "a revolution on the spur of the moment, without the conditions for a revolution" (Marx & Engels, 2010, p. 318). They qualified the insurrectionists as "alchemists of the revolution" who make use of "incendiary bombs, destructive devices of magic effect, revolts which are expected to be all the more miraculous and astonishing in effect as their basis is less rational" (Marx & Engels, 2010, p. 318). In the later introduction to Marx's writings on the class struggles in France, Engels echoed this stance; he described the insurrectionist endeavors as "rebellions in the old style" which relied on "street fighting with barricades," but eventually turned out to be "outdated" as they did not engage with the central tenets of modern society (Engels, 2010, p. 517). The political mind is a political mind precisely because it thinks within the framework of politics. The keener and more lively it is, the more incapable is it of understanding social ills. The classic period of political intellect is the French Revolution […]. The principle of politics is the will. The more one-sided and, therefore, the more perfected the political mind is, the more does it believe in the omnipotence of the will, the more is it blind to the natural and spiritual limits of the will, and the more incapable is it therefore of discovering the source of social ills. (Marx, 2010d, p. 199) The more developed and the more comprehensive is the political understanding of a nation, the more the proletariat will squander its energies—at least in the initial stages of the movement—in senseless, futile uprisings that will be drowned in blood. Because it thinks in political terms, it regards the will as the cause of all evils and force and the overthrow of a particular form of the state as the universal remedy. Proof: the first outbreaks of the French proletariat. (Marx, 2010d, p. 204) The voluntaristic approach collapses into an epistemic flaw: the political mind erects limits that undermine the search for adequate strategies in the quest for social change. As this approach revolves around the "omnipotence of the will," it insinuates that society is governed by the struggle between free-standing will-formations and not by the contradictions between and within social spheres. This can be read as a critique of people-centered politics. Casting the popular will as the unity that sets everything in motion, the political mind is not able to understand the avenues of historical evolution. Society, however, does not evolve solely through political will-expression, but also through other sites of social change. Still indebted to the legacy of the late French Revolution, this popular voluntarism gives rise to a Jacobin flaw and momentous shortcuts when it comes to self-reflection and strategy choices. People-centered approaches advocate, without proper scrutiny, that the mobilization of the people is the prime strategy of choice. This assumes that any possible defeats must always be due to a weakness of popular will—either it was not mobilized intensely enough, it was not broad enough, or it was diluted. A tragic circle unfolds: the radical activists build barricades and the reformists issue reform bills, and so on, with even more enthusiasm, intensity, and will-power than before. However, they ultimately fail in many cases, not due to weakness of will but due to the avenues of social evolution. By adhering to a narrow political mind, they have deprived themselves of the means for understanding why they failed. Through this critique, Marx rejected French insurrectionism as well as Ruge's popular appeal to the Prussian King. It may be hyperbolic to follow Shlomo Avineri at this point, who identified in Marx a "stubborn opposition, throughout his life, to a political émeute of the working class" (Avineri, 1969, p. 194). Nevertheless, one can identify an evaluative shift in discussing people-centered politics: instead of engaging in recurrent and, in many cases, utterly failing attempts to change society through collective action centered on the popular will (be it in the guise of reformist or insurrectionary approaches), one must take interest in the more delicate question concerning how political action is able to contribute to the transformation of the systemic set-up of modern societies at all.14 A revolution in general—the overthrow of the existing power and dissolution of the old relationships—is a political act. But socialism cannot be realised without revolution. It needs this political act insofar as it needs destruction and dissolution. But where its organising activity begins, where its proper object, its soul, comes to the fore—there socialism throws off the political cloak. (Marx, 2010d, p. 206) In this passage, the "Randglossen" brought a conception of class-based politics to the fore that opened up an alternative to insurrectionism. It was ultimately taken up by the social democratic current in the labor movement: to overcome the Jacobin flaws, it seemed more plausible to adopt an analytical perspective on capitalist societies and envisage a class-based politics centered on labor. The irony of world history turns everything upside down. We, the "revolutionaries", the "overthrowers"—we are thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and overthrow. The parties of order, as they call themselves, are perishing under the legal conditions created by themselves. They cry despairingly with Odilon Barrot: la légalité nous tue, legality is the death of us; whereas we, under this legality, get firm muscles and rosy cheeks and look like life eternal. (Engels, 2010, p. 522) As to pure democracy and its role in the future I do not share your opinion. Obviously, it plays a far more subordinate part in Germany than in countries with an older industrial development. But that does not prevent the possibility, when the moment of revolution comes, of its acquiring a temporary importance as the most radical bourgeois party (it has already played itself off as such in Frankfort) and as the final sheet-anchor of the whole bourgeois and even feudal regime. At such a moment the whole reactionary mass falls in behind it and strengthens it; everything which used to be reactionary behaves as democratic.17 In sum, Marx and Engels pursued a strategic approach and defined their stances according to the concrete situation at stake. However, as it turned out, the problem of the popular will and popular sovereignty could not be bypassed by transferring it to the economic sphere and class-based politics. The more that social democratic mass parties emerged in different countries, the more the decisive conflicts again revolved around the representation of the people. Not the least, Marx partly changed his attitude toward communal ownership in his late writings and sympathized with parts of the Russian Narodnik movement (e.g. lauding Chernyshevsky, the author of the influential novel "What is to be done?," in the foreword to the second edition of capital). As evidenced by Jones, this was mainly due to Marx's engagement with the legal regulation of communal land tenure in Germany that ultimately led him to re-evaluate Russia's economic structure (Jones, 2016, 579 ff).18 From the 1870s, European Social Democracy had its heyday. Trade unions and social democratic parties emerged which were committed to a Marxist variety of anti-capitalism and a class-based conception of politics. But Marx was too quick in his forecast of a shift from popular to class-based politics. In particular, European Social Democratic Parties strongly congregated around the struggle for democratizing the political system in the name of the people: "Between the 1870s and 1890s, country by country across the map of Europe, socialist parties were formed to give government by the people coherent, centralized, and lasting political form. Until the First World War and to a great extent since, those parties carried out the main burden of democratic advocacy in Europe" (Eley, 2002, p. 5). The labor movement largely returned to people-centered politics and rallied around the fight for universal suffrage. As Adam Przeworski has demonstrated in his comparative study on European Social Democracy, one can observe a shift from class-based politics to popular politics: while from the 1840s, activists were trying to constitute the proletariat as a distinct force by "separating it from the masses of the people," from the 1870s the people as mass became the central point of reference (Przeworski, 1987, p. 54). If one counts in it all persons without property, all those who have no income from property or from a privileged position, then they certainly form the absolute majority of the population of advanced countries. But this proletariat would be a mixture of extraordinarily different elements, of classes that have more differences among themselves than had the "people" of 1789, who certainly as long as the present conditions of property are maintained have more common—or, at least, similar—interests than contrary ones […] (Bernstein, 1899, p. 103) Bernstein assumed that the working-class could exert the "hegemony within the people" and assemble "completely different elements of the population"—up to the point that the "labor party" and the "people's party" become "identical" (Bernstein, 1899, p. 103). […] the social democrat's ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; "who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation […]". (Lenin, 1960, p. 423) Although Lenin was still committed to a socialist strategy, he was clear about the need to reduce the complexities of society to a "single picture" and reclaim the popular will. These underlying connections between Bernstein and Lenin raise the question concerning how to make sense of the oscillation between the critique and the return of a people-centered politics in European Social Democracy. Contrary to Marx's speculations about the transfer of meaningful political struggle from the political sphere to the economy, the political system underwent a further constitutionalization in the 19th century. Though taking part in the capitalist ensemble of social systems, the constitutional state increasingly expanded its role in making collectively binding decisions that claimed to constitute and bind society as a whole. In his encompassing analysis of the advent of modern statehood, the constitutional sociologist Chris Thornhill has demonstrated that "rudimentary features of constitutional orders" were emerging in most European states, guaranteeing "basic mechanisms of representation" as well as "clear public procedures to determine the introduction, promulgation and enforcement of laws" (Thornhill, 2011, p. 254). To contest existing power-relations, it became—under these conditions—attractive to espouse popular sovereignty. The turn to the people was a reaction to the fact that constitutionalism was established (and, vice versa, contributed immensely to the constitutionalization of the political sphere). The existing order was contested by re-claiming the role of the people against the ruling constituted powers. Rosa Luxemburg's proposal for strategic renewal from the 1900s on reacted to the apparent problem that surrounded this shift. As European Social Democracy increasingly took part in the constitutionalized spheres of modern society, it established internal divisions of labor ranging from the participation in communal and regional councils to the trade unions that started to bargain on institutionalized grounds with the entrepreneurs. Luxemburg was highly critical of social democracy falling prey to dispersion within—what she called—"industrial constitutionalism" (Luxemburg, 2008, p. 134). Instead of achieving partial advances in these different spheres, she advocated a political strategy that aimed at mobilizing the masses through a holistic Volksbewegung (people's movement; Luxemburg, 1974a, p. 149). Luxemburg inserted an innovative twist because she considered such collecti
Referência(s)