If – as we argue – so-called left-wing populism and right-wing populism represent very different political phenomena, why should we use the same term, populism, for both, especially when a signifier such as fascism is available? Moreover, one of the main characteristics of fascism is the confusion of the idea of the equality of ‘the people’ with identitarian closure through the homogenisation of differences. What is usually called right-wing populism is much better designated fascism, neo-fascism or post-fascism – while left-wing populism should just be called populism.
SS: Your counterposing of populism to fascism rests on a bold argument that you ground both in political experience and in a strand of political theory that is not well known outside Latin America. In so doing, you challenge the insularity of mainstream ‘northern’ political theory. Your book refers to a long line of Latin American political theorists – how have these intellectual and political traditions informed your approach to populism?
PB & LC: As Latin American academics, we’re similar to our colleagues in the rest of what is called the ‘Global South’. We consider ourselves part of the academic world; we read authors and theories from different regions on an equal footing. But some parts of the academic world have not been very interested in what is produced outside the ‘historical centres’ of thought production.
Fortunately, this situation is changing. This is due to two factors: new editorial strategies that enable the dissemination of our work; and the fact that Europe and the US are no longer the indisputable centres for the production of ideas. The field of populism studies offers an interesting twist in this regard, due to the fact that a relationship of greater equality is emerging in the production of knowledge.
We are building international networks on an equal footing and we read each other in two directions: North–South and South–North. This enables a dialogue that pays attention to both the particularities of each region and their commonalities. We would like to emphasise that the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have helped considerably in building these bridges.
But the wish to think of ourselves as ‘out in the world’ (and not as a particularity that confines its thinking to itself) finds its origins in various traditions in Latin America and the Caribbean. On a more regional level, we feel the influence of two great currents. These locate their roots, on the one hand, in the plebeian and socialist republicanism of Simón Rodríguez and José Martí in the 19th century, giving rise to a whole continental experience of articulation between the popular and the emancipating democratic institutions; and, on the other hand, in the legacy of the heterodox Marxism that José Carlos Mariátegui inaugurates with his aesthetic-political assumptions reflected in spaces such as the journal Amauta; the Black Marxism of the Caribbean in intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, and the influence of Andean thinkers such as Zavaleta Mercado and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui in Bolivia or Agustín Cueva and Bolivar Echeverría in Ecuador and Mexico.
In Argentina, we recognise ourselves at the intersection of two traditions: national-popular thought and the Lacanian Left. It is here that we can place the classic works of Ernesto Laclau (and those intellectuals who influenced his thought early on, such as Arturo Jauretche, John William Cooke and Jorge Abelardo Ramos), passing through José Aricó, Juan Carlos Portantiero and Emilio de Ípola, to more current references such as Horacio González, María Pía López and Jorge Alemán.
Finally, it is important to add that all the authors and currents mentioned have been configured as a dense network of postcolonial thought, and that decolonial theory is a key strand within this historical accumulation. We make this clarification because in the English-speaking world (especially in the US), it is often believed that postcolonial Latin American and Caribbean thought started with 1990s decolonial theory, omitting the historical role of plebeian republicanism, heterodox Marxism and populism from this struggle from the Global South for epistemological and political emancipation.
SS: If I understand you correctly, you argue that populism has been misinterpreted as an anti-democratic aberration, ignoring the way that political modernity has been articulated and lived in the Global South. This was premised on the normalisation of the Global North as the only possible model for modernity. Can you take us through the way that you see political modernity emerged in the Global South and how populism fits into this constellation of traditions?
PB & LC: First, we would like to make it clear that we reject relativistic conceptions of modernity – as if each place carried out its own unique and untranslatable experience. It seems to us that there is a multicultural trap in this retrospective interpretation of the past that segments the possibilities of understanding the ‘historical knots’ that organise our present. At the same time, it ties us down to particularistic thought and ignores how all these ‘supposed’ particularities are produced and relate to each other in one great epochal and conceptual plot.
But we also distance ourselves from the decolonial interpretation that seeks to challenge modernity as a whole, as simply a history of oppression. From this point of view, on the one hand, modernity would be identified with Europe and oppression, and on the other, Latin America with otherness and passivity. Thus, two opposite and independent poles are configured with reference to each other. As a consequence, our emancipation from the European yoke would hinge on us recovering our ancestral ‘otherness’.
To us, this interpretation – which also rejects the concepts of republic, state, democracy and a long list of etceteras – has two problems. First, it leads to deadlock; namely, in all praxis and all theory (even in language), we will find an impure element that has functioned as a form of oppression by the ‘other’. Still, and this is paradoxical, it leads us to reactionary arguments typical of the Right. For instance, like saying that ‘class struggle’ is a Eurocentric and patriarchal concept and, therefore, we must reject it.
However, we do not consider that this operation performed by decolonial theory is something inherently characteristic of it. Rather, it responds to a way of thinking in our times. We sincerely think that present in all the theoretical proposals where ethics prevail over politics is what we think of as the legacy of Levinas. Once again, each theoretical proposal is assumed to constitute a singularity, but ends up reproducing a more general form that becomes ‘unthinkable’.
Meanwhile, this interpretation does not pay attention to historical processes and all the archival work that historians such as Valeria Coronel, Marixa Lasso, James Sanders and José Figueroa – to name but a few − have been drawing on from the past. The work of these historians helps us think about two aspects. One, the active role of the popular sectors (indigenous, farmers, Black people and female) in the construction of more egalitarian and emancipatory republics. Two, the active role of these sectors in the configuration of modernity itself.
In this sense, we consider modernity a global and dialectical process. A process in tension between a reactive movement and an emancipatory movement. And in this process, Latin America plays a central (not a peripheral) role in the construction of these two movements. In our case, we are interested in thinking about what emancipatory possibilities Latin America engenders for modernity. And Latin American populisms are one more link (theoretical and practical) in a long historical accumulation of democratic experiences of plebeian republicanism.
In that regard, it is not a question of thinking of Latin America as an exception, but as part of a broad process where we help to configure forms of emancipation for the world. We are also the political imagination of the future. Then, one needs to note the difficulty that certain segments of the European intelligentsia have in understanding this, and their oscillation between considering politics in Latin American as remnants of the past (as if ‘Europe’ were in some the vanguard) or an exotic otherness to be protected in a paternalistic/maternalistic way.
It is no accident that the new political imagination in Europe came from the south, and that this European south has deep roots within Latin America. It is time to understand each other as being situated in a back-and-forth game in the long history of solidarity and emancipation of those in the ‘lower orders’.
SS: In your critique of neoliberal fascism, you attempt to deconstruct approaches developed within the context of the European ‘liberal, anti-communist left’. You single out the thinking of Éric Fassin, who prefers the plural term ‘publics’ in his attempt to maintain a critical distance from majoritarian ‘populist’ logics; and also those from Latin American autonomist traditions, including Svampa and Mondonesi, who, in your opinion, attempt to sever the link between populism and social movements. This critique also takes in republican democratic philosophy insofar as it views populism as a transitory yet disposable step towards the attainment of a civic republicanism (for example, in the work of Villacañas).
PB & LC: In our book, we want to address and deactivate the various arguments that certain left-wing thinking deploys to criticise populism. For this reason, we explore the criticisms made by these three specific currents: European left-wing liberalism; Latin American autonomism; and Left republicanism in Spain.
The first current considers populism as a right-wing experience. The second identifies it with neoliberalism. The third one conceives it as a transitory experience towards republicanism. The first two currents reject populism without further ado, while the third one ‘picks it up’, albeit as a transitional project.
We offer a series of arguments to explain why it is wrong to associate populism with the right-wing (or even with fascism), with neoliberalism or with a transitional experience.
In the first case, we gather together the critiques of Žižek, Fassin and Lazzarato and try to show that the specific rejection of populism by these authors rests on a liberal point of view (although Žižek is not liberal in his intellectual commitment), which confuses the specificity of populist phenomena and cannot capture the radically emancipatory dimension of the populist commitment.
Furthermore, we insist on the importance of bearing in mind the history of Latin American popular struggle to understand how leading plebeian figures impact on and articulate democracy. It seems to us that, without knowing this history in-depth, we run the risk of reproducing a series of prejudices that imbue this triangulation with authoritarianism. There is currently a great confusion – an understandable confusion, given the trauma created by the fascist leaders of the 20th century in Europe – that mixes up leadership with caudillismo and authoritarianism. It seems to us that this is a limitation in our times that favours a very narrow and unilateral reading of leaderships.
But when it comes to Latin America, we are reminded that there are many different types of leadership and that these can also be part of a democratic experience. To consider leading populist figures as a remnant of forms of the past is a manifestation of the naivety of an era that rests on the belief that it has surpassed all previous ones and now finds itself in a more advanced place in history. So it all comes down to historicist prejudices.
In the second case, we argue against autonomism in Latin America, which tends to reject the role that parties, the state and institutions can play in social emancipation. It should be noted that this arises from a debate that originated in the 1990s. That is to say, since then fields such as sociology began to refer to ‘social movements’ as a new actor, independent of left-wing political parties, unions and the classic collective organisations that characterised the struggles in Latin America in the 1960s and ’70s.
Sociology considers these movements ‘autonomous’ in the sense that they do not depend on any party or field beyond their own articulation. In turn, they identify the social movement with the ‘true place’ of the popular and conceive this space as the only one where emancipation can be pursued. Thus, they restrict the possibility of thinking that a union or a political party can also be a popular place for emancipation. Our criticism, therefore, rests on our broader conception of the popular and emancipation. First, it seems to us that social movements are yet another actor within a broader and more complex organisation called the ‘popular field’. Second, we believe that the popular field (movements, unions, parties, etc) is capable of articulating an emancipatory proposal when it has the possibility of governing through the state, transforming institutions and radicalising democracy.
Print
Spyros A. Sofos Paula Biglieri Luciana Cadahia | Radio Free (2021-05-11T17:56:05+00:00) Situating populism beyond the deformation of Eurocentric and post-democratic narratives. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/11/situating-populism-beyond-the-deformation-of-eurocentric-and-post-democratic-narratives/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.