(p)opulism

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun Dec 24 07:27:18 PST 2000


J Cullen wrote:


>However I agree that class analysis is most usefully presented in
>American tones rather than German or Russian ones. You hear a lot of
>anti-corporate sentiment among working-class people, and even the
>Pope warns about the dangers of globalization, but you just don't
>win over many of them by longing for the "good old days" of the
>Comintern.

Does it have to be an either/or thing like this? A lot of anti-corp sentiment is about the defense of or nostalgia for small producers - it's not necessarily about workers. It's a fantasy to think we could go back to small producers in any significant way - the computer I'm typing on, to pick a very immediate example, wouldn't exist if we were relying on artisanal labor. (Software, maybe; hardware, no.) Sure, the Comintern is dead, but so are the material bases of populism. So the question is how to get popular control over the behemoths.

Doug



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