>From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
>> By the way, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a populist.
>
>Is that because of the threat the majority constantly poses, in any society,
>to the civil rights of minorities, or for some other reason?
I'm no scholar of populism, but it's mainly struck me as deeply petty bourgeois politics - not against capitalists, just big capitalists; not against money, just big money; not against a system of private property enforced by money, but just for easy credit. Sometimes it's pro-worker, sometimes it's not; and it's often xenophobic and anti-urban. It denounces finance, without noticing the connections of finance to ownership, or the fact that the whole end of capitalist production is not the satisfaction of needs or the making of neat things, but the accumulation of capital. It's a shallow form of class politics that can often see poor people as being just as parasitic on virtuous producers as Jewish bankers in New York.
Doug