Populism

[Chris Kromm]

This a rather broad pastiche of arguments to pin on "populism," and begs
more questions than it answers. Is a movement only radical if it
specifically and *always* singles out "capitalism" by name? Would this not
write off many other periods of radical unrest in U.S. history, as when
socialists railed against the "trusts," etc.? Should we similarly write off
"socialism" and "communism" because of racist, workerist, anti-rural ("the
idiocy of rural life"), ethnocentric, and other questionable views in its
theory and practice?

Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2001 09:17:57 -0400
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
Subject: Re: populism

Lawrence wrote:


>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

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