See below...
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Wojtek Sokolowski
> Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2003 3:39 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Subject: RE: Disciplinarian populism (was: Hostility towards
> Pacifistsexplained....)
>
>it is not the ideological contants
> that matters here, but role expectations.
> Wojtek
>
This idea of Disciplinarian Populism is very useful, and it fits neatly into other studies of the role of demonization and scapegoating, that Matt Lyons and I used in "Right-Wing Populism in America." Populism can be left wing, or right wing, or centrist. It is a style. Some of the best writing on scapegoating and populism is by Laclau and Postone.
Laclau argues that the essential difference between left-wing populism and right-wing populism is whether the populist movement reinforces the dominant class or the dominated class. Is the populist narrative truly subversive or does it merely replicate dominant beliefs? The dominant class is always seeking to neutralize the anger and antagonism of the dominated class, and right-wing forms of populism accomplish this, argues Laclau, because they "constitute the complex of interpellations which express the 'people'/power bloc contradiction as distinct from a class contradiction." This illuminates why so many populist movements of the right are cross-class anti-regime coalitions.
In fact, according to Laclau, alienation itself arises in "those situations where the non-class interpellations and contradictions in which the individual participates are subjected to the articulating principle of a class distinct from that to which the individual belongs."
Postone describes the role of antisemitism for the Nazis, a perfect example of Disciplinarian Populism. He argues that Nazi scapegoating of Jews centered on the idea that Jews represented parasitic financial capitalism in a battle with productive (and concrete) labor, industry, and technology. According to Postone, "When one examines the specific characteristics of the power attributed to the Jews by modern anti-Semitism--abstractions, intangibility, universality, mobility--it is striking that they are all characteristics of the value dimension of the social forms analyzed by Marx" in his theory of how the mechanisms behind capitalism are fetishized.
Jews were not just seen by the Nazis as agents of capitalism, according to Postone, Jews became biological personifications of capitalism, which "because of its fetishized form...did not appear to include industry and technology."
The result is a "comprehensive worldview which explains and gives form to certain modes of anticapitalist discontent in a manner that leaves capitalism intact."
According to the Nazi narrative, Germany was being destroyed by parasitic international finance capital as personified by the scapegoated and demonized Jews. So the Nazis launched a ruthless mission "to rid the world of the source of all evil." This was Hitler's Apocalypse. The public punishing of the Jews satisfied the populist base of the Nazi movement through the sado-masochistic spectacle of the ritual (and literal) attack on the scapegoat.
Originally the sins of the people were transferred to the scapegoat and the goat was cast out into the desert taking those sins out of the populist mass. With sado-masochistic scapegoating, the repressed and unnacceptable ideas and feelings of the populist mass are projected onto the scapegoat and the scapegoat is attacked by authority figures, or the attack is permissioned by the authority figures.
Thus Disciplinarian Populism.
Or perhaps you have never seen the play The Crucible or the movie the Ox-Bow Incident?