[lbo-talk] Yoshie: "dialogue" takes listening on your part, too

Eric Beck rayrena at realtime.net
Wed Jul 12 15:18:05 PDT 2006



> Somehow I fail to see what creepy Green Party-Populism and
>statist socialism have in common. While I disagree with some aspects
>of Yoshie's view of the internal affairs of the Iranian state, it
>seems fairly clear that she is no "state socialist" as that term is
>generally used

An admirer of Lenin and Hobbes who believes that any future socialist/communist movement must take control of the state to be successful not a state socialist? What is a state socialist then?

As far as the commonalities, briefly: Both populism and socialism find their representation/justification in the figure of "the people." The state is coterminus with the people, meaning there is always an other who is not the people, outside of the state, and populism and socialism are two types of politics that attempt to take hold of state power in order to carry out the function of drawing (and constantly redrawing, whenever it serves their purposes) the boundary between the people and the not-people, inside and outside the state. State socialism (eg, Chavismo) of course tends to exclude less along racial and gender lines that populism (eg, the US anti-immigration movement), but it still reserves the right to fix, but not dissolve, the boundaries.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list