> Their response was key. In both cases, they could have gone either way -
> towards a nostalgic, reactionary, backward-looking anti-capitalism (like
> Luddism), or a progressive collectivist solution (like socialism). After a
> series of false starts, the southern farmers embraced collectivism. For
> god's sake, the main slogan they used to describe their vision of the good
> society was The Cooperative Commonwealth. That wasn't a random choice of
> words.
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Canadian history provides a good example of how populism is a contradictory
phenomenon which "can go either way".
The forerunner of Canada's social-democratic party was the CCF - for Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. It was a prairie populist movement which formed and developed rapidly during the depths of the Depression. Elected in Saskatchewan in 1944, it pioneered the introduction of medicare. In the early 60's, the CCF fused with the Eastern-based industrial unions to form the NDP. It was the progressive, collectivist expression of rural populism.
The growth of CCF, however, was also paralleled by the rise of Social Credit, a competing right-wing populist movement based largely on the same rural constituency in neighbouring Alberta, in the heart of Canada's "bible belt". It adopted the unorthodox easy money economic theories of a Scottish engineer, C.H. Douglas, and some of its leaders were openly anti-semitic. (One of the movement's prominent supporters in Britain was Ezra Pound.) Social Credit, like the CCF, also held power provincially but, subjected to the pressure of the rapidly-expanding Alberta oil interests, it governed conservatively and steered well clear of its founding principles calling for the socialization of credit and a guaranteed income. It eventually merged into the Conservative party.
The two-faced nature of Canadian prairie populism in the Depression and immediate postwar years is characteristic of the protest movements of squeezed small farmers whose economic and cultural conditions are being rapidly transformed by finance capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and the domination of the political arena by city-based political parties representing the interests of the big bourgeoisie and the working class. They often, as Seth notes, draw on and combine elements of the political thought associated with each of the main classes and are impelled to ally with one or the other, depending on circumstances. If there is sometimes confusion in the analysis of such movements, it's owing to their often confused cultural and political outlook which can make situating them on the political spectrum more difficult, as we also know from our discussions of contemporary populist movements in the Islamic world and Latin America.