Posts Tagged ‘Chantal Mouffe’
Spain: rise of the far right, collapse of Podemos in Spanish local elections and snap General Election.
“The problem with the populist strategy, for the left, is that it’s neither left nor a winning strategy.” – Left-wing populism. A legacy of defeat: Interview with Éric Fassin. 2018.
Podemos: In the Name of the People (2016) by Íñigo Errejón and Chantal Mouffe, offered the Spanish party as an example of successful left populism. In the December 2015 Spanish General election, Podemos had received 21% of the vote and became the third largest party in the parliament, with 69 out of 350 seats. Owen Jones in 2016 called them a “model” ” Podemos has won support for radical ideas without creating scapegoats”. Chantal Mouffe talked of its ability to work with “libidinal investment at work in national – or regional – forms of identification.”(For a Left Populism. Chantal Mouffe. 2018). In April 2019 the party lost 29 seats and fell to the 4th place below the centre right Ciudadanos. In the November 2019 Spanish general election, the party lost 7 more seats, falling in 4th place.
Podemos suffered a split in 2019 with Errejón leaving and putting his energy into a deferent political vehicle,
On January 17, the fifth anniversary of the creation of Podemos, two of its leading founders publicly confirmed the fracture of the left-wing party.” Íñigo Errejón, a top official at the group that he helped transform from an anti-austerity movement into a national force with parliamentary and institutional presence, on Thursday announced his decision to run for the Madrid regional premiership at the May election in alliance with Más Madrid, the party created by the mayor of the Spanish capital, Manuela Carmena.” (El Pais) Podemos founder Pablo Iglesias left politics altogether in 2021 “shortly after Unidas Podemos’ poor performance at the ballots”.
Chantal Mouffe continues to promote ‘left populism’ and remains credited with having had some influence (the extent of which is contested) on La France insoumise and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. In her most recent book Mouffe claims that LFI, Podemos and the Labour Party did badly in elections when they “abandoned their previous left populist strategy” (Page 4, Towards a Green Democratic Revolution. 2022).
In these local and regional elections Podemos got 3,2 % of the vote The power of what Mouffe calls “affects”, emotional ties, (drawing on Frédéric Lordon concepts going back to some readings of Spinoza) may be seen in the rise in Spain of the far right Vox, but there is little sign of “the creation of a broad coalition of movements under the banner of a ‘Green Democratic Revolution'” in Spain or elsewhere in the post-pandemic era. Indeed it could be argued that the problem for the left posed by the rise of the far-right, which in Spain has campaigned against migration, and got 7,18 % is greater than can be met by calls to construct the ‘people’ a new “we” against the ‘oligarchy’. The last thing needed is another voice, that is Mouffe’s, railing against ‘rationalism’ when irrationalism, from conspiracy theories, confusionist red-brown groups, to the racist right, is on the rise.
The rght-wing Spectator carries this article.
What the rise of Vox means for Spain Jim Lawley.
These elections then suggest that Vox may be a highly influential (albeit junior) partner in the central government after the general election which, it has just been announced, will be held on 23 July. At present it is the third-strongest party in the national parliament with 52 of the 350 seats, while the Partido Popular is the second-strongest with 88 seats. These two right-wing parties already govern in coalition in the Castile-León region and if, as now seems likely, they can join forces in July to oust Spain’s fragile Socialist-led government, they doubtless will.
Spain calls snap general election after right, far-right, inflict heavy local and regional defeat. The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party suffered a dramatic electoral reverse in local and regional elections held on Sunday, triggering an equally dramatic response from Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. (El Pais)
….
Vox is no longer a hypothesis but a growing reality, according to Sunday’s results. The PP has also bounced back since 2019, when the party obtained its worst-ever results in both the general and regional elections. Now, the prospect of the PP governing in coalition with Vox is not something abstract, but almost a certainty.
Podemos also suffered substantial losses, including losing all 10 of its representatives in the Madrid regional parliament.
Spain’s PM calls snap election after opposition triumphs in local polls.
Eyes will now turn to Podemos and Sumar, the new leftwing platform led by the labour minister and deputy prime minister, Yolanda Díaz, to see whether the two groups join forces to fight the election.
Podemos suffered disastrous results on Sunday as its support collapsed in key regions. The party’s leader, Ione Belarra, went on the offensive on Monday, describing the PP and Vox as a “reactionary wave” that would seek to cut public services, bring in privatisation and reverse the progress the coalition government had made on tackling the climate emergency, improving housing and protecting social rights.
Friends and Enemies: what remains of British ‘left populism’?
“The problem with the populist strategy, for the left, is that it’s neither left nor a winning strategy.” – Left-wing populism. A legacy of defeat: Interview with Éric Fassin. 2018.
This deepening of democracy resonates particularly with the spirit of Momentum, which proposes and seeks to build links with the social movements. This explains the central place given to the struggle against all of the forms of domination and discrimination, from economic relations to other domains like feminist, anti-racist and LGBTQ+ struggles.
It is the articulation of these struggles alongside other forms of domination which stands at the heart if Corbyn’s strategy, and thus qualifies it as a “populism of the left”. The objective is to establish a chain of equivalence between different democratic struggles across British society and to transform the Labour Party into a large popular movement capable of articulating a new hegemony.
From Chantal Mouffe: “Corbyn represents the implementation of a left populist strategy. 2018.
A comprehensive balance-sheet of what was known as ‘left populism’ has yet to be drawn up. This book lays down some markers, from a stand, not uncritically, in favour of left populism, Left Populism in Europe Lessons from Jeremy Corbyn to Podemos Marina Prentoulis 2021 . This, which includes reflections on Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, is being published this autumn, Le populisme de gauche sociologie de la France insoumise (LFI ) Manuel CERVERA-MARZAL. One would also include an update on the coalition between Podemos, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) and the resignation of their leading figure, Pablo Iglesias, who has now retired from politics.
Marina Prentoulis (Left populism: learning from the past, preparing for the future) argues, “What populism of all kinds does – in its right and left wing versions – is create a ‘people’ out of this process of coming together which pits itself against the established elites. At this initial point the political content of the movement is raw material that can turn out to have a left or right wing orientation. It is there to be taken in one direction by a figure like Donald Trump, or another by the Spanish populist left party, Podemos.”
In contrast to Mouffe, and with the advantage of a time distance, she states, “For example, the Labour party – I don’t think that it has ever managed to create ‘a people’ in the way right wing populism did around Brexit.” What Corbynism did, she argues, is draw a new generation of left wing people into activity within Labour and then use their energy to fight in very traditional party terms against the right. It was not the social movement which populist theory sees as the first step in severing the emotional identification with the established order.”
Prentoulis says in defence of the left populist strategy and way of approaching politics, “As democracy seeks to get a grip on the situation once again, identities are as much in the mix as social class, and populism allows us to think through some of the dilemmas of what is inevitably a more fluid and volatile situation.”
This, theoretical and political critique, has been published on the Verso site. It, to say the least, denies the coherence of the founding theorist of left-populism Ernesto Laclau. It is a frontal attack on the “political logic” of left populism in the form theorised by Laclau and Mouffe:
Against populist reason: Ernesto Laclau’s blind alleys
(August 2021)
“Populism,” as a political concept, gained mainstream traction over the 2010s as the neoliberal consensus broke down internationally. But what is populist theory and what is its relationship to the twentieth-century Marxist thought from which it developed? In this piece, Stathis Kouvélakis offers a critical examination of the political logic of Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism.
Stathis Kouvélakis writes for Contretemps, the French review founded by the 4th International Philosopher, Daniel Bensaïd He has produced a rigorous critique of best known left-wing theorist of populism, Ernesto Laclau. one can focus on this point. He argues, rightly in this Blog’s view, that the theory of populism developed by the late Laclau and extended in the new millennium to cover the L’eft populisms’ of La France insoumise, PODEMOS and Jeremy Corbyn is fundamentally flawed. An attempt at “a general phenomenology of the political constitution of group identities” it is overlain with a political strategy for “radical democratic politics” that fails to offer a left wing, let alone Marxist anchor.
In this context, “Populism’” is ” understood as the generic process of constitution of the subject-people of politics”,
What historical examples back this narrative up? Or as the writer puts it, “what does the contribution of the hegemonic process amount to? It rests in fact on the construction of a cleavage between ‘popular subject’ and ‘enemy’..” As Kouvélakis points out, “To take up the examples cited by Laclau himself, what made the Chartist discourse a populist discourse was the fact that it opposed to the body of ‘real producers’ (workers, craftsmen, self-employed) a minority of ‘idlers and parasites’, who monopolised wealth and appropriated the state through restricted suffrage.”
Like many cases in Laclau’s work this is an analysis of an analysis, in this case of the conclusions of Gareth Stedman Jones’ brilliant, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982, 1983). One could add that Jones shows the words “working class” did not mean, or have the same social references, in 19th century Britain as they do today.
Kouvélakis makes the fundamental point: populism ais not socialism.
Similarly, the discourse of the American ‘progressives’ at the end of the nineteenth century, or of the Peronist movement, a humbled common people to minorities of ‘monopolists’, ‘oligarchies’ seen as monstrous growths on a national body that was fundamentally healthy. The watchwords of contemporary ‘populisms’ do not innovate much, pitting ‘people’ against ‘‘castes’ or ‘oligarchies’; even, in contemporary versions of fascism, against ‘globalised elites’ and ‘migratory submersion’ – to quote just two of Marine Le Pen’s favourite targets.
Behind this is the ambiguity of the ‘democratic demand’, the idea that the people is the subject of democracy (rather than say, the electorate, that is those who actually can vote) can ‘issue’ such calls. He also asks, in contrast to the ‘constitution’ the ‘people’ moments of disintegration, or indeed – one adds – the split of a country into different ‘peoples’ as in the UK and Spain. Where do the more-borders nationalists SNP and the Catalan independence parties, fit into the spectrum of populism? What, equally, of the issue of political “confusionnisme” which this Blog discussed a couple of days ago – Philippe Coffrey talks of “zones of intersection” between left and right populism? Finally the failure of left populism to build its own ‘people’ cannot be theoretically explained away but needs empirical research.
The France based Kouvélakis like Éric Fassin, professeur de sociologie at a Paris University, must be all too aware of the inability of French left populism (LFI) to make a breakthrough, and the electoral strength of the national populist Front National, now Rassemblement National, normally classed on the far-right. Mélenchon is at present between 11% and 13% support for his 2020 Presidential bid.
Coming from the radical, perhaps Leninist, left, and using the arms of very abstract conceptualisation against Laclau who was a master producer of such discourse, this is the conclusion,
This apparently paradoxical recourse to a social ‘ontology’ that is as trivial as it is incompatible with populist reason can only be understood as an attempt to attribute content, an appearance of concreteness, to categories that have sunk into a bad abstraction. By a final ironic twist, it is a kind of ‘spectral Marxism’ of a particularly evolutionary and historicist variant – in other words, a ‘vulgar’ Marxism in the precise sense in which Marx described as ‘vulgar’ the political economy that succeeded the ‘classics’ (Smith, Ricardo), which comes to haunt a ‘post-Marxism’ determined to liquidate the very idea of revolution.
One does not have to sympathise with “revolution”, a master-signifier if ever there was one, or with the authors’ wider ‘revolutionary’ politics, to agree with some of the critical points Kouvélakis makes. To summarise rather brutally, he indicates just how slippery Laclau, and by extension Mouffe can be. Or, to put it differently, a lot of words tending towards little political change from the left.
As the “populist moment” on the left passes into history one trait remains. Populism of all brands, Laclau asserted, “rests in fact on the construction of a cleavage between ‘popular subject’ and ‘enemy’. Chantal Mouffe’s writings explore in luxuriant detail the concept, which originates in the works of the pro-Nazi German jurist Carl Schmitt (he may have first appeared in her, The Return of the Political. 1993. For Schmitt the carving out of a division between Friend and Enemy is foundational moment in politics. Mouffe attempts to revise Schmitt’s friend/enemy-distinction (The Concept of the Political 1932, English edition 2007) and carve out a theory of agonistic pluralism.
Yet as can be seen, if Laclau is right, and many suspect he has a point about this as a feature of populism, this trait does not disappear by just adding a dose of pluralism, and accepting the ‘agonistic’ principle, “a practice of democratic engagement that destabilises appeals to authoritative identities and fixed universal principles. It is surely fundamentally anti-pluralist for all that can try to wish the intolerance away.
It is hard to accept that Labour – contrast Corbyn with Jean-Luc Mélenchon, compare a mass democratic party with a ‘movement’ (LFI) built around a ‘charismatic’ chief – was ever populist. Labour politicians do not rail against elites, oligarchies or entrenched political castes. If there was a trace of a cult behind some Corbyn admirers it largely extended to admiring, happy words and feelings, and not a lot further. No doubt one could speculate on the influence within Labour of “libidinal investment at work in national – or regional – forms of identification.”(For a Left Populism. Chantal Mouffe. 2018).
And yet…… a section of the alt-left media, some of the Corbyn levée, and the anti-Corbyn lot braying for purges, at present having the screaming hab-dabs, seem caught up in defining the Friends and, above all, Enemies….
Democracy For Sale: Peter Geoghegan. A Left Anti-Populist Review.
Foreshadowed in ‘Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics – Peter Geoghegan.’ (Head of Zeus.2020).
A reader of the alt-left media, trying to get to grips with Labour’s 2019 Election Defeat, asks, how did the Tories appeal to working class and former Labour voters? Working by the lamp-light of the study he or she interrogates the nearest object to hand, via Zoom. “Red Wall Voter” they say, “How did you change your opinion? What role did Brexit play?” The voter will look back, and ask the theorist in turn, questioning the gaze of the theorist sitting in metropolitan isolation, away from the real folks who want their Country Back.
A left populist pops up on the screen. “A popular democratic interpellation” says the reader of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, has been taken by a “logic of equivalence”, the “designation of the enemy” a frontier of the political imaginary, into a new hegemonic discourse”. The task of the left, he or she continues, is to ensure that “the people” is constructed democratically” against the “oligarchy” that rules in the EU and the UK. (1)
In 2016, in Sunderland, Peter Geoghegan, just before the Referendum asked a real-life Brexit supporter. “He talked about pit closures and disinvestment, deindustrialisation and neglect” He was vexed about Turkey joining the EU. Where did he hear that news? Facebook. On his train the journalist sees a copy of the Metro free-paper. It has an ad-wrap around for Vote Leave, paid for by the Democratic Unionist Party. Digging into this Democracy for Sale reveals that the “DUP’s advertising blitz was bankrolled by the biggest donation in Northern Irish history routed by a secretive Scottish group linked a former head of Saudi Arabian intelligence”. Sunderland was the first constituency to declare, heavily, for Leave. Supporters had been “interpellated” by money.
In the Campaigns for Brexit use of Facebook and Twitter to paper propaganda, Dominic Cummings’ official Vote Leave campaign and Arron Bank’s Leave.EU (see image above…) the “digital” Brexit Party, Young Britain, the European Research Group (ERG), they all lead back to the role of “dark money“. These are “funds from unknown sources that influence our politics”, building support for ideas with sophisticated digital means unknown until this millennium.
Democracy for Sale is a gripping account of the way the politics of cash played out in the EU Referendum, in the run up to the Boris Johnson’s December Election Campaign, and, as the author reminds us in this Podcast, is being performed – half-seen, half-concealed – in public today. (Bella Caledonia. #NAFNC Interviews Peter Geoghegan). The operations of a US-inspired style of campaigning was able to buy influence – on the cheap – in British politics. That fundraising and the use of money escaped regulation. with Banks, for example, moving money in and out of his offshore businesses. “There was little political will for a major political investigation into how election law was broken in 2016” . It shows how “the leaders who thrive now are those who can best control a fragmented and disoriented media, harnessing the power of social networks a a push us towards extremes.”(Page 224)
The ‘Anglosphere”
Above all, the book illustrates how the troops of the Brexit camp were able not just to speak to the Sunderland, the ‘left behind” electorate but to mobilise them for a Buccaneering free-market project grounded in an imaginary ‘Anglosphere’ that would shatter ties with the European Union. “In two decades, the idea that Britain should leave the European Union deregulate and form a new trading relationship with predominantly white English-speaking nations went from fringe concern to a widely held political aspirations “Pages 127 – 8). Geoghegan traces a network of Think Tanks and pressure groups, behind the shift in opinion, “producing the ideas” that “gain traction”. These ideas, going back to the twentieth century theories of Milton Friedman and Friedrich August von Hayek, reconfigured in the age of national neo-liberalism of Donald Trump. Shaped in this millenium wealthy US foundations, Heritage, Atlantic Bridge, there was a shift to promote a “new special relationship with the United States based on deregulation and free trade” (Page 135)
The ideas have long had outlets in media owned by Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch and the gamut of British Conservatives papers, from the Mail, the Star and the Express, a constant source of crude “mistruths about the EU”, the Brexiteer Bollox recounted in Fintan O’Toole’s Heroic Failure, Brexit and Politics of Pain (2018) . There have been projects like the Young Britain’s Foundation (YBF), to train a cadre of hard-right young people in the ideologies of US libertarians. Money gushing from the Koch Brothers has found its way into the greedy hands of the former Revolutionary Communist Party Network, Spiked and the Academy of Ideas. The vector of the Anglosphere ideal and, with pride of place, the “hardline Parliamentary caucus, the European Research Group.”
Democracy for Sale has a fine chapter on the “digital gangsters” of Cambridge Analytica who specialised in “‘psy-ops’ to disrupt democracy” a trailblazing operation in on-line profiling and false-messaging. “Online campaigning is also barely constrained by Britain’s tight election finance laws.” (Page 203). A “sprawling industry”, surrounded by allegations of external interference, Russian and other, one message comes out, as spoken by Peter Pomerantsev “In an age where the old ideologies have vanished and there is no competition over coherent political ideas, the aim is to lasso together in separate groups around around a new notion of the people in an amorphous but powerful emotion that each can interpret in their own way, and then seal it by conjuring up phantom enemies who threaten to undermine them.” (Page 220) Pomerantsev had met Chantal Mouffe, as he recounted in his book on “influence machines”, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality (2019). You had already guessed.
In 2019 the Brexit Party, inspired by the Italian Movimento 5 Stelle, 5 Star Movement, template of a tech-utopian web platform, controlled from the top with an iron grip, buttressed by a pseudo -participation through the Net, emerged from UKIP to push for the Leave cause, post-referendum. Like its elder mentor Nigel Farage’s party was a private company, very private. In the “pop up” org, the long-standing dress of the UK’s old-style national populist UKIP was dropped, “the herring-bone suits, the blokey bonhomie and the and “tarnished fascist-leaning brand” got dumped. In came the “shiny new” party with figures seen to be from outside the traditional political spectrum. Hard-line Catholic moralist and Tory stalwart Ann Widecombe entered alongside Claire Fox (yet to be Baronnes Claire Regina Fox..) from the Spiked spider’s web, with her background in revolutionary Trotskyism.
The Brexit Party encapsulates how the Internet has radically reshaped politics, from the rise of untraceable online funding to the splintering of a relatively homogeneous media landscape into myriad shards, all competing for attention. (Page 223)
The Party came first in the 2019 European Elections. It disappeared without trace in the December General Election, standing down in all Conservative held seats. But it garnered a useful half a million votes, “mostly working class constituencies” ” (Page 253) One can imagine that, aside from the wider effect of Farage’s efforts to popularise Brexit as a people’s cause, harmed Labour more than the Tories. The profits from his venture, after the party was formally wound up, continue to keep this friend of Donald Trump and Trumpism in a more than comfortable lifestyle,
National Populism.
Geoghegan extents the story to Trumpite ideologue Steven Banon and European ultra-conservatives, or national populists, Matteo Salvini and the nativist Lega Nord in Italy, Vox in Spain (the later with clear links to Spain’s Fancoist ultra-right), the ‘social conservatism’ of the Polish Law and Justice party, Victor Orbán’s Hungary, and the international appeal of an “authoritarian model” of politics. It might have been useful to compare them with the rise of Silvio Berlusconi, four times Italian Prime Minister, head of Forza Italia and a pre-digital Media empire, promoter of a rightist populism from 1994 onwards, ” “Berlusconismo” (entrepreneurial optimism), and no stranger to ‘dark money’.
One could add that dubious political funding is a long-standing feature of political life in Spain, France, and many other European countries and in Spanish politics it is said to be the source of the left populist reaction to La Casta by Podemos. I can euqally find some striking examples of it in one of the forerunners of populism, the late 1880s century ‘Boulangist’ movement in France, backed by right-wing patriotic ultras, Bonapartistes, some on the Blanquist left, radicals and socialists , anti-Semites, Monarchists, and Catholic reactionaries and with more than dubious finance. It is said to have been one of the first movements to be “beyond left and right”. Boulanger was exposed by a 19th century Peter Geoghegan, Gabriel Terrail in Les coulisses du boulangisme, préface de Mermeix, (1890).
Democracy for Sale makes a plea for legislation to end this “dysfunctional status quo”. Yet can that stop the influence of wealthy donners, speculators eager to make money from injecting “a bit of chaos into the economic system” and the foreign owners and tax dodgers of media bodies promoting Brexit? The paradoxical basis of the coalition of protectionist sentiment behind Brexit and free-market buccaneers has not stopped Johnson being elected.
One underlying cause of the spread of populist campaigning through lying, the growth of the Net and the massive decline of print media, and other regulated news vehicles such as public service broadcasting, is harder to tackle. With an eye to the future Boris Johnson is opening the floodgates for his friends not just to cream off profits from the state bounty in the form of contracts for everything from Covid Testing onwards. There are plans to open the media to right-wing populism.
Then there is this..
The Guardian reports,
Andrew Neil has quit the BBC to launch a new right-leaning opinionated rolling news channel which aims to start broadcasting early next year as a rival to the public broadcaster and Sky.
Be forewarned. Many of us, repelled by the very name of the Brexit ideology’s cornerstone, a new economic and political “anglo” sphere (one can imagine what an Irish author thought of that one), have tended to mock the idea. As it merits scorn – a love that dares to speak its name, looks threadbare in the world of grasping Trump’s efforts to cling to power. But read Peter Geoghegan’s highly recommended Democracy for Sale: it’s a better guide to the politics of right-wing hegemony than anything academics have yet produced.
And so it continues…
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Peter Geoghegan Open Democracy
For an Introduction to the vast and learned library of books about left populism, discourse, hegemony and the People, see this interview:
Tendance Coatesy 