What’s Left of Populism and the Universal Subject (a theoretical piece)

(my 15 page grad school writing sample)

In the year 410 C.E. the Visigoths breached the walls of Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire, and preceded to loot, burn, and pillage their way through the city, leaving a wake of destruction in their path. It was the first of a wave of invasions by Germanic tribes (Visigoths, Vandals, Angles, Saxons, Franks, Goths and Lombards) that swept through the Roman Empire signaling a symbolic apocalypse and the literal transformation of the frontier of “Western civilization” for centuries to come. With the victory of populist leaders like Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and even further right populists throughout Europe, I wonder if we are on the brink of yet another catastrophic “invasion”. It begs the question, “What’s left of populism for the left?”

Despite its bad press, the notion of radical left populism warrants further investigation. We may ask what the notion of left populism might offer in light of the rise of white nationalism and the reactionary wave rippling through contemporary politics. Additionally, with the furthering of environmental degradation, economic inequality, racism, sexism, transphobia and the like, it appears necessary a collective be formed in opposition to the apocalyptic scenarios facing our species, and one which transcends our divisions. Still one must wonder on what basis we build from?

Typically in political discourse, populism is the idea that society can be separated into two groups,“the people” and the “elites”. Usually the latter group is identified as corrupt or oppressive of the former. Populist leaders tend to market themselves as embodiments of the will of the people, against the corruption of “elites”. There is a distinct “Us” versus “Them” logic which demonizes the opposition, the elites and those the elites use against ‘the people’. In the case of the reactionary Right, it’s typically immigrants, and poor refugees that get the brunt. For the Left on the other hand, the “Them” are structural aspects of the system such as financial capital, and the technocratic state apparatus. Populism on the Right appears a danger to society but what about on the Left?

Recalling the infamous debate between Slavoj Zizek and Ernesto Laclau, “the father of modern left populism” (as Zizek describes him), the question is posed as to whether there is a medium in this exchange which opens the path for progress and a rebirth of the left. To this point, their contention over the essence of the leftist struggle seems especially interesting. Laclau on the one hand asserted the impossibility of a totalized universality, arguing that populism is founded on the basis of empty signifiers. He views this non-essentialist approach to populism as a necessary component in a democratic struggle for the hegemony of ‘the people’. Zizek on the other hand presents Hegelian ‘concrete universality’ as very close to Laclau’s notion of hegemony, while suggesting the potential for a temporal reconciliation of the universal and particular.

The utility of Hegel’s ‘concrete universality’ to left populism is immediately apparent. It stands in a position between the extremes of nominalism on the one side, and a fully abstract universality on the other (The Science of logic: Book 3). Zizek elucidates ‘concrete universality’ as a universality of exceptions. Within the ‘concrete’ mode, there are no ‘typical situations’ and therefore a concrete totality is a totality which “regulates the concrete context of exceptions”. As such, ’concrete universality’ does not mean the dissipation of particular identities in favor of universal ones, but rather the realization that all particular identities are necessarily subsumed to (and undermined by) their universal opposite. Notably, within the ‘concrete’ position of universality we realize that we are all still subject to certain universal forces, most notably the capitalist system.

Laclau however frames his position as a rejection of the “reductionist” tenets of “old” Marxism, including the centralized focus on capitalism. He identifies the universal position as a temporary passage or point of residence for various signifiers (something like Lacan’s objet petite a). In this way the universal is realized by way of its particulars, which individually have no necessary shared content. Two issues come to mind. First that there does in fact appear to be a shared content within the struggle of the people. Even if initially abstract, the shared content of struggle becomes ‘concrete’ in its repeated interaction with the universal mediating system (capitalism). It would appear to be a necessity to any proposed struggle for hegemony or ‘radical democracy’ as Laclau and Chantel Mouffe frame it.

The second apparent issue is that without this shared content the revolutionary nature of the left becomes neutralized, dispersed into the greater identity discourse. The issue here is not the assertion of identity politics as such but rather the disassociation of identity politics from the critique of capitalism. While Laclau postulates “class struggle as just one species of identity politics”, I would argue on the contrary that the individual identities represented in identity politics are secondary to the distinction of ‘class’. This is why as Zizek explains, economic class specifically intercedes all other identities, whereas the opposite is not true. Though class antagonism appears as only one in the series of social antagonisms (economic, political, feminist, ecological, ethnic, etc.), it is the specific antagonism which modifies the others. It is after all precisely on account of post-industrial global capitalism, that we see such proliferation of antagonisms relegating ‘class struggle’ to a secondary position. Economic (political-economic) critique is of such importance because it structures “the very terrain on which the multitude of ‘particular contents’ fight for hegemony”.

In Race, Nation, Class, Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein do an excellent job elucidating the ways in which the antagonisms of capitalism intersect the antagonisms of racism and sexism in particular. On a concrete level such interaction between race and sex, and the economic system is unavoidable. While in constant expansion, the capitalist system requires the minimization of production costs (notably labor cost) in order to maximize profit. As Wallerstein asserts, racism has historically functioned to allow the capitalist class to lower the salaries of a major segment of the work force, for example Blacks in the US. A similar argument could be made about the status of women, though Wallerstein points out how the traditional social position of women historically allowed for essentially free labor in the form of housework.

Such antagonisms rely on a similar underlying hierarchy which effectively reduces the status of one individual to the hegemony of another. One cannot however confront such antagonisms existing within the superstructure without an analysis of the base. Through a Marxian logic of commodity fetishism, Zizek asserts that in a society in which commodity exchange predominates, individuals relate to themselves, and the objects they encounter as “contingent embodiments of abstract-universal notions”. Therefore our concrete sociocultural background is experienced as contingent, ultimately defined by the ‘abstract’ universal capacity to think and work. In the modern capitalist state one is not born into a fixed social role and therefore what one becomes depends on choice, and contingent circumstance. Zizek suggest therefore that the individual becomes universal once they lack a proper place within the social edifice, ceasing to identify the ‘kernel of their existence’ within their particular social situation. That is when the individual is unable to identify themselves within the abstract universal logic of capitalism.

Capitalism is the universal system from which particular individuals are exceptions to, and therefore inhabits the role of abstract universal. From a ‘concrete universal’ perspective, the exceptions are those who have found themselves alienated from the system of capitalism. Hence the “Us” of this paradigm, are the “not-all”, each particular having its own universal characteristics which contradict the logic of the “all” in capitalism. Capitalism’s “allness” is therefore shattered in its failure to include the particulars. Zizek argues that Laclau’s position signals an abandonment of the classical Marxian notion of class struggle in exchange for a ‘postmodern’ irreducible plurality of struggles (identity politics). The issue being that this transition renaturalizes capitalism as the only game in town. Furthermore, Zizek suggests that capitalism can accommodate all the demands of identity politics while maintaining the status quo in terms of the continued alienation of its subjects.

A ‘concrete universal’ is presented as an ‘eternal idea’, capable of being reinvented within new historical or social contexts. For Hegel, truth is the outcome of a long historical process of concretization of opposing determinations. The ‘concrete universal’ arises the moment abstract universality (the will in-itself) meets the exception within particularity (the will for-itself). Zizek gives a series of examples which elucidate this notion of ‘concrete universality’;

…in the relationship between a genus and its subspecies, one of these subspecies will always be the element that negates the very universal feature of the genus. Different nations have different versions of soccer; Americans do not have soccer, because ‘baseball is their soccer’ . This is analogous to Hegel’s famous claim that modern people do not pray in the morning, because reading the newspaper is their morning prayer (…) Perhaps, in the history of cinema, the best example is the relationship between Western and sci-fi space operas (…) space operas have taken their place, that is, space operas are today’s Westerns.

Communism is such an idea which allows reinvention to take place for the sake of various concrete struggles. Rather than a set of fixed rules, communism can be linked to the historical drive towards radical emancipation which persists throughout history, from Spartacus to the Haitian revolution. This characteristic struggle, an abstract forced to take new forms in various particular instances throughout history, seems inseparable from a ‘concrete’ approach to left populism.

I’ll clarify my understanding of struggle within the context of Marxist “class struggle”, however not reducing ‘class’ to sheer economic position. In agreement with the historical materialist conception that the means of production is the primary generator of culture and history, it is necessary to acknowledge as Engles and Marx did that economic class is not the only determining factor of struggle. Human struggles extend beyond the exploitative system (capitalism) within which they exist within. This is even if the antagonisms that system produces help reproduce the struggles. The struggle between the working class and bourgeoisie is a struggle against capitalism, while racial and gender struggles for instance have their own names and histories. What these struggles have in common is what I’m getting at with the notion of ‘class’. They rely on the superior position of one group over another within an unjustified hierarchal system. This hierarchy in effect alienates those in the inferior position from a place within the system, relegating them to the status of ‘outsiders’ from within. Their continued inclusion within the ‘capitalist order’ is only for the sake of exploitation for those in superior social positions. Within the fold of ‘concrete universal exceptionalism’, the ‘outsiders’ are able to articulate their particularity in such a way as to erase it, destabilizing the unjustified hierarchy. They share the distinction of a kind of proletariat subjectivity. This is a status marked by the loss of ones place within the social order. Social power while not necessarily requiring the control and dominance over the means of production, is guaranteed by that hegemony. As a result, the liberation of proletariat subjects requires a liberation from the system which exploits their inferior position. It seems reasonable therefore to extend the category of proletarian beyond the limits of an economic position, and to a more abstract notion of subjectivity emptied of substance.

From this position, the left can both criticize the various forms of social and political oppression while at the same time maintaining a collective notion of proletariat subjectivity against both reactionary forces, and liberal stances on identity, which present the goal of liberation as a matter of ‘culture change’ or recognition. Without the included transformation of the economic system we reach a deadlock. If one identity group is somehow liberated, capitalism can move the target toward another excluded group. What remains always within the system is an excluded other ripe for exploitation, and in the capitalist system, exploitation is a requirement. What changes with culture in absence of economic transformation is only that which is allowable within the existing system. I propose therefore that the transformation of culture and economic system go hand in hand, and therefore consider my approach to be intersectional.

As Zizek points out in “Repeating Lenin”, Marx already deploys a logic of hegemony in his Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, presenting the emergence of a universal class as a particular class that stands for society as such, as the bourgeoisie did during the French Revolution. Marx points out the disillusion that followed the victory of the bourgeoisie after the French Revolution when the universal and particular became visible again, the actuality of universal freedom being no more than the profit of the capitalist class for themselves. Marx however puts forth the proletariat as the truly universal class due to their very exclusion from the ownership of property. They are in other words a class lacking in content, the ‘negative’ (non-class) of the ‘positive’ (elite class).

The proletarian class is also an international class, as Marx says in the Communist Manifesto, the proletariat has no country. Emptied of capital content, a proletarian is an individual who in relation to those in power, the maintainers of the means of production, is essentially nullified, pushed to the periphery of society in terms of consideration, a contradiction of the universal notion of human rights developed during the Enlightenment. This subject might be trans, black, or simply impoverished. They may also be a mixture of these identities. Regardless, their very existence, and identity in relation to the one presented as superior (white, male, heteronormative ect.), is deficient, and for their sake, less worthy of consideration. This is why the disempowered position is the privileged position in terms of revolutionary goals. It is why Black Lives Matter activists must assert that “black lives matter”, rather than “all lives”. All lives is the assumption of the dominant group (abstract universal) for themselves, while “black lives” places the emphasis on the excluded group (concrete universal).

The affirmation of the desubjectivized group, those invalidated by the existing power structure, becomes a weapon against that hegemony which is maintained by the capitalist system. Likewise, the capitalist system relies on social antagonisms such as racism and sexism for its reproduction. The liberation of oppressed groups comes however not simply by means of the assertion of identity, or culture, but rather in the assertion of a radical program of egalitarianism. It is worth it to point out that this concept of egalitarianism came to prominence in the West following the French Revolution, along with liberty and fraternity. These ideals, still yet to be realized in their entirety, continue to be reborn in different social contexts, evidence of their universal resonance. Notably, the heirs of these ideals were often the colonized of the Americas, the irony of the Haitian revolution against the French Empire, and even in modern liberal society the fight for equality remains a central theme.

The Marxist notion of proletariat subjectivity implies a kind of ‘concrete universality’ that embraces the struggles of the proletariat worldwide in their shared quest for liberation. The process of ‘emancipation’ is certainly an international project, since many of the needs of the world, for instance the prevention of environmental catastrophe (climate derangement) are shared. Furthermore, the consequences of imperialism are international. The preceding global capitalist system has created a network of oppressions. While workers of less fortunate countries are exploited, their governments are destabilized. Immigration becomes a necessity for survival. While richer nations benefit on one hand through the exploitation of the labor of those from the fringes, the working class public remains divided, manipulated by reactionaries to betray their own interest in their opposition against the poor of other nations. This xenophobic tendency comes at the expense of class solidarity and the opposition against their shared adversary, the very global capitalist system itself. Racism and xenophobia play heavily into the hands of international capitalism. This is why it is necessary for left populism to embrace an ‘international politics of citizenship’ as Balibar describes.

More to the point of internationalism, we come up against the concept of the nation itself, a creation of bourgeois liberals from the Enlightenment.The unification of states in Europe typically implied an attempt to homogenize formerly diverse groups in terms of language and culture in order to create conditions conducive to the functions of the market economy. This points to the fact that national identities are ultimately fake, or at least ‘inorganic’, in the sense that they are not the creations of the people they define but rather the creation of economic elites. Hence the lack of true “nationality” for the disempowered class. As Carlo Rovelli points out in his article for the guardian on national identity, the development of “nationalism” has very dangerous potentials, identifiable in the rise of fascism in Italy, and Nazism in Germany. Furthermore, as he puts it;

Today’s surge of localism and nationalism does not just result from mistaken hopes of political gain; it draws on the emotional appeal of a potential identity. Politics plays with our insatiable desire to belong. Foxes have earths and birds have nests, but a human being has no place to lay their head. Offering the fictitious home of “the nation” is cheap and politically rewarding. Glorifying local or national identity by placing it above cooperation is not just counterproductive, it is also miserable, ugly and morally reprehensible.

Perhaps this fictitious home is precisely the place where our desires go dark. The imaginary whole is a strangely satisfying myth. The idea that we had already been complete, and that something had disrupted that completeness is at the core of reactionary ideology. Their populism is built on scapegoats, often imaginary external threats (immigrants, Jews, Muslims ect.) which disturb the harmony of “organic society”. The tendency for left populism to privilege national sovereignty against agents of global capital is perhaps a tempting but limited approach. Zizek criticizes Laclau for insisting on the creation of some figure of “the Enemy” as immanent to populism. These enemies would be financial elites, fundamentalists, and the like. However, as Zizek insists, the true “enemy” of ‘the people’ is the very system sustaining such noxious social relations.

The far Right imagines a harmonious past world, inhabited by a ‘pure people’ composed retroactively from the present. This tendency seems to provide a kind of obscene enjoyment, most apparent in reactionary acts of violence against their presumed “enemies”. It would however seem more fitting for left populism to present its opposition through the reverse ideology. That is, while the Right enjoys the prospect of the “return to innocence”, the left would find enjoyment in the very idea of lack itself, or the implied indeterminacy. While Zizek has been critical of populism in general, he has also been critical of the enjoyment taken in self-castrated liberal moderation. I wonder if within left populism it is possible we might enjoy again, in the very surplus that appears within the gap. This surplus, representing perhaps the un-actualized potential of struggle, which is in itself “enjoyable” as a process by which a “thing” is not a fixed object but rather the process of becoming.

In reference to Lacan’s ‘objet petite a’, which Laclau himself identifies with his conception of ‘populism’, Zizek writes in Less Than Nothing;

…far from lack being reducible to the lack of an object, the object itself is a spectral positivization of a lack. And one has to extrapolate this mechanism into the very (pre-) ontological foundation of all being: the primordial gesture of creation is not that of an excessive giving, of assertion, but a negative gesture of withdrawal, of subtracting, which alone opens up the space for the creation of positive entities.

Zizek continues to explain that in order to arrive at something, one must subtract from nothing its very “nothing-ness”. This is to say, one must posit the primordial pre-ontological Abyss as nothing, so that against the background of nothing, something can appear.

The ontology presented by Zizek in Less Than Nothing bears a steady resemblance to Kabbalist cosmology as expressed by the famous mystic Issac Luria. The concept of tzimtzum is identified as the necessary process of contraction undergone by G-d (“Ein Sof”) in the creation of the universe. This split in the infinite wholeness of Ein Sof was to make room for creation according to Kabbala. The creation story describes how Ein Sof attempted to fill the empty vessel it had created with its endless light and shattered the vessel, destabilizing the material reality in which humans exist. Moreover, the necessity of creation came from Ein Sof’s will to know itself. Therefore, humanity has become a part of this discovery, a project of putting the broken pieces together. In a similar way, one might argue that with the death of Christ, so too does the Holy Spirit in Christianity stand for the people on a quest to build a new society (‘the Kingdom of God’).

Zizek interprets Christian motifs, such as the divine Trinity and Christ’s “doubt” on the Cross, as indications that in Christianity, the “broken vessel” is not only the created reality which fell from G-d and lost its perfection, but also the ultimate broken vessel is G-d Himself. Rather than attempt to recollect the pieces of the fractured vessel, in this radical interpretation of Christianity, humanity, likened to the ‘image of G-d”, is expected to reflect G-d’s very fractured nature, as the truth of God’s image. It is reminiscent of what G.K. Chesterton calls “… the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces.”

Chesterton continues to remark about how G-d rejoices in the very separation of the universe. Perhaps in Chesterton’s own celebratory remarks, we discover a hint of a kind of enjoyment in lack.

Furthering this understanding of open ontology, in Organs Without a Body Zizek argues again through Hegel, that the very nature of reality is incomplete. Therefore, our supposed limitations in understanding reality are only demonstrations of realities ever incompleteness. As Zizek puts it;

When we try to establish the function of some organ in an animal, we are thereby repeating the “objective” process itself through which the animal “invented” this organ as the solution of some problem. Our process of approaching constituted objective reality repeats the virtual process of Becoming of this reality itself. The fact that we cannot ever “fully know” reality is thus not a sign of the limitation of our knowledge, but the sign that reality itself is “incomplete,” open, an actualization of the underlying virtual process of Becoming.

In approaching populism, Laclau, (like Zizek) is hesitant to try and positivize the content which defines the collective. In the place of this essence, Laclau presents the gap itself, or un- totalized mass. However, within the ‘concrete’ approach there is at least a potential for a temporary totalization. Of course such totalization is only the moment when the particular undermines the assumed totality, and in doing so universalizes the content of the exception. This process is however historical, and therefore a continuous development. In this same manner, reality is presented as an incomplete project. This is why Zizek approaches communism in such an open manner. The landscape is constantly shifting, so Marx’s analysis from the eighteen- hundreds is no longer fully relevant. This is the benefit of open ontology for future collectives.

Again to refer back to the tension between Zizek and Laclau over universality and its connection to theological negation, the individual subject “becomes” precisely at loss. The ontologically incomplete nature of reality would preclude any possibility of an eternal universality. One must wonder then if the core of the “universal” subject exists precisely where the vessel becomes “fractured”. An open ontology allows for that universal dimension to be a continued process, whereby new antagonisms, and fractures can be revealed. Proletariat subjectivity is a process of becoming, and every moment where the universal is revealed, it is temporal, to be broken again before reappearing. This is the anti-reactionary logic of communism. Rather than a static set of rigid rules and regulations, communism, as a ‘concrete universal’, is there to be reinvented adaptively. Where there is a social antagonism at conflict with our continued ‘enlightenment project’ of liberty and egalitarianism, communism is there to reveal such limitations. The goal of the left, therefore is not simply to include the excluded, as would be the case within standard liberal-democracy, but rather to transform the system which profits from and proliferates social exclusion. The prospect of left populism appears to represent the very prerequisite to such social transformation, and if so, appears a project worth revisiting.

Share
Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply