Unlock Now For A Left Populism Designed By Chantal Mouffe Distributed As Interactive EBook

a Left Populism VERSO,is a MUST READ for a number of reasons, I will also add it to the carefully curated mandatory induction reading list for new boyfriends, I must investigate this thought some more but I really feel like there is an increasing trend to make socialist political theory more accessible and relevant to actually existing struggles, kind of a populism within the mostly academic discourse.
The book is very short, only aboutpages, and breaks down Mouffes earlier and theory heavy work into a few key thoughts and proposed consequences for a left populism.
For those who are familiar with Gramsci and postMarxism this is a neat summary and recap of the story since Mouffes and her late husband LaclauspostMarxist manifesto Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.
Then, in, they argued that Marxists need to accommodate theoretically and politically the demands made by the new movements, moving beyond an economistic and class essentializing understanding of social relations towards building chains of equivalence between the various emancipatory struggles.
In thes ands, neoliberal hegemony subverted the progressive potential of the new movements, as reflected in liberal feminism, rainbow capitalism, green growth.
Theglobal financial crisis brought about an ongoing crisis in and of neoliberal hegemony and the model of liberal democracy wedded to the liberal economy which opened a populist moment both for the right and the left the right on the basis of an authoritarian and nationalist neoliberalism rather than an alternative to neoliberalism itself.
Interestingly, the only remaining social force fighting for the neoliberal hegemony status quo is the centreleft/social democracy, The left populism, which we are currently seeing especially in the US where there is no social democratic tradition and the undemocratic twoparty state which structurally enables populism, is precisely the chain of equivalence between the various struggles minimum wage, immigration, rent control, racism under the populist antagonism of the people versus the oligarchy.
Contrary to social democracys postpolitical and postdemocratic technocratic fixes to social ills eg Obamas market based health insurance or silicon valleys universal basic income or digital or green capitalism the left populism aims to repoliticize and redemocratize politics and the economy through disarticulating liberal democracy from the liberal economy and the free market.
Z jednej strony ciekawa analiza, z drugiej jednak propozycje są tak ogólne, a użyty język tak zawiły, że ciężko się przez to brnie.
Przeszkadzało mi też ciągłe nawiązywanie do poprzednich prac autorki, które były wspominane wielokrotnie, co wybijało mnie z rytmu czytania.
Można przeczytać, ale nie czuję, żeby wniosła wiele do mojego życia, For a Left Populism, by Chantal Mouffe, is an interesting little book looking at the modern Populist moment in Western democracies and looking at ways for the Left to engage in these movements.
Currently, Populism is a loaded term, and used as a slur for any politician who engages with the underprivileged masses often seen as an exploitative term ie.
a charlatan politician. It is also overwhelmingly associated with the Right, and sometimes takes as a synonym or complimentary term for nationalism, These assumptions are false, and are often directed by members of the Left, This shows, according to the author, the issues the Left have with engaging with lower class voters, who are disenfranchised with the Left's acceptance of Neoliberal hegemony and movement toward consensus and centrist politics.


Mouffe goes through the history of this change, as the Left in most Western democracies bowed to the inevitability of Neoliberlism, especially of the ilk of Thatcher.
Mouffe looks to this tradition as a way to engage voters who are tired of picking between two parties with little that differentiates them.
The author posits that these competing elites may have wild and discourse heavy election campaigns, but at the end of the day, govern and make decisions using the same ideologies, and benefiting big business and the wealthy at the expense of the middle and lower classes.
This is certainly the case in Canada, where the Liberal Party and Conservative Party, the two parties that have governed Canada since independence, often run similar platforms, and interact with the citizenry in similar ways.
Mouffe uses Western Europe as an example, so this issue is certainly prevalent in Western democracies,

Mouffe argues for the creation of a unified message to the left, uniting the interests of the working class, LGBTQ community, advocates for women's rights, antiracists, and those of the lower and middle class.
In reality, these groups are all historically oppressed peoples, but in recent years the Right has been able to control the narrative for the middle and lower classes of society.
They have done so by appealing to economic needs, and fears of joblessness, poverty, and security all things that are compounded by issues within Neoliberal thought itself.
This is an obvious thesis, but Moufe has a succinct argument that we need to ensure as much of society is democratized as possible, without moving into the sphere of revolutionary democracy.
Instead, a more radical democracy should be created, within the sphere of Liberalism, that encourages citizens to participate in institutions, all with the goal of removing power from the elite, and ensuring it remains squarely within the.
framework of a participatory democracy, Mouffe does not argue against representative democracy per se
All in all, a fascinating little read on political theory, where the author argues that the Right are monopolizing the political narrative, and the existing left are intellectually stagnant.
The left needs to reorganize, reenergize, and continue to promote a society where discourse is allowed, and the freedoms and liberties of all are prioritized.
Recommended for those interested in the left, and those looking for an interesting political theory read, I made hard work out of this but it's a fairly readable engaging book,

It might have been possible to get carried away with it inbut even at this end of the Corbyn and Syriza projects it has something useful to say about the benefit, and possibly the necessity to construct left populist arguments.


I have mentioned some of the failed great hopes of recent left electoralism but I think the arguments can also apply to a wider range of political campaigns and ideologies.
Przegadane i dość puste, a tam gdzie takie nie jest, nie zostałem zbytnio przekonany, Niemniej ważny to temat, A hegemonic formation is a configuration of social practices of different natures: economic, cultural, political, and juridical, whose articulation is secured around some key symbolic signifiers which shape the common sense and provide the normative framework of a given society.
The objective of the hegemonic struggle consists in disarticulating the sedimented practices of an existing formation and, through the transformation of these practices and the instauration of new ones, establishing the nodal points of a new hegemonic social formation.
This process comports as a necessary step with the rearticulation of the hegemonic signifiers and their mode of institutionalization, Clearly articulating democracy with equal rights, social appropriation of the means of production and popular sovereignty will command a very different politics and inform different socioeconomic practices than when democracy was articulated with the free market, private property and unfettered individualism.
”

Now we need to consider a question that I take to be crucial for envisaging the construction of a people: the decisive role played by affects in the constitution of political identities.
The lack of understanding of the affective dimension in the processes of identification is, in my view, one of the main reasons for which the left, locked in a rationalist framework, is unable to grasp the dynamics of politics.
This rationalism is no doubt at the origin of the stubborn refusal of so many left theorists to accept the teachings of psychoanalysis.
”

Freud shows that, far from being organized around the transparency of an ego, personality is structured on a number of levels that lie outside of the consciousness and rationality of the agents.
He therefore obliges us to abandon one of the key tenets of rationalist philosophy the category of the subject as a rational, transparent entity able to confer a homogeneous meaning on the totality of her conduct and to accept that individuals are mere referential identities, resulting from the articulation between localized subject positions.
The claim of psychoanalysis that there are no essential identities but only forms of identification is at the centre of the antiessentialist approach that stipulates that the history of the subject is the history of her identifications and that there is no concealed identity to be rescued beyond the latter.
” I finished this wonderfully provocative and learned short book a couple of months ago, but kept putting off reviewing it because I wanted to write a longer piece which made use of what it claimed about populism, and how those arguments related to other concerns about different types of radical localist politics.
I'm still going to write that piece, but I need to get this up before the end of the year, so hear it is: Mouffe's extended monograph on "left populism" is, I think, pretty essential for situating the pressures which democracy currently faces in a fully accurate context.


Mouffe's argument is a complex one, but never dense, or at least so I thought, Her thesis is built upon the Gramscian assertion that any kind of social order invariablyand necessarilyintroduces an element of the hegemonic, Critics of liberal democracy like Carl Schmitt, on Mouffe's reading, understood that well, as have many conservative politicians who have instinctively recognized, and attacked from a "populist" direction, the hegemonic elements of liberalism, which many on the left, for class or cultural reasons, floundered in their defense of.
The "left populism" she calls for necessitates a recognition of the hegemonic, or the social totality, or any political construct, This means that liberal democracy will always struggle, since liberalism's social totality is a universalism natural rights, individual equality, etc, whereas democracy's social totality is always particular any demos must be selfidentifiable as such"we the people"and thus cannot really be universal.
Mouffe does not believe that such means that leftists, in constructing a new left populist hegemonic, should dismiss with liberalism on the contrary, she thinks that tension is valuable, not the least reason for which being that she is not a revolutionary.


In my favorite part of her argument, she breaks down the left defined as those looking to extend egalitarian empowerment into not just political but also economic and social realms she is very much with Erik

Olin Wright in seeing socialism as most fundamentally a democratization and equalization of society into three categories: "pure reformism," which accepts and simply seeks to move in a democratic and egalitarian direction both liberal democracy and the neoliberal hegemonic social formation "radical reformism," which accepts the legitimacy of the former but wants to overthrow the latter and "revolutionary politics," which rejects both.
Mouffe is clearly in the social democratic/democratic socialist, and thus the second, camp rather than embracing an anarchism or communism which would see the state withering away, she follows the Gramscian line of seeking the radical democratization of the state.
What's the difference The difference is that the liberal institutions of the modern constitutional state, even if radically democratized, would still allow for a partisan management of the antagonisms that democratic particularism will unavoidably bring about.


Ultimately then, Mouffe invitation to develop a left populism is a call for a certain kind of pluralistic socialism, one in which the libidinal attachments which will characterize particular regional or national communities Mouffe allows that direct local democratic decisionmaking or "commonsthinking" should have a place, but is liberal enough to be suspicious of too much localization will be respected.
She doesn't get into what would such involve, and that is a flaw in her argument, but she does at least admit that advocates of left populism need to be patriots in the conventional sense, which also means that such advocates cannot automatically exclude the bourgeoisie which the liberal democratic totality will always create, in favor of the a theory that legitimates only the poor and working class.
So, a very radical conceptualization of the current agenda of the left, but one that is aiming solely at establishing "a new hegemonic formulation within the liberal democratic framework.
" A liberal pluralistic democratic socialism As much as I have become much more sympathetic to various forms of localism, anarchism, and mututalism of late, it's still better than most alternatives, I think.
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