Populist reason and bourgeois rationalism

The populist reason of Podemos (Pablo Iglesias) has burst onto the political agenda.

I am writing this article in connection with the recently published "What is populism?" by comrade Albert Borràs.

If Albert has chosen an analytical, descriptive and explanatory perspective of the concept of populism, I will choose a political perspective of it.

Populist reason bursts into Spain

Very much in vogue in the mass media and in the political and business elites of our country to try to discredit Podemos, the reviled populism seems to be back on the agenda. Much has been said about extreme right-wing populism in Europe and now it seems that the political winds of left-wing populism from Latin America are blowing strongly in our territory.

Why is populism so much criticized?

As Albert explains, it is often equated with demagogy (gaining political support through favors to the people) but it has, evidently, a very different component. There is something common to extreme right-wing and extreme left-wing populism that is often overlooked: both are born out of the political passions of the "people". are born of the political passions of the "people".”. 

What have the passions traditionally opposed? Reason, and, more specifically, the scientific and bourgeois reason born of the French Enlightenment. The passion/reason or rationality versus irrationality debate has long since been overcome but we still suffer its impacts. If populism is so much criticized by the financial and political elites of our country, it is because of a long-standing structure of thought: passions would be the "lowest" of human beings and reason would be the highest, almost the very essence of the human condition, that which would distinguish us from the "beasts", from animals.

For me, one of the most abject essays that clearly reflects this thought is Mass Psychology by Le Bon. The masses have always been assimilated to irrationality and low political passions. This has always been opposed by an elite of privileged people, an elite of people who will position themselves above the crowd and who will believe themselves to be the possessors of Truth and Reason, always distant and necessarily independent of the multitudes. And who, therefore, set themselves up as our sovereigns and as our rulers (and I add, to control us).

When we read and interpret society according to the classic and modern scheme of an uneducated, passionate people, under against/opposed to a rational, "meritocratic", "meritocratic", "meritocratic", "meritocratic", "meritocratic" elite. rational, "meritocratic" elite, separate from the multitudes and separated from the multitudes, we find ourselves with the hard core of the debate we are having right now around populisms. It is the very scheme of modern sovereignty that we also find in the analyses of our own psyche (the will that our "conscience", our "rational" conscience be sovereign over the body, over our decisions, over our "instincts" which it would oppose).

What is so fascinating about the National Front and why is it so strong among the French working classes?

The conventional argument to explain these phenomena is: "simple and miraculous solutions are offered to complex problems". We have to shy away from this type of explanation for two reasons which, in my opinion, reinforce the existing structure of domination.

First reasonFirst reason: By affirming that people are convinced by simple things in the face of complex problems, we are implicitly affirming that people are imbeciles and that they are not capable, on their own, of understanding this world and what they themselves suffer. That is, you are saying that you, as a good enlightened person, are smarter than the rest and that we should leave the political decision space to technocrats who would understand the complexity of our world. This is very classic right-wing paternalism, which was used as an argument to prohibit the poor, African-Americans, women and children from voting during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

Second reasonWhen conventional wisdom asserts that "to complicated problems, simple solutions" it is asserting its own framework of analysis rather than the idea it is conveying. This framework remains that of bourgeois rationality: I make an observation of reality, me being an external element to it, and I can classify, describe, certain problems. This reproduces the illusory position of the observer who observes without influencing the process itself (an idea that quantum physics has already disproved).

People suffer in our flesh the effects and oppressions of this system. Nobody has to come and tell us how or how much we are oppressed, it is something we already know. If the National Front has won an election it is not because it offers solutions, it has to do with a different political rationality that comes from the demos itself, from the people themselves, even if in this case it has a character of social decomposition. Marine Le Pen does something that other politicians are not used to: she speaks with passion. She speaks as many of us speak in our streets and neighborhoods. She is aggressive. Many people of the popular classes can identify with her because she uses the same expressions, the same passionate force that already exists in the streets. This is neither bad nor good per seThe idea is to fight against bourgeois rationalism, that false game of interests and university-educated and well-domesticated people who would sit around a table to discuss the evils of the world while sipping their cups of coffee or hot tea.

Whatever the social background of Marine Le Pen is indifferent, she speaks and speaks as one speaks in the popular classes, while generating a new framework of oppression. And for that reason she is a danger, for that reason she has strength and for those reasons in France they are going to have a huge problem. Few people, and even less in the political sphere, seem to recognize that Le Pen has the merit of having created a terrifying bond with the popular, middle and upper classes of France. She is always attacked from a position of liberal elitism instead of recognizing her as an adversary, as a party and ideas that are on an equal footing. We must not put ourselves hierarchically or intellectually above Marine, because we fall back into the game and the terrain of liberal parliamentarism, we must fight her from the popular and oppressed classes. It is a real threat, a threat that resides in the sad passions (in the Spinozist sense) of the multitude.

Podemos and populist rationality

Podemos, for its part, goes much further than that. It does not make a passionate exaltation of the rags and of a hatred towards social minorities.. Podemos creates and realizes itself through a populist rationality, a rationality that arises from the demos, from the multitudes. If the National Front remains in the populism of the modern people -of ONE people, with ONE idea, that makes ONE decision, that is closed and limited in itself, that creates a separation between its people and the rest of the people- Podemos opens the people to become a multitude, so that there are no sovereign withdrawals, so that many decisions are made and many rationalities emerge. In addition to this, it reinforces joyful passions, generating social composition and increase of collective power.

The populism of the National Front aspires to make of the many a first state unit, pre-conflictual (pre-class struggle constitutive of the capitalist order). On the other hand, as Paolo Virno assures in Grammar of the multitude: "the multitude is furrowed by antagonisms, it can never be a unity. The many subsist as many without aspiring to state unity".

Channeling and trying to confine the passions of the multitudes to a game of liberal and bureaucratic interests is a crude attempt by the elites to manage and subjugate us with the subterfuge of bourgeois Reason (Cartesian, illuminist, elitist). So that everything can become identifiable and can be fixed, so that everything falls under their rules, so that they are the ones who determine those rules and so that those who can use them without changing them are the ones who continue to decide from above how to govern us. It is an actualization of the Platonic Idea. Reason and passion are always chained and juxtaposed.

The problem is never what is rational or what is irrational but who determines what is rational or irrational and in view of what objectives or in view of justifying what social structure..

We, the citizens, the multitudes, generate political reason from below, a new "reason" far from the usual mechanisms of libidinal repression. We separate ourselves from the old axes: reason/passion, rational/irrational, left/right. We want to constitute a new world of the commons and therefore we also carry out and continue the pertinent critique of those structures that arbitrarily erect themselves above us, be they kings and absolute monarchies that were realized by divine reason, or by a hierarchical positioning of a certain type of Reason, of pure reason that imposes a false dichotomy between reason and passion but that in truth continues to be its bourgeois reason against our reason of the people, of the multitudes.