5. A Critique of Left-Wing Populism: Critical Materialist and Social-Psychological Perspectives

More than one decade after the major crisis of the capitalist world-economy in 2007/2008, the political landscape in many nation-states has witnessed a significant shift to the right, an increasing attraction to authoritarian forms of conflict resolution and paranoid ideologies such as racism and antisemitism. In a situation of weakness, stagnation, and confusion about the elements, origins, and repercussions of this shift, parts of the political and academic left have begun to fundamentally reconsider the coordinates of their political strategies and visions. It is especially the project of left-wing populism which has gained prominence as a new intellectual and political approach. Its most influential theoretical justification can undoubtedly be found in the collaborative work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The most effective way to counter the rise of right-wing populism, they argue, is to develop an alternative notion of “the people” rather than rejecting it entirely. More specifically, they suggest to re-orientate the notion of “the enemy” away from migrants and people of color and toward what they call “the elite” or “the oligarchy”. In its left-wing form, they conclude, populism represents the emancipatory potential of democratic politics.

Laclau and Mouffe’s embrace of the “populist moment” has been widely criticized. While Marxist critics focus on the insufficiencies of their socio-economic analysis, (left-)liberal critics put a stronger emphasis on the authoritarian, anti-pluralistic, and anti-liberal implications of both left-wing and right-wing populisms. However, there is still a lack of a critical analysis of both the socio-historical conditions and the political-ideological consequences of the left-wing populist dichotomy between “the people” and “the elite”. It is such a comprehensive approach which this paper sets out to develop. Drawing on the materialist critical theory and social psychology developed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, the paper interrogates the contradictory promises and regressive entanglements of the post-Marxist attempt to rehabilitate ‘the people’. Most notably, it is argued that Laclau and Mouffe’s model of left-wing populism is based on a Manichaean, personalized world-view that fails to take into account the impersonal, anonymous aspects of modern, capitalist relations of domination and coercion, as well an ahistorical notion of affect which, instead of strengthening processes of critical (self-)reflection, reinforces the unconscious experience of suffering and dissatisfaction and thus rationalizes the fertile ground for collective aggression against imagined “others”. Against this background, the paper concludes that left-wing populism fails to provide a sustainable alternative to the contemporary rise of right-wing movements.