The Abuse of the Concept of “Populism”

 



        Prabhat Patnaik



ALL regimes based on class antagonism require a discourse to legitimise
class oppression and this discourse in turn requires a vocabulary of its
own. The neoliberal regime too has developed its own discourse and
vocabulary and a key concept in this vocabulary is “populism”. This
concept is given great currency by the media, which is peopled by
members drawn from the upper middle class who have been major
beneficiaries of the neo-liberal regime and have therefore developed a
vested interest in its continuation. So pervasive is the reach of this
concept that even well-meaning and progressive members of the literati
have fallen victim to its abuse and employ the term with the pejorative
connotation typically imparted to it by the corporate-owned media.

The term “populism” of course is not an invention of the neo-liberal
intelligentsia. It has been used much earlier but with a meaning very
different from what is given to it now. The Russian Narodniks for
instance were called “populists” by Russian Marxists, including Lenin,
but the term was used to denote the fact that the Narodniks did not make
class distinctions within the mass that they indiscriminately called the
“people”. The idea was not to discredit the use of the term “people”,
for Lenin himself used the term “working people” to denote workers and
peasants; it was to avoid the obliteration of distinctions among them
which needed to be /theoretically /drawn. Under neo-liberalism, however,
the term is used to refer to any appeal made to any segment of the
working people, whether to mobilize them on grounds of religious
chauvinism or by making fiscal transfers to them.

The term “populism” in its current use, therefore, covers both fascist
and semi-fascist appeals to the people on issues that deliberately
camouflage their oppression, as well as all attempts to secure some
gains for them to alleviate their oppression. The former is sometimes
called “Right-wing populism” while the latter is called “Left-wing
populism”. The ideological obfuscation is obvious here: not only is
there no class perspective behind the use of the term, but by treating
both “Left-wing” and “Right-wing” populism on a par as unwholesome
tendencies, there is a privileging of the “middle”, i.e., a liberal
bourgeois position as the only “sensible” one. A concept used in a
rigorous theoretical critique with regard to the cognition of a mass
entity, as was the case with the Russian Marxists, has now been
converted into an apotheosis of the liberal bourgeois position.

This is not just a case of obfuscation; it is positively misleading as
well. The hallmark of the fascist, neo-fascist and semi-fascist
positions that are labelled “Right-wing” populism is that they have
nothing to offer by way of /economic benefits/ to the masses. By
contrast, what is called “Left-wing” populism demands welfare state
measures, and, at the very least, economic transfers to the people; by
putting the two on a par and debunking “populism” in general, the
dominant discourse essentially debunks /all economic transfers to the
people./ It, therefore, advances a position according to which any
economic concessions made to the people must be eschewed and the
government’s focus must be entirely on the growth of the GDP; since
transfers to the people eat into resources that could have been used for
making investments which would have accelerated growth, such transfers
are a waste, made under duress only because of electoral compulsions,
but otherwise utterly unwise. An extension of this logic is the argument
that any attempt on the part of the government to reduce economic
inequality in society is also unwise.

This discourse is perfectly in keeping with a neo-liberal regime. Before
it was introduced, nobody would have been critical if an agenda of
reducing inequality and eliminating poverty had been advanced. In fact,
Indira Gandhi won an election on the slogan of /Garibi Hatao/; of
course, she did not do it, but the criticism against her was not that
she advanced the slogan but that she did not do it. Amartya Sen had
argued long ago that devoting just 5 per cent of GDP would eliminate
poverty in India and that the country should do it by foregoing total
consumption by an amount equal to just one year’s GDP growth (which was
then about 5 per cent per annum). Reduction in inequality and the
elimination of poverty were thus considered primary tasks before the
economy during the /dirigiste /period; but not so now, even though there
has been a massive increase in income and wealth inequality under the
neo-liberal regime. And recourse to the pejorative use of the term
“populism” is a means of debunking all such demands for greater
egalitarianism, an ideological weapon in the hands of corporate capital
and the burgeoning upper middle class to beat down all proposals for
economic transfers to the poor.

Prioritising economic growth has always been a feature of bourgeois
economics, but with a difference. Adam Smith had argued for the removal
of state interference that, he believed, stood in the way of economic
growth, even though he knew perfectly well that the benefits of this
growth would not come to the working class. In his view an increase in
the wealth of the nation was an important goal /per se/; where he
differed from his predecessors was in arguing that this wealth consisted
not in the acquisition of gold and silver but in the accumulation of
capital stock that could be used for producing goods. David Ricardo too
was all for the accumulation of capital stock and hence for the growth
of output, even though he knew that there was a limit to such
accumulation. (Indeed, Karl Marx had lauded Ricardo for advocating
accumulation even though the latter believed that such accumulation
would run into a/cul-de-sac/ when what was called a stationary state was
reached). Ricardo also believed that the working class would not be
benefitted by such accumulation.

The reason why both Smith and Ricardo thought that the working class
would not be benefitted by such accumulation is because any improvement
in its condition tended to bring forth an increase in its population.
The only way that workers could benefit from capital accumulation,
therefore, was if they restricted their propensity to procreate. But
that was a matter that they alone could influence, though the classical
economists were in favour of their becoming better off through
restricting their population growth. The classical advocacy of growth
however was independent of whether workers benefitted from it.

The current advocacy of growth is different. Nobody today believes that
the conditions of the working people are miserable because they
procreate too much; nobody believes that their conditions cannot be
improved through the efforts of the State by bringing about income
transfers in their favour. And yet such transfers are sought to be
avoided by neo-liberal bourgeois economists on the grounds that they
would jeopardise economic growth. The classical advocacy of growth is
taken over by modern neo-liberals, but without the classical economists’
sympathy for the working class. Thus, the bourgeoisie’s class animosity
against the working class is now reflected in the attitudes of the
economists as well.

The emphasis on growth to the exclusion of economic transfers to the
poor, which are sneeringly labelled as “populist measures”, is doubly
offensive to the poor. On the one hand it prevents an improvement in
their living standard that could have been achieved if the transfers had
taken place; on the other hand, the quest for growth invariably involves
a number of projects that entail the ousting of peasants and labourers
from the land that they cultivate, and of people at large from their
habitats, which leaves them even worse off than they were to start with.
True, employment is created on such projects and also in downstream
activities created by them; but the displaced are scarcely the
beneficiaries from such employment generation, and even the employment
that is created often falls short of the employment that is destroyed.
And rehabilitation of the displaced people that is promised when the
project is undertaken is scarcely ever realised. If growth was being
effected under the aegis of collectives of the people themselves,
through for instance peasant collectives themselves starting industrial
projects, then matters would be different; but that is not the way that
growth occurs under capitalism.

The debunking of welfare state measures by referring to them
pejoratively as “populist”, and emphasising GDP growth exclusively as
the objective of state policy, are cynically anti-people; but that is
the hallmark of neo-liberalism.

Em
PEOPLES DEMOCRACY
https://peoplesdemocracy.in/2023/0122_pd/abuse-concept-%E2%80%9Cpopulism%E2%80%9D
22/1/2023