§0. Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger’s The Populist Moment:The Left After the Great Recession recounts the left populist mobilizations and party politics in the Global North after the financial crisis of 2008. They analyze five cases: Greece and Syriza, Spain and Podemos, France and La France Insoumise, the United Kingdom and Jeremy Corbyn’ leadership in the Labour Party, and the United States and the Bernie Sanders campaign.
§1. They refer to the classical definition of populism as class alliance of “the people” in opposition to an “elite”. Historically this would entail working class joining with the peasantry as well as some middle class segments. In the 2008 financial crisis, the austerity measures accompanying bank bailouts caused a rapid proletarianization of many people who expected to have comfortable middle class lives, which resulted in such a populist moment.
Each case had their specific starting points as well their very different end points: Pasokification and neutralization in the case of Syriza, stagnation and normalization in the case of Podemos, reconfiguration of the institutional left in France, disappearence of the Corbyn current in the UK, and splintering in the Democrat Party in the US. (All of these are according to the authors.) Besides these differences, there are also commonalities in their contexts, such as the decline of democratic intermediary organizations between the people and the state apparatus.
§2. The Populist Moment reflects on the class composition of these movements but it also has another aspect that interacts with some of the tools we analyzed in All In: movement capabilities.
The main thread of The Populist Moment is to analyze the institutional capabilities of the movements: how existing structures responded, what new structures appeared, and how those structures interacted with the class and with the movement. I’d like to share some of my reflections on this reading.
§3. Emergence of new institutional actors: Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn worked within existing political parties and had credible political backgrounds. Syriza and La France Insoumise had some initial structure, which got a substantial qualitative transformation as their contexts changed rapidly. Podemos was a novelty for the Spanish party landscape.
§4. Emergence of new institutional capability: In almost all cases, they represented their party projects as part of a mass movement and wrote up detailed policy proposals. This was the period in which we saw serious public debate on Green New Deals, the Eurozone, debt management and the financial sector. This increased institutional capability is beyond the parties themselves and had fruitful impact on the movement ecology.
§5. Limits to institutional capability: Also in almost all cases, the lack of underlying organizations that could consolidate the strategy resulted in a few individual leaders being highlighted (with their corresponding charisma as well as personal vulnerabilities).
§6. Institutional capability of which movement?: In All In, we refer to three models of transformation: ruptural, inside-the-system and outside-the-system. We then analyze movement capabilities within each model of transformation. It is fair to say that all these political parties offered institutional capability for inside-the-system approach.
This is also partly due to the underlying movements they wanted to represent. I would argue that, among the five cases, perhaps Greece had a ruptural potential. The other four countries did not have mass mobilizations with insurrectionary aspirations, but in Greece there was, at least to some significant degree, a revolutionary situation. (In contrast, Jeremy Corbyn did not have any substantial movement behind him and his appearance as alternative became the main source mobilization itself.)
Syriza, like its sister organizations, did not have such a perspective and therefore never invested in a scenario outside of the Eurozone framework. They were being pushed to a ruptural conjuncture by the inflexible attitude of the Euro Group, which they refused. They then had to double down and their base followed through. In contrast, Bernie Sanders’ socialdemocratic reform proposals were perceived as ruptural in the US context.
§7. As we enter deeper structural crises with climate collapse and the accompanying social and political conflicts, it is worth reflecting on how to build institutional capability for a ruptural movement. For the Global North, although the authors never refer to a ruptural scenario or vision, The Populist Momentum still offers lessons, observations and insights on the question of institutional capability.
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Sinan Eden is a co-author of All In.
N.B. These “interaction” articles are book readings with specific angles. We have no intention of summarizing or reviewing the books. Rather, we are exploring interactions between the books’ content (main arguments or minor observations) and the movement-level strategy and organization framework presented in All In.
