Class struggle and populism : ties, transfigurations, tensions.

Abstract

The article analyzes the complex and problematic relationship between populist insurgency and the return of the class struggle. The ‘populist moment’ is interpreted as a counter-movement with respect to the disruptive social results of the thirty-year period of neo-liberal globalization and as an obligatory passage, in the current historical conjuncture, to reactivate the possibility of a distributive conflict in a practicable political space, that of the National State. After the initial onset, however, populism is structurally inadequate, due to its very logic of functioning, to give form to a class struggle anchored in the pluralism of social interests and to resist the risk of reactionary drifts and colonization from above by the dominant economic forces.