从雅各宾的缺陷到变革性民粹主义:左翼民粹主义与欧洲社会民主的遗产

IF 1.2 Q3 POLITICAL SCIENCE
Kolja Möller
{"title":"从雅各宾的缺陷到变革性民粹主义:左翼民粹主义与欧洲社会民主的遗产","authors":"Kolja Möller","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12698","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>In the established landscape of research in the social sciences, populism is seen as a type of politics that chiefly revolves around the distinction between the “people” and the “elite”.<sup>1</sup> Within this, different forms of populism can be distinguished—ranging from right-wing and authoritarian to liberal-centrist and religious varieties. In the camp of the political left, populism is often cast as essentially a democratic endeavor. Drawing on a conception of inclusive peoplehood, which is not opposed to other vulnerable social groups “below” but solely to the “elite above”, many authors emphasize that it is crucial to pursue a populist strategy in order to overcome existing hegemonies, democratic deficits, ossifications, and class-rule (Grattan, <span>2016</span>; Howse, <span>2019</span>; Kempf, <span>2020</span>; McCormick, <span>2001</span>; Mouffe, <span>2018</span>). Throughout the past few decades, the landscape of research on left populism has grown considerably. Various studies have investigated the history of anti-establishment popular movements of the 19th century, such as the Narodniki in Russia or the American Populist Party (Canovan, <span>1981</span>; Kazin, <span>1995</span>). Further, research has also looked at how, from the 1990s, anti-neoliberal alliances in Latin America had their momentum, entered governmental office, and established a far-reaching renewal of constitutional orders (Linera, <span>2014</span>; Weyland, <span>2013</span>). And in particular, in the last decade, the rejuvenation of left politics in Europe and the United States has often relied on populist approaches (Katsambekis &amp; Kioupkiolis, <span>2019</span>).</p><p>Taking a more systematic stance, theories of radical democracy have sought to demonstrate that politics in modern societies is structured around the embodiment of the “people” as an empty signifier. From this perspective, it is not by accident that left varieties of populism can be recurrently observed; their persistence reflects that politics is, at its heart, not only concerned with policy-issues but with “constructing the people” (Laclau, <span>2014</span>). Thus, populism may not be episodic, accidental, or a specific ideology that brings the vital interests of ordinary people to the fore. Rather, it must be seen as a generalizable discursive strategy—in the words of Ernesto Laclau: the “royal road”—when it comes to the strive for political power (Laclau, <span>2005</span>, p. 67).<sup>2</sup> In recent years, a neo-Machiavellian strand of research has emerged that is not so much concerned with the discursive construction of peoplehood, instead focusing on the materiality of social power. Drawing inspiration from the political philosophy of Early Modernity and Niccolò Machiavelli's insights on the exercise of political rule, these approaches assume that societies are constantly split between the “plebian” people and the ruling elites (McCormick, <span>2001</span>; Vergara, <span>2020a</span>). Against this backdrop, populism amounts to a plebian politics that “springs from the politicization of wealth inequality in reaction to systemic corruption and the immiseration of the masses, an attempt to balance the scales of social and political power between the ruling elite and the popular sectors” (Vergara, <span>2020a</span>, p. 238).</p><p>However, the historical balance sheet of left populisms remains ambivalent. Though recurring attempts to change society through mobilizing the people against the elite can be observed, they have often revealed self-defeating dynamics:<sup>3</sup> the collapse into authoritarian government once populism is in power, the inability to account for how complex modern societies actually operate by adhering to an all-too simple people/elite binary distinction; and the arising incapacity to identify reasons for political failure and success apart from stressing that popular mobilizations played a key role (when successful) or were diluted (when unsuccessful). In the current debate on left-populism, however, a broader camp of anti-populist critiques mainly advances objections from a normative angle (Arato, <span>2016</span>; Cohen, <span>2019</span>; Urbinati, <span>2019</span>; Müller, <span>2014</span>). It is argued that populist forms of politics are, in principle, incompatible with central achievements of liberal democracy, such as pluralism, the separation of powers, or parliamentary representation. They seem to be unavoidably entangled in authoritarian politics and, therefore, in need of being rejected as a course of political action.</p><p>This article aims to move beyond the rigidified divide between appraisals and rejections of left populism by shifting the field of inquiry: instead of investigating the relation of populism and the political as such or evaluating whether populism is compatible with principles of liberal democracy, it conducts a reconstruction of discussions in the broadly conceived camp of European Social Democracy in the “long 19th century” (Hobsbawm). Thereby, it focuses on how the leading intellectuals of this political current were reflecting on the practical potentials and limitations of a politics that is centered on the popular will. As emphasized by contemporary discourse theoretical approaches to the study of populism, politics in modern societies largely revolves around the role of the people and the conflicts that surround its articulation.<sup>4</sup> Therefore, a wide range of people-centered politics can be identified—popular, populist or folky. While the article echoes the definition of populism as people-centered politics that opposes the elites, it stresses not only its inevitability but also its limitations. It scrutinizes populism's internal pitfalls and how it reacts to the contradictions and problems inherent to the structure of the given societal order. Thereby, the article aims at circumventing a transhistorical per se perspective and at a closer examination of the respective social circumstances.</p><p>The ambition is not to provide an encompassing investigation of the whole theoretical landscape of social democracy, but to look for how some of the leading intellectuals grappled with the problems of a people-centered politics in the light of practical experiences in political struggle. It will be argued that we can identify an intellectual trajectory that dealt with the question of whether a politics that is centered on the popular will as opposed to the elites is able to incite social transformation and collective learning processes or, to the contrary, thwarts them. Admittedly, one should not overlook that there are severe differences between the social democratic mass parties of the 19th century and the contemporary disorganized party landscape. However, the article encourages an investigation that overcomes the juxtaposition of left populisms and other variants of progressive politics such as social movement politics (Arato &amp; Cohen, <span>2021</span>) or class-politics (Seferiades, <span>2019</span>).</p><p>Drawing on the recent work of the historian Christina Morina, European Social Democracy is understood in the following as a broader social movement that extended from the mid-19th century to the First World War (Morina, <span>2022</span>).<sup>5</sup> It was characterized by the advent of new forms of political organization, most notably trade unions and social democratic mass parties. Despite severe internal conflicts, it was driven by a shared approach to history and society that was drawn from the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The defining feature of European Social Democracy was located in a specific mode of social inquiry. As stressed by Morina, activists and intellectuals may have engaged in controversies around a whole set of issues. They all assumed, however, that modern societies take part in the course of historical evolution and that a sound type of political action must be derived from a comprehensive inquiry that clarifies the scopes for social transformation at a given historical moment. The common denominator that constituted coherence within the movement was the assumption that societies undergo a historical development (often described as “stages”) and that a tenable conception of political action must react to the objective problems and contradictions inherent in this process. According to Morina, the “attraction lay not primarily in a vaguely suggested utopian perspective, but in the concretely demanded scientific relevance to the present. They [the leading intellectuals and activists of European Social Democracy] drew from Marx's work primarily a promise of knowledge geared to the here and now, not a belief in the future oriented only to tomorrow. For them, Marxism was actually a never-completed study of the real world […]” (Morina, <span>2017</span>, p. 16). This was the unifying thread of European Social Democracy that spread from the works of Marx and Engels to very different activists and intellectuals, such as Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Ilych Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg.<sup>6</sup> It needs to be noted that the Second International was a broad political movement. Not the least, syndicalist and anarchist ideas were prevalent in many countries and the theories of Marx and Engels were not the only intellectual resources available at the end of the 19th century.<sup>7</sup> However, if it comes to reconstruct the overall mindset that ultimately coined the characteristic controversies within the European labor movement, the “invention of Marxism” (Morina) played a crucial role.</p><p>This article reconstructs how this political movement dealt with the potentials and short-comings of populist approaches: Section 2 demonstrates that, initially, the young Marx and Engels of the 1840s and 1850s took a skeptical stance on people-centered politics. Quarrelling with the insurrectionist movements of their time, they identified Jacobin flaws that tended to construct considerable hurdles for achieving social transformation. In contrast to this critique, demonstrated in Section 3, European Social Democracy in both its reformist as well as its more radical ramifications returned to mobilize the popular will from the 1870s onward. Section 4 investigates how Rosa Luxemburg—an important figure of European Social Democracy—reacted to the rising constitutionalization of politics and society through a proto-populist restatement of social democracy as <i>Volksbewegung</i> around the 1900s. This transformative populism was meant to mobilize the people, but it should also overcome the Jacobin flaws by establishing collective learning processes. Section 5 presents the argument that European Social Democracy's trajectory can be seen as a learning cycle itself with regard to potentials and pitfalls of left populisms. Contemporary controversies should be sensitive to these insights and thus engage in more context-dependent inquiries.</p><p>Studies on the history of populism demonstrate that social movements have often relied on the distinction between the people and the elite: ranging from the different attempts to mobilize the <i>populus dei</i> (people of god) against the system of offices in the catholic church to the popular city revolts in early modernity, and then from bourgeois revolutions to large segments of the early labor movement, the reference to the people as opposed to the elites has always played a pivotal role (Dupuy, <span>2002</span>; Hermet, <span>2001</span>; Möller, <span>2020</span>). As the French intellectual historian Pierre Rosanvallon has argued, the 19th century was a decisive stage for the spread of a people-centered politics. National statehood was consolidated and struggles for its constitutionalization became a central site of political conflict. Questions concerning how to conceive of the popular will and how it can be represented amounted to a controversial issue: “Since 1789 the instituted and the instituant, the people moving in the streets and the people embodied in representative institutions, the diversity of social conditions and the unity of the democratic principle were opposing each other” (Rosanvallon, <span>1998</span>, p. 17). Though partial at the outset, nascent constitutional states established forms of popular legislation and reflected themselves as being authorized by the people as constituent power. Not least, the reference to the people was a point of departure within a politics that conceptualized under the category of “Bonapartism” and “Caesarism”.<sup>8</sup> The latter combined personalized leadership with plebiscitarian legitimation, as was the case in Louis Napoleon III's ascent to power that toppled France's democratic revolution in 1848 and paved the way for a “unitary combination” of popular sovereignty and monarchical authority (Groh, <span>1972</span>, p. 732).</p><p>However, the overall turn to the people was only one part of the story. From the early 19th century, a rather critical engagement with popular sovereignty could be identified as well. One could delve at this point into the classical works of the nascent discipline of sociology, but it was probably none other than G. W. F. Hegel who took, in his “Philosophy of Right,” a rather critical stance on popular sovereignty. After an inquiry into the differentiation of social spheres, such as the state, the family, and the market, he advocated for a mixed constitution that should regulate the complexities of modern society instead of subordinating them to the sovereign will of the people. Hegel suspected the latter would lead to totalizing and, ultimately, destructive effects by imposing a political voluntarism that disregarded the historical achievements within these social spheres. He qualified popular sovereignty as “one of those confused thoughts which are based on a garbled notion [Vorstellung] of the people” (Hegel, <span>1991</span>, §279, 319). He explained that, since popular sovereignty ran the risk of relying on “a formless mass,” it was likely to undermine the “internally organized whole” of the state (Hegel, <span>1991</span>, §279, 319). With this argument, Hegel set the scene for a whole strand of discussions revolving around the relationship between politics and popular sovereignty. Admittedly, it was not his defense of the state, but the skeptical remarks on achieving historical progress through a people-centered politics that were taken up by Left- and Young Hegelians and then migrated into activist circles.<sup>9</sup> From then on, attempts to change society had to deal with a fundamental problem: on the one hand, society could be characterized by a differentiation of social spheres. Against this backdrop, holistic approaches to transforming this ensemble as a whole were considered as being likely to exert destructive effects. But on the other hand, society was conceived as a totality and, hence, a transformative politics required searching for “levers” or windows of opportunity that still transcend the whole context. The main question was: to what extent is a politics that relies on the popular will a viable course of action for overcoming the societal contradictions of modern society?</p><p>Most importantly, Marx and Engels, whose works became the intellectual base for European Social Democracy, instigated a shift in evaluating popular politics. It has become a certain trend in recent political philosophy to make use of Marx's early writings in order to think about democracy and social freedom (Abensour, <span>2011</span>; Honneth, <span>2016</span>; Leipold, <span>2020</span>). However, there is no running away from the fact that Marx critically discussed political action. Indebted to Hegel, he started from the assumption that bourgeois societies are regulated by an interplay of different forms in politics (state form), law (legal form), and civil society.<sup>10</sup> Thus, Marx not only defended a bold conception of “true democracy” (Marx, <span>2010e</span>, p. 30) in his early writings, but he was also interested in providing an explanatory model for how the hegemony of the emerging capitalist economy and its ideological tenets were consolidated through a mutual coupling (and separation) of the political, the economic, and the legal sphere.</p><p>This point of departure had huge repercussions when it came to clarifying the role of political action. Given the circumstances of modern society, a people-centered politics could not be seen as the privileged site for inducing sudden social change. This led to political tensions within the circles of the early labor movement: as noted by Alan Gilbert, Marx adopted “a long-term strategic view and openly disdained immediate popularity” (Gilbert, <span>1981</span>, p. 122). His “views differed fundamentally from those of more short-sighted democrats, anarchists, or communists who demanded instant victory (Weitling, Heinzen, Bakunin, Kriege, Ruge)” (Gilbert, <span>1981</span>, p. 122). Marx remained ambivalent: on the one hand, he lauded democracy as the “solved riddle of the constitution” and defended popular sovereignty against Hegel's conception of statehood in the “Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts” (Marx, <span>2010b</span>, p. 29). On the other, he was highly critical of approaches to political action that aimed at resurrecting the Jacobin legacy of the French Revolution.<sup>11</sup></p><p>This critical attitude can be reconstructed from his critique of French insurrectionism in the 1840s.<sup>12</sup> By French insurrectionism, one has to understand the circles of revolutionaries—mainly inspired by Filippo Buonarroti's Jacobin activism in the late French Revolution and his later published book “Babeuf's Conspiracy for Equality” (Buonarroti, <span>1836</span>)—whose aim was to incite an insurrection in the city of Paris and, thereby, commence a revolutionary process “in the name of the sovereign will of the people” (Deppe, <span>1970</span>, p. 47).<sup>13</sup> A central figure was the revolutionary Auguste Blanqui who amounted to political leader in France's revolution of 1830 and from then on stuck to an insurrectionist political strategy (Draper, <span>1986</span>, 120 ff). Marx and Engels argued that the French insurrectionist circles undermined the “process of revolutionary development” because they envisaged launching “a revolution on the spur of the moment, without the conditions for a revolution” (Marx &amp; Engels, <span>2010</span>, p. 318). They qualified the insurrectionists as “alchemists of the revolution” who make use of “incendiary bombs, destructive devices of magic effect, revolts which are expected to be all the more miraculous and astonishing in effect as their basis is less rational” (Marx &amp; Engels, <span>2010</span>, p. 318). In the later introduction to Marx's writings on the class struggles in France, Engels echoed this stance; he described the insurrectionist endeavors as “rebellions in the old style” which relied on “street fighting with barricades,” but eventually turned out to be “outdated” as they did not engage with the central tenets of modern society (Engels, <span>2010</span>, p. 517).</p><p>The voluntaristic approach collapses into an epistemic flaw: the political mind erects limits that undermine the search for adequate strategies in the quest for social change. As this approach revolves around the “omnipotence of the will,” it insinuates that society is governed by the struggle between free-standing will-formations and not by the contradictions between and within social spheres.</p><p>This can be read as a critique of people-centered politics. Casting the popular will as the unity that sets everything in motion, the political mind is not able to understand the avenues of historical evolution. Society, however, does not evolve solely through political will-expression, but also through other sites of social change. Still indebted to the legacy of the late French Revolution, this popular voluntarism gives rise to a Jacobin flaw and momentous shortcuts when it comes to self-reflection and strategy choices. People-centered approaches advocate, without proper scrutiny, that the mobilization of the people is the prime strategy of choice. This assumes that any possible defeats must always be due to a weakness of popular will—either it was not mobilized intensely enough, it was not broad enough, or it was diluted. A tragic circle unfolds: the radical activists build barricades and the reformists issue reform bills, and so on, with even more enthusiasm, intensity, and will-power than before. However, they ultimately fail in many cases, not due to weakness of will but due to the avenues of social evolution. By adhering to a narrow political mind, they have deprived themselves of the means for understanding why they failed.</p><p>Through this critique, Marx rejected French insurrectionism as well as Ruge's popular appeal to the Prussian King. It may be hyperbolic to follow Shlomo Avineri at this point, who identified in Marx a “stubborn opposition, throughout his life, to a political émeute of the working class” (Avineri, <span>1969</span>, p. 194). Nevertheless, one can identify an evaluative shift in discussing people-centered politics: instead of engaging in recurrent and, in many cases, utterly failing attempts to change society through collective action centered on the popular will (be it in the guise of reformist or insurrectionary approaches), one must take interest in the more delicate question concerning how political action is able to contribute to the transformation of the systemic set-up of modern societies at all.<sup>14</sup></p><p>In this passage, the “Randglossen” brought a conception of class-based politics to the fore that opened up an alternative to insurrectionism. It was ultimately taken up by the social democratic current in the labor movement: to overcome the Jacobin flaws, it seemed more plausible to adopt an analytical perspective on capitalist societies and envisage a class-based politics centered on labor.</p><p>In sum, Marx and Engels pursued a strategic approach and defined their stances according to the concrete situation at stake. However, as it turned out, the problem of the popular will and popular sovereignty could not be bypassed by transferring it to the economic sphere and class-based politics. The more that social democratic mass parties emerged in different countries, the more the decisive conflicts again revolved around the representation of the people. Not the least, Marx partly changed his attitude toward communal ownership in his late writings and sympathized with parts of the Russian Narodnik movement (e.g. lauding Chernyshevsky, the author of the influential novel “What is to be done?,” in the foreword to the second edition of capital). As evidenced by Jones, this was mainly due to Marx's engagement with the legal regulation of communal land tenure in Germany that ultimately led him to re-evaluate Russia's economic structure (Jones, <span>2016</span>, 579 ff).<sup>18</sup></p><p>From the 1870s, European Social Democracy had its heyday. Trade unions and social democratic parties emerged which were committed to a Marxist variety of anti-capitalism and a class-based conception of politics. But Marx was too quick in his forecast of a shift from popular to class-based politics. In particular, European Social Democratic Parties strongly congregated around the struggle for democratizing the political system in the name of the people: “Between the 1870s and 1890s, country by country across the map of Europe, socialist parties were formed to give government by the people coherent, centralized, and lasting political form. Until the First World War and to a great extent since, those parties carried out the main burden of democratic advocacy in Europe” (Eley, <span>2002</span>, p. 5). The labor movement largely returned to people-centered politics and rallied around the fight for universal suffrage. As Adam Przeworski has demonstrated in his comparative study on European Social Democracy, one can observe a shift from class-based politics to popular politics: while from the 1840s, activists were trying to constitute the proletariat as a distinct force by “separating it from the masses of the people,” from the 1870s the people as mass became the central point of reference (Przeworski, <span>1987</span>, p. 54).</p><p>Bernstein assumed that the working-class could exert the “hegemony within the people” and assemble “completely different elements of the population”—up to the point that the “labor party” and the “people's party” become “identical” (Bernstein, <span>1899</span>, p. 103).</p><p>Although Lenin was still committed to a socialist strategy, he was clear about the need to reduce the complexities of society to a “single picture” and reclaim the popular will.</p><p>These underlying connections between Bernstein and Lenin raise the question concerning how to make sense of the oscillation between the critique and the return of a people-centered politics in European Social Democracy. Contrary to Marx's speculations about the transfer of meaningful political struggle from the political sphere to the economy, the political system underwent a further constitutionalization in the 19th century. Though taking part in the capitalist ensemble of social systems, the constitutional state increasingly expanded its role in making collectively binding decisions that claimed to constitute and bind society as a whole. In his encompassing analysis of the advent of modern statehood, the constitutional sociologist Chris Thornhill has demonstrated that “rudimentary features of constitutional orders” were emerging in most European states, guaranteeing “basic mechanisms of representation” as well as “clear public procedures to determine the introduction, promulgation and enforcement of laws” (Thornhill, <span>2011</span>, p. 254). To contest existing power-relations, it became—under these conditions—attractive to espouse popular sovereignty. The turn to the people was a reaction to the fact that constitutionalism was established (and, vice versa, contributed immensely to the constitutionalization of the political sphere). The existing order was contested by re-claiming the role of the people against the ruling constituted powers.</p><p>Rosa Luxemburg's proposal for strategic renewal from the 1900s on reacted to the apparent problem that surrounded this shift. As European Social Democracy increasingly took part in the constitutionalized spheres of modern society, it established internal divisions of labor ranging from the participation in communal and regional councils to the trade unions that started to bargain on institutionalized grounds with the entrepreneurs. Luxemburg was highly critical of social democracy falling prey to dispersion within—what she called—“industrial constitutionalism” (Luxemburg, <span>2008</span>, p. 134). Instead of achieving partial advances in these different spheres, she advocated a political strategy that aimed at mobilizing the masses through a holistic <i>Volksbewegung</i> (people's movement; Luxemburg, <span>1974a</span>, p. 149). Luxemburg inserted an innovative twist because she considered such collective action not simply as counter-power; as the following shows, she envisaged a transformative process that was meant to incite collective learning processes. Thereby, she stepped beyond the Jacobin flaws. Politics was not solely concerned with the imposition of will but with the discovery of latent transformative options within the social fabric. Admittedly, she threw the baby out with the bathwater, as will be argued later, because of her generalized dismissive attitude toward all types of societal differentiation. However, one can identify a considerable move from a left to a transformative populism.</p><p>At the outset, Luxemburg observed new types of social conflict in modern societies and emphasized the role of new popular movements (<i>Volksbewegungen)</i>:<sup>20</sup> “The historical hour itself calls for forms of popular movements and creates new ones, improvises hitherto unknown means of struggle, examines and enriches the arsenal of the people, unconcerned with the party's decrees” (Luxemburg, <span>1974a</span>, p. 149).<sup>21</sup> Their characteristic trait was that they were not painstakingly prepared and directed by organized party sections or trade unions. They relied on spontaneous mass activity and eventually created their own institutions of self-organization: the councils.<sup>22</sup> Luxemburg gave a systematic outline of this observation in her famous text “The Mass Strike” from 1906. Taking her cue from the strike movements in Russia and the St. Petersburg insurrection in 1905, she relocated the role of collective mass-action. The few industrial workers in Russia at that time were not the only ones to gather in the streets; rather, as Luxemburg analyzed, there was “a many-colored complex of various sections of the population, a chaos of conflicting interests” (Luxemburg, <span>2008</span>, p. 113). Luxemburg elevated this popular movement to a lesson for European Social Democracy, urging that the repertoire of politics must be expanded: the general mass strike was the decisive step toward making the envisioned social democratic transformation of capitalist societies conceivable.</p><p>By focusing its politics on either parliamentarism (political system/state constitution) or on the trade unions and corporatism in the workplaces (economic constitution), social democracy underwent a dispersion. The transformative goal was abandoned as a result of being absorbed within the respective patterns of bargaining and conflict resolution. Class conflict communicated itself not as a general struggle for a new societal whole, but either as a conflict between different parties in the political system running for public office or as a sectoral conflict between specific groups of the workforce and business interests. It dispersed into “a multitude of individual struggles”.</p><p>The mass strike, however, presented itself as a course of action that could bring the holistic ambition into play again. For Luxemburg, it should reunite the whole of social democracy into a movement-like unity: taking its cue from simple conflicts—for example, over wages, working hours, and so on—it seemed possible that a popular transgression could address foundational issues in society as a whole.<sup>23</sup> Accordingly, short-term disputes, if only properly politicized, could provoke “a spontaneous shaking and tugging at these chains” (Luxemburg, <span>2008</span>, p. 129), which would put the already constituted procedures and mechanisms of societal differentiation of capitalist societies into question. Luxemburg envisaged a “real people's movement”: “If the mass strike, or rather, mass strikes, and the mass struggle are to be successful, they must become a real people's movement, that is, the widest sections of the proletariat must be drawn into the fight” (Luxemburg, <span>2008</span>, p. 158).</p><p>Interestingly, Luxemburg turned a widely held objection against populist politics upside down. Many observers have cast the holistic standpoint that creeps within notions of the “people” as an expression of unrestrained passions for communal association and irrational impulses toward grasping the whole. But for Luxemburg, the <i>Volksbewegung</i> was the privileged site for rationally understanding how capitalism as an encompassing societal framework operates precisely <i>because</i> it is geared toward grasping the social whole. One can say that Luxemburg proceeded from a left-populism—understood as invoking the people in order to further certain political objectives and advance in the struggle for political power—to a transformative populism: it should establish a process of collective learning “from below” and overcome the Jacobin flaws that Luxemburg saw—again—resurfacing in the Russian Revolution of 1917: “The Bolsheviks are the historical heirs of the English Levelers and the French Jacobins” (Luxemburg, <span>1974c</span>, p. 342).</p><p>Thus, politics is not only about imposing political will. It is about the elaboration of an adequate world-disclosing critique and an open process of self-correction. According to Luxemburg, a laborious “thorny way of self-liberation” opens up, on which the <i>Volksbewegung</i> should be able to free itself from superfluous relations of domination in a collective learning process.</p><p>In these passages, Luxemburg argued that leadership plays an instrumental role in fostering the learning process. Full-blown leaderism, however, is detrimental to self-emancipation as it thwarts knowledge-gathering. Luxemburg hints at the possibility that the role of leaders and cadres is subverted in the process. Here, she alludes to a rather Rousseauian conception of vertical organ separation: in the course of the successful <i>Volksbewegung</i>, the cadres switch their roles from being leaders to simply becoming executive “tools” of mass-action's <i>volonté générale</i>. Admittedly, it remains unclear how this switch can be effectively achieved. However, Luxemburg refers to the possibility that the basic structures of political action themselves can be subverted. Again, the emphasis is on an open-ended process that transcends the limitations of politics—be it the heroic imposition of political will on social matter or the role of personalized leadership.</p><p>To be sure, Luxemburg often formulated in general statements leaving us with crucial challenges: what are the conditions for movements that endure rather than fail? How can we make sense of collective learning extending from the macro-social level to its micro-foundations? A restatement would, obviously, be a demanding endeavor.<sup>25</sup> This should not lead us to overlook the fact that Luxemburg's approach can be reconstructed as an advance; it can be seen as a step in a learning process itself because it drew conclusions from the critical evaluation of existing experiences ranging from Jacobin flaws and the limitations of class-politics to the dispersive tendencies in industrial constitutionalism.</p><p>As we have seen, it is possible to reconstruct the reflections that surrounded the advent of social democratic mass parties as already addressing some intricacies of left populism. European Social Democracy started as a movement that adhered to a critique of popular sovereignty. Despite these insights, it reverted back to the popular will. One should be careful to equate European Social Democracy with the recent surge of left populisms since the 2010s in Europe. But, as pointed out by numerous studies (Gerbaudo, <span>2017</span>; Katsambekis &amp; Kioupkiolis, <span>2019</span>; Kioupkiolis, <span>2016</span>), a similar tendency can be observed: Starting from social movement practices and ideologies, the turn to a people-centered politics in countries such as Spain, France, or Greece were identified.</p><p>As demonstrated in this article, the recurrence of populism should not be seen as an interplay between anti-populism and populism, but as a learning cycle. The concept of a learning cycle in the context of social movements was used by the German Historian Michael Vester in his seminal study on the advent of the British labor movement from 1792 to 1848 (Vester, <span>1975</span>, 25 ff).<sup>26</sup> In this study, Vester examined how the practical “cycles of struggle” in the emergent strikes and campaigns intersected with intellectual advances in drawing conclusions from these experiences, leading to a refinement and re-orientation of political strategy. In spite of setbacks and failures, Vester was able to identify “feedback cycles” at the intersection of political action and intellectual reflection (Vester, <span>1975</span>, p. 19).</p><p>The cycle that this article has reconstructed passed through three stages: it started with <i>stage one</i> in the mid-19th century, where Marx and Engels drew conclusions from the apparent Jacobin flaws of insurrectionary tendencies. They assumed that a sound conception of politics should take the structure of modern capitalist society into account. This led to the transferal of promising courses of political action to the economic sphere and its inherent contradictions (“class-politics”). In <i>stage two</i>, in the late-19th century, European Social Democracy returned in all its reformist and revolutionary ramifications to a politics that aimed at achieving social transformation through invoking the popular will. This was largely due to the constitutionalization of the political system that was meant to take collectively binding decisions and made it necessary to overcome class politics. In <i>stage three</i>, Luxemburg drew conclusions from the obvious problems of industrial constitutionalism by conceiving of a transformative populism: on the one hand, it should overcome the dispersive flaws through invoking a holistic <i>Volksbewegung</i> as transformative lever. On the other, it should overcome the Jacobin flaws through an emphasis on collective learning processes. The envisaged <i>Volksbewegung</i> was not only the place of counter-power, but also of exploration, the gathering of knowledge, and self-correction. Thereby, Luxemburg laid the foundations for a transformative populism: a populism that should not only further simple goals or conquer public offices, but should also transform society and the agents themselves up to the point where the characteristic contradictions and societal differentiation of modern society are transcended.</p><p>Luxemburg's take on collective learning processes was rather sketchy. It would go beyond the scope of this article to provide a comprehensive account of the relation of politics, populism, and collective learning processes. However, some short-comings of Luxemburg's account must be considered. A serious problem—which has accompanied “Luxemburgist” political approaches from the outset—was that she basically identified social differentiation as such with capitalist society and rejected it in all its ramifications. Adopting a rather vitalistic perspective, she advocated “uninhibited, effervescent life,” “creative power,” and “social instincts instead of egoism, mass initiative in place of lethargy” (Luxemburg, <span>1974c</span>, 360 ff). Accordingly, the inquiry is, from the outset, restricted because constituted procedures and mechanisms of social differentiation are seen as <i>always</i> playing out in a negative direction—be it through co-opting opposition into social systems or through obfuscating a sound perspective on the social whole. Here, Luxemburg tended to neglect the state of the art of her own social movement, namely European Social Democracy, which was concerned with a more sophisticated analysis of modern society. At least, it has always been conceded in this tradition that differentiation processes can play out in a progressive direction and that capitalism must be overcome from within the internal contradictions of social systems—and not solely through assuming a generalized oppositional “mass”-standpoint on the social whole. Luxemburg neglected the fact that there can be many non-populist moments where enthusiastic self-empowerment and holistic movement may not be conducive to bringing about social transformation. By inflating the <i>Volksbewegung</i>, her conception runs the risk of undermining the necessary collective learning as it becomes difficult to explore non-populist courses of action that may prove to be promising in many situations.<sup>27</sup></p><p>Thereby, she deprived transformative populism of the means to concretize learning processes. Mechanisms of differentiation are urgently needed in order to explore the world, cope with the flood of knowledge, and achieve (and acknowledge) partial advances. By the dissolution into holistic mass dynamism, the <i>Volksbewegung</i> can collapse into a blockade because the learning process is overloaded from the outset. In light of the holistic project, every partial step weighs itself against the backdrop of a “whole” that must be immediately approached. It remains difficult to establish indirect or more complex strategies of goal attainment. The scope of learning is severely restricted as everything is geared toward <i>not touching upon the ideal of mass mobilization</i>.<sup>28</sup> A restatement of transformative populism would have to rely on a more open mode of inquiry that considers the merits of a holistic perspective, but does not dismiss mechanisms of differentiation from the outset. Most importantly, a reflexivity is needed that keeps itself open to the manifold sources of social transformation—scientific knowledge, economic innovation, aesthetic experience—instead of constantly highlighting the importance of high intensity movement activism.</p><p>To conclude, a nuanced inspection must be conducted in order to determine when populist approaches seem suitable for furthering social transformation in a given situation or when—to the contrary—they prove self-defeating. Instead of advocating left populism or anti-populism per se, it is necessary to engage with more context-dependent inquiries of left populisms in history, as well as in our contemporary world, and ask whether they incite or block collective learning processes, whether they regress to typical flaws, or whether they draw conclusions from past experiences.</p>","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12698","citationCount":"1","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"From Jacobin flaws to transformative populism: Left populism and the legacy of European social democracy\",\"authors\":\"Kolja Möller\",\"doi\":\"10.1111/1467-8675.12698\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"<p>In the established landscape of research in the social sciences, populism is seen as a type of politics that chiefly revolves around the distinction between the “people” and the “elite”.<sup>1</sup> Within this, different forms of populism can be distinguished—ranging from right-wing and authoritarian to liberal-centrist and religious varieties. In the camp of the political left, populism is often cast as essentially a democratic endeavor. Drawing on a conception of inclusive peoplehood, which is not opposed to other vulnerable social groups “below” but solely to the “elite above”, many authors emphasize that it is crucial to pursue a populist strategy in order to overcome existing hegemonies, democratic deficits, ossifications, and class-rule (Grattan, <span>2016</span>; Howse, <span>2019</span>; Kempf, <span>2020</span>; McCormick, <span>2001</span>; Mouffe, <span>2018</span>). Throughout the past few decades, the landscape of research on left populism has grown considerably. Various studies have investigated the history of anti-establishment popular movements of the 19th century, such as the Narodniki in Russia or the American Populist Party (Canovan, <span>1981</span>; Kazin, <span>1995</span>). Further, research has also looked at how, from the 1990s, anti-neoliberal alliances in Latin America had their momentum, entered governmental office, and established a far-reaching renewal of constitutional orders (Linera, <span>2014</span>; Weyland, <span>2013</span>). And in particular, in the last decade, the rejuvenation of left politics in Europe and the United States has often relied on populist approaches (Katsambekis &amp; Kioupkiolis, <span>2019</span>).</p><p>Taking a more systematic stance, theories of radical democracy have sought to demonstrate that politics in modern societies is structured around the embodiment of the “people” as an empty signifier. From this perspective, it is not by accident that left varieties of populism can be recurrently observed; their persistence reflects that politics is, at its heart, not only concerned with policy-issues but with “constructing the people” (Laclau, <span>2014</span>). Thus, populism may not be episodic, accidental, or a specific ideology that brings the vital interests of ordinary people to the fore. Rather, it must be seen as a generalizable discursive strategy—in the words of Ernesto Laclau: the “royal road”—when it comes to the strive for political power (Laclau, <span>2005</span>, p. 67).<sup>2</sup> In recent years, a neo-Machiavellian strand of research has emerged that is not so much concerned with the discursive construction of peoplehood, instead focusing on the materiality of social power. Drawing inspiration from the political philosophy of Early Modernity and Niccolò Machiavelli's insights on the exercise of political rule, these approaches assume that societies are constantly split between the “plebian” people and the ruling elites (McCormick, <span>2001</span>; Vergara, <span>2020a</span>). Against this backdrop, populism amounts to a plebian politics that “springs from the politicization of wealth inequality in reaction to systemic corruption and the immiseration of the masses, an attempt to balance the scales of social and political power between the ruling elite and the popular sectors” (Vergara, <span>2020a</span>, p. 238).</p><p>However, the historical balance sheet of left populisms remains ambivalent. Though recurring attempts to change society through mobilizing the people against the elite can be observed, they have often revealed self-defeating dynamics:<sup>3</sup> the collapse into authoritarian government once populism is in power, the inability to account for how complex modern societies actually operate by adhering to an all-too simple people/elite binary distinction; and the arising incapacity to identify reasons for political failure and success apart from stressing that popular mobilizations played a key role (when successful) or were diluted (when unsuccessful). In the current debate on left-populism, however, a broader camp of anti-populist critiques mainly advances objections from a normative angle (Arato, <span>2016</span>; Cohen, <span>2019</span>; Urbinati, <span>2019</span>; Müller, <span>2014</span>). It is argued that populist forms of politics are, in principle, incompatible with central achievements of liberal democracy, such as pluralism, the separation of powers, or parliamentary representation. They seem to be unavoidably entangled in authoritarian politics and, therefore, in need of being rejected as a course of political action.</p><p>This article aims to move beyond the rigidified divide between appraisals and rejections of left populism by shifting the field of inquiry: instead of investigating the relation of populism and the political as such or evaluating whether populism is compatible with principles of liberal democracy, it conducts a reconstruction of discussions in the broadly conceived camp of European Social Democracy in the “long 19th century” (Hobsbawm). Thereby, it focuses on how the leading intellectuals of this political current were reflecting on the practical potentials and limitations of a politics that is centered on the popular will. As emphasized by contemporary discourse theoretical approaches to the study of populism, politics in modern societies largely revolves around the role of the people and the conflicts that surround its articulation.<sup>4</sup> Therefore, a wide range of people-centered politics can be identified—popular, populist or folky. While the article echoes the definition of populism as people-centered politics that opposes the elites, it stresses not only its inevitability but also its limitations. It scrutinizes populism's internal pitfalls and how it reacts to the contradictions and problems inherent to the structure of the given societal order. Thereby, the article aims at circumventing a transhistorical per se perspective and at a closer examination of the respective social circumstances.</p><p>The ambition is not to provide an encompassing investigation of the whole theoretical landscape of social democracy, but to look for how some of the leading intellectuals grappled with the problems of a people-centered politics in the light of practical experiences in political struggle. It will be argued that we can identify an intellectual trajectory that dealt with the question of whether a politics that is centered on the popular will as opposed to the elites is able to incite social transformation and collective learning processes or, to the contrary, thwarts them. Admittedly, one should not overlook that there are severe differences between the social democratic mass parties of the 19th century and the contemporary disorganized party landscape. However, the article encourages an investigation that overcomes the juxtaposition of left populisms and other variants of progressive politics such as social movement politics (Arato &amp; Cohen, <span>2021</span>) or class-politics (Seferiades, <span>2019</span>).</p><p>Drawing on the recent work of the historian Christina Morina, European Social Democracy is understood in the following as a broader social movement that extended from the mid-19th century to the First World War (Morina, <span>2022</span>).<sup>5</sup> It was characterized by the advent of new forms of political organization, most notably trade unions and social democratic mass parties. Despite severe internal conflicts, it was driven by a shared approach to history and society that was drawn from the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The defining feature of European Social Democracy was located in a specific mode of social inquiry. As stressed by Morina, activists and intellectuals may have engaged in controversies around a whole set of issues. They all assumed, however, that modern societies take part in the course of historical evolution and that a sound type of political action must be derived from a comprehensive inquiry that clarifies the scopes for social transformation at a given historical moment. The common denominator that constituted coherence within the movement was the assumption that societies undergo a historical development (often described as “stages”) and that a tenable conception of political action must react to the objective problems and contradictions inherent in this process. According to Morina, the “attraction lay not primarily in a vaguely suggested utopian perspective, but in the concretely demanded scientific relevance to the present. They [the leading intellectuals and activists of European Social Democracy] drew from Marx's work primarily a promise of knowledge geared to the here and now, not a belief in the future oriented only to tomorrow. For them, Marxism was actually a never-completed study of the real world […]” (Morina, <span>2017</span>, p. 16). This was the unifying thread of European Social Democracy that spread from the works of Marx and Engels to very different activists and intellectuals, such as Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Ilych Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg.<sup>6</sup> It needs to be noted that the Second International was a broad political movement. Not the least, syndicalist and anarchist ideas were prevalent in many countries and the theories of Marx and Engels were not the only intellectual resources available at the end of the 19th century.<sup>7</sup> However, if it comes to reconstruct the overall mindset that ultimately coined the characteristic controversies within the European labor movement, the “invention of Marxism” (Morina) played a crucial role.</p><p>This article reconstructs how this political movement dealt with the potentials and short-comings of populist approaches: Section 2 demonstrates that, initially, the young Marx and Engels of the 1840s and 1850s took a skeptical stance on people-centered politics. Quarrelling with the insurrectionist movements of their time, they identified Jacobin flaws that tended to construct considerable hurdles for achieving social transformation. In contrast to this critique, demonstrated in Section 3, European Social Democracy in both its reformist as well as its more radical ramifications returned to mobilize the popular will from the 1870s onward. Section 4 investigates how Rosa Luxemburg—an important figure of European Social Democracy—reacted to the rising constitutionalization of politics and society through a proto-populist restatement of social democracy as <i>Volksbewegung</i> around the 1900s. This transformative populism was meant to mobilize the people, but it should also overcome the Jacobin flaws by establishing collective learning processes. Section 5 presents the argument that European Social Democracy's trajectory can be seen as a learning cycle itself with regard to potentials and pitfalls of left populisms. Contemporary controversies should be sensitive to these insights and thus engage in more context-dependent inquiries.</p><p>Studies on the history of populism demonstrate that social movements have often relied on the distinction between the people and the elite: ranging from the different attempts to mobilize the <i>populus dei</i> (people of god) against the system of offices in the catholic church to the popular city revolts in early modernity, and then from bourgeois revolutions to large segments of the early labor movement, the reference to the people as opposed to the elites has always played a pivotal role (Dupuy, <span>2002</span>; Hermet, <span>2001</span>; Möller, <span>2020</span>). As the French intellectual historian Pierre Rosanvallon has argued, the 19th century was a decisive stage for the spread of a people-centered politics. National statehood was consolidated and struggles for its constitutionalization became a central site of political conflict. Questions concerning how to conceive of the popular will and how it can be represented amounted to a controversial issue: “Since 1789 the instituted and the instituant, the people moving in the streets and the people embodied in representative institutions, the diversity of social conditions and the unity of the democratic principle were opposing each other” (Rosanvallon, <span>1998</span>, p. 17). Though partial at the outset, nascent constitutional states established forms of popular legislation and reflected themselves as being authorized by the people as constituent power. Not least, the reference to the people was a point of departure within a politics that conceptualized under the category of “Bonapartism” and “Caesarism”.<sup>8</sup> The latter combined personalized leadership with plebiscitarian legitimation, as was the case in Louis Napoleon III's ascent to power that toppled France's democratic revolution in 1848 and paved the way for a “unitary combination” of popular sovereignty and monarchical authority (Groh, <span>1972</span>, p. 732).</p><p>However, the overall turn to the people was only one part of the story. From the early 19th century, a rather critical engagement with popular sovereignty could be identified as well. One could delve at this point into the classical works of the nascent discipline of sociology, but it was probably none other than G. W. F. Hegel who took, in his “Philosophy of Right,” a rather critical stance on popular sovereignty. After an inquiry into the differentiation of social spheres, such as the state, the family, and the market, he advocated for a mixed constitution that should regulate the complexities of modern society instead of subordinating them to the sovereign will of the people. Hegel suspected the latter would lead to totalizing and, ultimately, destructive effects by imposing a political voluntarism that disregarded the historical achievements within these social spheres. He qualified popular sovereignty as “one of those confused thoughts which are based on a garbled notion [Vorstellung] of the people” (Hegel, <span>1991</span>, §279, 319). He explained that, since popular sovereignty ran the risk of relying on “a formless mass,” it was likely to undermine the “internally organized whole” of the state (Hegel, <span>1991</span>, §279, 319). With this argument, Hegel set the scene for a whole strand of discussions revolving around the relationship between politics and popular sovereignty. Admittedly, it was not his defense of the state, but the skeptical remarks on achieving historical progress through a people-centered politics that were taken up by Left- and Young Hegelians and then migrated into activist circles.<sup>9</sup> From then on, attempts to change society had to deal with a fundamental problem: on the one hand, society could be characterized by a differentiation of social spheres. Against this backdrop, holistic approaches to transforming this ensemble as a whole were considered as being likely to exert destructive effects. But on the other hand, society was conceived as a totality and, hence, a transformative politics required searching for “levers” or windows of opportunity that still transcend the whole context. The main question was: to what extent is a politics that relies on the popular will a viable course of action for overcoming the societal contradictions of modern society?</p><p>Most importantly, Marx and Engels, whose works became the intellectual base for European Social Democracy, instigated a shift in evaluating popular politics. It has become a certain trend in recent political philosophy to make use of Marx's early writings in order to think about democracy and social freedom (Abensour, <span>2011</span>; Honneth, <span>2016</span>; Leipold, <span>2020</span>). However, there is no running away from the fact that Marx critically discussed political action. Indebted to Hegel, he started from the assumption that bourgeois societies are regulated by an interplay of different forms in politics (state form), law (legal form), and civil society.<sup>10</sup> Thus, Marx not only defended a bold conception of “true democracy” (Marx, <span>2010e</span>, p. 30) in his early writings, but he was also interested in providing an explanatory model for how the hegemony of the emerging capitalist economy and its ideological tenets were consolidated through a mutual coupling (and separation) of the political, the economic, and the legal sphere.</p><p>This point of departure had huge repercussions when it came to clarifying the role of political action. Given the circumstances of modern society, a people-centered politics could not be seen as the privileged site for inducing sudden social change. This led to political tensions within the circles of the early labor movement: as noted by Alan Gilbert, Marx adopted “a long-term strategic view and openly disdained immediate popularity” (Gilbert, <span>1981</span>, p. 122). His “views differed fundamentally from those of more short-sighted democrats, anarchists, or communists who demanded instant victory (Weitling, Heinzen, Bakunin, Kriege, Ruge)” (Gilbert, <span>1981</span>, p. 122). Marx remained ambivalent: on the one hand, he lauded democracy as the “solved riddle of the constitution” and defended popular sovereignty against Hegel's conception of statehood in the “Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts” (Marx, <span>2010b</span>, p. 29). On the other, he was highly critical of approaches to political action that aimed at resurrecting the Jacobin legacy of the French Revolution.<sup>11</sup></p><p>This critical attitude can be reconstructed from his critique of French insurrectionism in the 1840s.<sup>12</sup> By French insurrectionism, one has to understand the circles of revolutionaries—mainly inspired by Filippo Buonarroti's Jacobin activism in the late French Revolution and his later published book “Babeuf's Conspiracy for Equality” (Buonarroti, <span>1836</span>)—whose aim was to incite an insurrection in the city of Paris and, thereby, commence a revolutionary process “in the name of the sovereign will of the people” (Deppe, <span>1970</span>, p. 47).<sup>13</sup> A central figure was the revolutionary Auguste Blanqui who amounted to political leader in France's revolution of 1830 and from then on stuck to an insurrectionist political strategy (Draper, <span>1986</span>, 120 ff). Marx and Engels argued that the French insurrectionist circles undermined the “process of revolutionary development” because they envisaged launching “a revolution on the spur of the moment, without the conditions for a revolution” (Marx &amp; Engels, <span>2010</span>, p. 318). They qualified the insurrectionists as “alchemists of the revolution” who make use of “incendiary bombs, destructive devices of magic effect, revolts which are expected to be all the more miraculous and astonishing in effect as their basis is less rational” (Marx &amp; Engels, <span>2010</span>, p. 318). In the later introduction to Marx's writings on the class struggles in France, Engels echoed this stance; he described the insurrectionist endeavors as “rebellions in the old style” which relied on “street fighting with barricades,” but eventually turned out to be “outdated” as they did not engage with the central tenets of modern society (Engels, <span>2010</span>, p. 517).</p><p>The voluntaristic approach collapses into an epistemic flaw: the political mind erects limits that undermine the search for adequate strategies in the quest for social change. As this approach revolves around the “omnipotence of the will,” it insinuates that society is governed by the struggle between free-standing will-formations and not by the contradictions between and within social spheres.</p><p>This can be read as a critique of people-centered politics. Casting the popular will as the unity that sets everything in motion, the political mind is not able to understand the avenues of historical evolution. Society, however, does not evolve solely through political will-expression, but also through other sites of social change. Still indebted to the legacy of the late French Revolution, this popular voluntarism gives rise to a Jacobin flaw and momentous shortcuts when it comes to self-reflection and strategy choices. People-centered approaches advocate, without proper scrutiny, that the mobilization of the people is the prime strategy of choice. This assumes that any possible defeats must always be due to a weakness of popular will—either it was not mobilized intensely enough, it was not broad enough, or it was diluted. A tragic circle unfolds: the radical activists build barricades and the reformists issue reform bills, and so on, with even more enthusiasm, intensity, and will-power than before. However, they ultimately fail in many cases, not due to weakness of will but due to the avenues of social evolution. By adhering to a narrow political mind, they have deprived themselves of the means for understanding why they failed.</p><p>Through this critique, Marx rejected French insurrectionism as well as Ruge's popular appeal to the Prussian King. It may be hyperbolic to follow Shlomo Avineri at this point, who identified in Marx a “stubborn opposition, throughout his life, to a political émeute of the working class” (Avineri, <span>1969</span>, p. 194). Nevertheless, one can identify an evaluative shift in discussing people-centered politics: instead of engaging in recurrent and, in many cases, utterly failing attempts to change society through collective action centered on the popular will (be it in the guise of reformist or insurrectionary approaches), one must take interest in the more delicate question concerning how political action is able to contribute to the transformation of the systemic set-up of modern societies at all.<sup>14</sup></p><p>In this passage, the “Randglossen” brought a conception of class-based politics to the fore that opened up an alternative to insurrectionism. It was ultimately taken up by the social democratic current in the labor movement: to overcome the Jacobin flaws, it seemed more plausible to adopt an analytical perspective on capitalist societies and envisage a class-based politics centered on labor.</p><p>In sum, Marx and Engels pursued a strategic approach and defined their stances according to the concrete situation at stake. However, as it turned out, the problem of the popular will and popular sovereignty could not be bypassed by transferring it to the economic sphere and class-based politics. The more that social democratic mass parties emerged in different countries, the more the decisive conflicts again revolved around the representation of the people. Not the least, Marx partly changed his attitude toward communal ownership in his late writings and sympathized with parts of the Russian Narodnik movement (e.g. lauding Chernyshevsky, the author of the influential novel “What is to be done?,” in the foreword to the second edition of capital). As evidenced by Jones, this was mainly due to Marx's engagement with the legal regulation of communal land tenure in Germany that ultimately led him to re-evaluate Russia's economic structure (Jones, <span>2016</span>, 579 ff).<sup>18</sup></p><p>From the 1870s, European Social Democracy had its heyday. Trade unions and social democratic parties emerged which were committed to a Marxist variety of anti-capitalism and a class-based conception of politics. But Marx was too quick in his forecast of a shift from popular to class-based politics. In particular, European Social Democratic Parties strongly congregated around the struggle for democratizing the political system in the name of the people: “Between the 1870s and 1890s, country by country across the map of Europe, socialist parties were formed to give government by the people coherent, centralized, and lasting political form. Until the First World War and to a great extent since, those parties carried out the main burden of democratic advocacy in Europe” (Eley, <span>2002</span>, p. 5). The labor movement largely returned to people-centered politics and rallied around the fight for universal suffrage. As Adam Przeworski has demonstrated in his comparative study on European Social Democracy, one can observe a shift from class-based politics to popular politics: while from the 1840s, activists were trying to constitute the proletariat as a distinct force by “separating it from the masses of the people,” from the 1870s the people as mass became the central point of reference (Przeworski, <span>1987</span>, p. 54).</p><p>Bernstein assumed that the working-class could exert the “hegemony within the people” and assemble “completely different elements of the population”—up to the point that the “labor party” and the “people's party” become “identical” (Bernstein, <span>1899</span>, p. 103).</p><p>Although Lenin was still committed to a socialist strategy, he was clear about the need to reduce the complexities of society to a “single picture” and reclaim the popular will.</p><p>These underlying connections between Bernstein and Lenin raise the question concerning how to make sense of the oscillation between the critique and the return of a people-centered politics in European Social Democracy. Contrary to Marx's speculations about the transfer of meaningful political struggle from the political sphere to the economy, the political system underwent a further constitutionalization in the 19th century. Though taking part in the capitalist ensemble of social systems, the constitutional state increasingly expanded its role in making collectively binding decisions that claimed to constitute and bind society as a whole. In his encompassing analysis of the advent of modern statehood, the constitutional sociologist Chris Thornhill has demonstrated that “rudimentary features of constitutional orders” were emerging in most European states, guaranteeing “basic mechanisms of representation” as well as “clear public procedures to determine the introduction, promulgation and enforcement of laws” (Thornhill, <span>2011</span>, p. 254). To contest existing power-relations, it became—under these conditions—attractive to espouse popular sovereignty. The turn to the people was a reaction to the fact that constitutionalism was established (and, vice versa, contributed immensely to the constitutionalization of the political sphere). The existing order was contested by re-claiming the role of the people against the ruling constituted powers.</p><p>Rosa Luxemburg's proposal for strategic renewal from the 1900s on reacted to the apparent problem that surrounded this shift. As European Social Democracy increasingly took part in the constitutionalized spheres of modern society, it established internal divisions of labor ranging from the participation in communal and regional councils to the trade unions that started to bargain on institutionalized grounds with the entrepreneurs. Luxemburg was highly critical of social democracy falling prey to dispersion within—what she called—“industrial constitutionalism” (Luxemburg, <span>2008</span>, p. 134). Instead of achieving partial advances in these different spheres, she advocated a political strategy that aimed at mobilizing the masses through a holistic <i>Volksbewegung</i> (people's movement; Luxemburg, <span>1974a</span>, p. 149). Luxemburg inserted an innovative twist because she considered such collective action not simply as counter-power; as the following shows, she envisaged a transformative process that was meant to incite collective learning processes. Thereby, she stepped beyond the Jacobin flaws. Politics was not solely concerned with the imposition of will but with the discovery of latent transformative options within the social fabric. Admittedly, she threw the baby out with the bathwater, as will be argued later, because of her generalized dismissive attitude toward all types of societal differentiation. However, one can identify a considerable move from a left to a transformative populism.</p><p>At the outset, Luxemburg observed new types of social conflict in modern societies and emphasized the role of new popular movements (<i>Volksbewegungen)</i>:<sup>20</sup> “The historical hour itself calls for forms of popular movements and creates new ones, improvises hitherto unknown means of struggle, examines and enriches the arsenal of the people, unconcerned with the party's decrees” (Luxemburg, <span>1974a</span>, p. 149).<sup>21</sup> Their characteristic trait was that they were not painstakingly prepared and directed by organized party sections or trade unions. They relied on spontaneous mass activity and eventually created their own institutions of self-organization: the councils.<sup>22</sup> Luxemburg gave a systematic outline of this observation in her famous text “The Mass Strike” from 1906. Taking her cue from the strike movements in Russia and the St. Petersburg insurrection in 1905, she relocated the role of collective mass-action. The few industrial workers in Russia at that time were not the only ones to gather in the streets; rather, as Luxemburg analyzed, there was “a many-colored complex of various sections of the population, a chaos of conflicting interests” (Luxemburg, <span>2008</span>, p. 113). Luxemburg elevated this popular movement to a lesson for European Social Democracy, urging that the repertoire of politics must be expanded: the general mass strike was the decisive step toward making the envisioned social democratic transformation of capitalist societies conceivable.</p><p>By focusing its politics on either parliamentarism (political system/state constitution) or on the trade unions and corporatism in the workplaces (economic constitution), social democracy underwent a dispersion. The transformative goal was abandoned as a result of being absorbed within the respective patterns of bargaining and conflict resolution. Class conflict communicated itself not as a general struggle for a new societal whole, but either as a conflict between different parties in the political system running for public office or as a sectoral conflict between specific groups of the workforce and business interests. It dispersed into “a multitude of individual struggles”.</p><p>The mass strike, however, presented itself as a course of action that could bring the holistic ambition into play again. For Luxemburg, it should reunite the whole of social democracy into a movement-like unity: taking its cue from simple conflicts—for example, over wages, working hours, and so on—it seemed possible that a popular transgression could address foundational issues in society as a whole.<sup>23</sup> Accordingly, short-term disputes, if only properly politicized, could provoke “a spontaneous shaking and tugging at these chains” (Luxemburg, <span>2008</span>, p. 129), which would put the already constituted procedures and mechanisms of societal differentiation of capitalist societies into question. Luxemburg envisaged a “real people's movement”: “If the mass strike, or rather, mass strikes, and the mass struggle are to be successful, they must become a real people's movement, that is, the widest sections of the proletariat must be drawn into the fight” (Luxemburg, <span>2008</span>, p. 158).</p><p>Interestingly, Luxemburg turned a widely held objection against populist politics upside down. Many observers have cast the holistic standpoint that creeps within notions of the “people” as an expression of unrestrained passions for communal association and irrational impulses toward grasping the whole. But for Luxemburg, the <i>Volksbewegung</i> was the privileged site for rationally understanding how capitalism as an encompassing societal framework operates precisely <i>because</i> it is geared toward grasping the social whole. One can say that Luxemburg proceeded from a left-populism—understood as invoking the people in order to further certain political objectives and advance in the struggle for political power—to a transformative populism: it should establish a process of collective learning “from below” and overcome the Jacobin flaws that Luxemburg saw—again—resurfacing in the Russian Revolution of 1917: “The Bolsheviks are the historical heirs of the English Levelers and the French Jacobins” (Luxemburg, <span>1974c</span>, p. 342).</p><p>Thus, politics is not only about imposing political will. It is about the elaboration of an adequate world-disclosing critique and an open process of self-correction. According to Luxemburg, a laborious “thorny way of self-liberation” opens up, on which the <i>Volksbewegung</i> should be able to free itself from superfluous relations of domination in a collective learning process.</p><p>In these passages, Luxemburg argued that leadership plays an instrumental role in fostering the learning process. Full-blown leaderism, however, is detrimental to self-emancipation as it thwarts knowledge-gathering. Luxemburg hints at the possibility that the role of leaders and cadres is subverted in the process. Here, she alludes to a rather Rousseauian conception of vertical organ separation: in the course of the successful <i>Volksbewegung</i>, the cadres switch their roles from being leaders to simply becoming executive “tools” of mass-action's <i>volonté générale</i>. Admittedly, it remains unclear how this switch can be effectively achieved. However, Luxemburg refers to the possibility that the basic structures of political action themselves can be subverted. Again, the emphasis is on an open-ended process that transcends the limitations of politics—be it the heroic imposition of political will on social matter or the role of personalized leadership.</p><p>To be sure, Luxemburg often formulated in general statements leaving us with crucial challenges: what are the conditions for movements that endure rather than fail? How can we make sense of collective learning extending from the macro-social level to its micro-foundations? A restatement would, obviously, be a demanding endeavor.<sup>25</sup> This should not lead us to overlook the fact that Luxemburg's approach can be reconstructed as an advance; it can be seen as a step in a learning process itself because it drew conclusions from the critical evaluation of existing experiences ranging from Jacobin flaws and the limitations of class-politics to the dispersive tendencies in industrial constitutionalism.</p><p>As we have seen, it is possible to reconstruct the reflections that surrounded the advent of social democratic mass parties as already addressing some intricacies of left populism. European Social Democracy started as a movement that adhered to a critique of popular sovereignty. Despite these insights, it reverted back to the popular will. One should be careful to equate European Social Democracy with the recent surge of left populisms since the 2010s in Europe. But, as pointed out by numerous studies (Gerbaudo, <span>2017</span>; Katsambekis &amp; Kioupkiolis, <span>2019</span>; Kioupkiolis, <span>2016</span>), a similar tendency can be observed: Starting from social movement practices and ideologies, the turn to a people-centered politics in countries such as Spain, France, or Greece were identified.</p><p>As demonstrated in this article, the recurrence of populism should not be seen as an interplay between anti-populism and populism, but as a learning cycle. The concept of a learning cycle in the context of social movements was used by the German Historian Michael Vester in his seminal study on the advent of the British labor movement from 1792 to 1848 (Vester, <span>1975</span>, 25 ff).<sup>26</sup> In this study, Vester examined how the practical “cycles of struggle” in the emergent strikes and campaigns intersected with intellectual advances in drawing conclusions from these experiences, leading to a refinement and re-orientation of political strategy. In spite of setbacks and failures, Vester was able to identify “feedback cycles” at the intersection of political action and intellectual reflection (Vester, <span>1975</span>, p. 19).</p><p>The cycle that this article has reconstructed passed through three stages: it started with <i>stage one</i> in the mid-19th century, where Marx and Engels drew conclusions from the apparent Jacobin flaws of insurrectionary tendencies. They assumed that a sound conception of politics should take the structure of modern capitalist society into account. This led to the transferal of promising courses of political action to the economic sphere and its inherent contradictions (“class-politics”). In <i>stage two</i>, in the late-19th century, European Social Democracy returned in all its reformist and revolutionary ramifications to a politics that aimed at achieving social transformation through invoking the popular will. This was largely due to the constitutionalization of the political system that was meant to take collectively binding decisions and made it necessary to overcome class politics. In <i>stage three</i>, Luxemburg drew conclusions from the obvious problems of industrial constitutionalism by conceiving of a transformative populism: on the one hand, it should overcome the dispersive flaws through invoking a holistic <i>Volksbewegung</i> as transformative lever. On the other, it should overcome the Jacobin flaws through an emphasis on collective learning processes. The envisaged <i>Volksbewegung</i> was not only the place of counter-power, but also of exploration, the gathering of knowledge, and self-correction. Thereby, Luxemburg laid the foundations for a transformative populism: a populism that should not only further simple goals or conquer public offices, but should also transform society and the agents themselves up to the point where the characteristic contradictions and societal differentiation of modern society are transcended.</p><p>Luxemburg's take on collective learning processes was rather sketchy. It would go beyond the scope of this article to provide a comprehensive account of the relation of politics, populism, and collective learning processes. However, some short-comings of Luxemburg's account must be considered. A serious problem—which has accompanied “Luxemburgist” political approaches from the outset—was that she basically identified social differentiation as such with capitalist society and rejected it in all its ramifications. Adopting a rather vitalistic perspective, she advocated “uninhibited, effervescent life,” “creative power,” and “social instincts instead of egoism, mass initiative in place of lethargy” (Luxemburg, <span>1974c</span>, 360 ff). Accordingly, the inquiry is, from the outset, restricted because constituted procedures and mechanisms of social differentiation are seen as <i>always</i> playing out in a negative direction—be it through co-opting opposition into social systems or through obfuscating a sound perspective on the social whole. Here, Luxemburg tended to neglect the state of the art of her own social movement, namely European Social Democracy, which was concerned with a more sophisticated analysis of modern society. At least, it has always been conceded in this tradition that differentiation processes can play out in a progressive direction and that capitalism must be overcome from within the internal contradictions of social systems—and not solely through assuming a generalized oppositional “mass”-standpoint on the social whole. Luxemburg neglected the fact that there can be many non-populist moments where enthusiastic self-empowerment and holistic movement may not be conducive to bringing about social transformation. By inflating the <i>Volksbewegung</i>, her conception runs the risk of undermining the necessary collective learning as it becomes difficult to explore non-populist courses of action that may prove to be promising in many situations.<sup>27</sup></p><p>Thereby, she deprived transformative populism of the means to concretize learning processes. Mechanisms of differentiation are urgently needed in order to explore the world, cope with the flood of knowledge, and achieve (and acknowledge) partial advances. By the dissolution into holistic mass dynamism, the <i>Volksbewegung</i> can collapse into a blockade because the learning process is overloaded from the outset. In light of the holistic project, every partial step weighs itself against the backdrop of a “whole” that must be immediately approached. It remains difficult to establish indirect or more complex strategies of goal attainment. The scope of learning is severely restricted as everything is geared toward <i>not touching upon the ideal of mass mobilization</i>.<sup>28</sup> A restatement of transformative populism would have to rely on a more open mode of inquiry that considers the merits of a holistic perspective, but does not dismiss mechanisms of differentiation from the outset. Most importantly, a reflexivity is needed that keeps itself open to the manifold sources of social transformation—scientific knowledge, economic innovation, aesthetic experience—instead of constantly highlighting the importance of high intensity movement activism.</p><p>To conclude, a nuanced inspection must be conducted in order to determine when populist approaches seem suitable for furthering social transformation in a given situation or when—to the contrary—they prove self-defeating. Instead of advocating left populism or anti-populism per se, it is necessary to engage with more context-dependent inquiries of left populisms in history, as well as in our contemporary world, and ask whether they incite or block collective learning processes, whether they regress to typical flaws, or whether they draw conclusions from past experiences.</p>\",\"PeriodicalId\":51578,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory\",\"volume\":null,\"pages\":null},\"PeriodicalIF\":1.2000,\"publicationDate\":\"2023-06-30\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12698\",\"citationCount\":\"1\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"1085\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.12698\",\"RegionNum\":0,\"RegionCategory\":null,\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"Q3\",\"JCRName\":\"POLITICAL SCIENCE\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.12698","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1

摘要

在社会科学研究的既定景观中,民粹主义被视为一种主要围绕“人民”和“精英”之间的区别展开的政治类型在这种情况下,不同形式的民粹主义可以被区分开来——从右翼和威权主义到自由中间派和宗教变种。在政治左翼阵营中,民粹主义通常被描绘成本质上是一种民主努力。许多作者借鉴包容性民族的概念,即不反对“下面”的其他弱势社会群体,而只反对“上面的精英”,强调追求民粹主义战略对于克服现有的霸权、民主赤字、僵化和阶级统治至关重要(Grattan, 2016;Howse, 2019;Kempf, 2020;麦考密克,2001;Mouffe, 2018)。在过去的几十年里,对左翼民粹主义的研究有了很大的发展。各种研究调查了19世纪反建制的民众运动的历史,如俄罗斯的民粹党或美国的民粹主义党(Canovan, 1981;金,1995)。此外,研究还着眼于从20世纪90年代开始,拉丁美洲的反新自由主义联盟如何获得动力,进入政府办公室,并建立了深远的宪法秩序更新(Linera, 2014;Weyland, 2013)。特别是,在过去十年中,欧洲和美国左翼政治的复兴往往依赖于民粹主义方法(Katsambekis &Kioupkiolis, 2019)。激进民主理论采取更系统的立场,试图证明现代社会的政治是围绕“人民”作为一个空洞的能指的体现而构建的。从这个角度来看,左翼民粹主义的变种可以反复出现并非偶然;他们的坚持反映了政治的核心不仅是政策问题,而且是“建设人民”(Laclau, 2014)。因此,民粹主义可能不是偶然的、偶然的,也不是把普通民众的切身利益放在首位的特定意识形态。相反,当涉及到政治权力的争夺时,它必须被视为一种概括的话语策略——用埃内斯托·拉克劳的话来说:“皇家之路”(拉克劳,2005,第67页)近年来,一种新马基雅维利式的研究流派出现了,它不太关注民族性的话语建构,而是关注社会权力的物质性。从早期现代性的政治哲学和Niccolò马基雅维利关于政治统治的见解中汲取灵感,这些方法假设社会在“平民”人民和统治精英之间不断分裂(麦考密克,2001;范盖拉,2020)。在这种背景下,民粹主义相当于一种平民政治,“源于对系统性腐败和大众贫困的财富不平等的政治化,试图在统治精英和大众之间平衡社会和政治权力的规模”(Vergara, 2020a,第238页)。然而,左翼民粹主义的历史资产负债表仍然是矛盾的。虽然可以观察到通过动员人民反对精英来改变社会的反复尝试,但它们往往暴露出弄巧成的动力:3一旦民粹主义掌权,就会崩溃为威权政府,无法通过坚持过于简单的人民/精英二元区分来解释复杂的现代社会实际运作方式;除了强调民众动员发挥了关键作用(成功时)或被稀释(不成功时)之外,越来越无法找出政治失败和成功的原因。然而,在当前关于左民粹主义的辩论中,更广泛的反民粹主义批评阵营主要从规范角度提出反对意见(Arato, 2016;科恩,2019;Urbinati, 2019;穆勒,2014)。有人认为,民粹主义形式的政治原则上与自由民主的核心成就不相容,如多元化、三权分立或议会代表制。它们似乎不可避免地与威权政治纠缠在一起,因此需要将其作为一种政治行动加以拒绝。本文旨在通过转移研究领域来超越对左翼民粹主义的评价和拒绝之间的僵化划分:它不是调查民粹主义与政治本身的关系,也不是评估民粹主义是否与自由民主原则相容,而是在“漫长的19世纪”(霍布斯鲍姆)的欧洲社会民主主义的广泛构想阵营中进行讨论的重建。因此,它关注的是这一政治潮流的主要知识分子如何反思以民意为中心的政治的实践潜力和局限性。 正如当代研究民粹主义的话语理论方法所强调的那样,现代社会的政治在很大程度上围绕着人民的角色和围绕其表达的冲突因此,可以识别出广泛的以人民为中心的政治——大众的、民粹的或民间的。这篇文章虽然呼应了民粹主义的定义,即反对精英的以人民为中心的政治,但也强调了民粹主义的必然性和局限性。它审视了民粹主义的内在陷阱,以及它如何应对特定社会秩序结构固有的矛盾和问题。因此,这篇文章的目的是避开一种超历史本身的观点,并对各自的社会环境进行更仔细的检查。本书的目标不是对社会民主主义的整个理论景观进行全面的研究,而是寻找一些主要知识分子是如何根据政治斗争的实践经验来解决以人民为中心的政治问题的。我们认为,我们可以确定一条智力轨迹,它处理的问题是,一个以民意为中心的政治,而不是以精英为中心的政治,是否能够推动社会转型和集体学习过程,或者相反,阻碍它们。诚然,人们不应忽视,19世纪的社会民主主义群众政党与当代无组织的政党格局之间存在着严重差异。然而,本文鼓励进行一项调查,克服左派民粹主义和其他进步政治变体(如社会运动政治)的并列性。Cohen, 2021)或阶级政治(Seferiades, 2019)。根据历史学家克里斯蒂娜·莫里纳(Christina Morina)最近的工作,欧洲社会民主主义被理解为从19世纪中期延伸到第一次世界大战的更广泛的社会运动(莫里纳,2022)它的特点是出现了新的政治组织形式,最显著的是工会和社会民主群众政党。尽管存在严重的内部冲突,但从马克思(Karl Marx)和恩格斯(Friedrich Engels)的著作中得出的对历史和社会的共同看法推动了这一进程。欧洲社会民主主义的决定性特征在于其特有的社会探究模式。正如森里那所强调的,活动人士和知识分子可能围绕一系列问题展开了争论。然而,他们都假设现代社会参与了历史演变的过程,并且一种健全的政治行动必须从一种全面的调查中衍生出来,这种调查澄清了特定历史时刻社会变革的范围。构成运动内部一致性的共同点是假设社会经历了一个历史发展(通常被描述为“阶段”),一个站得住脚的政治行动概念必须对这个过程中固有的客观问题和矛盾作出反应。根据森里纳的说法,“吸引力主要不在于模糊暗示的乌托邦前景,而在于具体要求的与当前相关的科学。”他们(欧洲社会民主党的主要知识分子和积极分子)从马克思的著作中主要汲取了一种面向此时此地的知识承诺,而不是一种只面向明天的未来信念。对他们来说,马克思主义实际上是对现实世界的一种从未完成的研究[…]”(Morina, 2017,第16页)。这是欧洲社会民主主义的统一线索,从马克思和恩格斯的著作传播到非常不同的活动家和知识分子,如爱德华·伯恩斯坦、卡尔·考茨基、弗拉基米尔·伊里奇·列宁和罗莎·卢森堡。需要注意的是,第二国际是一个广泛的政治运动。同样重要的是,工团主义和无政府主义思想在许多国家盛行,马克思和恩格斯的理论并不是19世纪末唯一可用的知识资源然而,如果要重建最终在欧洲劳工运动中创造出特有争议的整体心态,“马克思主义的发明”(森那)发挥了至关重要的作用。本文重构了这场政治运动是如何处理民粹主义方法的潜力和缺点的:第二节表明,19世纪40年代和50年代年轻的马克思和恩格斯最初对以人民为中心的政治持怀疑态度。他们与当时的起义运动争吵不休,发现了雅各宾派的缺陷,这些缺陷往往会给实现社会转型造成相当大的障碍。与第三节所展示的这种批判相反,从19世纪70年代开始,欧洲社会民主主义无论是其改革派还是其更激进的分支都重新动员了民意。 然而,在许多情况下,他们最终失败了,不是由于意志薄弱,而是由于社会进化的途径。由于坚持狭隘的政治思想,他们剥夺了自己理解失败原因的手段。通过这种批判,马克思拒绝了法国的叛乱主义,也拒绝了鲁格对普鲁士国王的普遍诉求。在这一点上,跟随什洛莫·阿维内里(Shlomo Avineri)可能有些夸张,他认为马克思“一生顽固地反对工人阶级的政治变革”(阿维内里,1969年,第194页)。然而,在讨论以人民为中心的政治时,人们可以发现一种评估性的转变:与其参与以民意为中心的集体行动来改变社会的反复尝试,在许多情况下,这是完全失败的尝试(无论是在改良主义还是起义方法的幌子下),人们必须对更微妙的问题感兴趣,即政治行动如何能够促进现代社会系统结构的转变。在这篇文章中,“Randglossen”将阶级政治的概念带到了前台,为起义主义开辟了另一种选择。它最终被劳工运动中的社会民主主义潮流所接受:为了克服雅各宾派的缺陷,采用对资本主义社会的分析视角,并设想一种以劳工为中心的阶级政治,似乎更合理。总而言之,马克思和恩格斯采取了一种战略方针,并根据利害关系的具体情况确定了自己的立场。然而,事实证明,人民意志和人民主权的问题不能通过将其转移到经济领域和以阶级为基础的政治来绕过。不同国家出现的社会民主主义群众政党越多,决定性的冲突就越会再次围绕人民的代表权展开。同样重要的是,马克思在他后期的著作中部分地改变了他对公有制的态度,并同情了部分俄国民粹派运动(例如赞扬车尔尼雪夫斯基,他是影响深远的小说《怎么办?》的作者)。(见《资本论》第二版前言)。正如Jones所证明的那样,这主要是由于马克思参与了德国公共土地使用权的法律规定,最终导致他重新评估了俄罗斯的经济结构(Jones, 2016, 579 ff)。从19世纪70年代开始,欧洲社会民主党进入了全盛时期。工会和社会民主党派出现了,他们致力于马克思主义的反资本主义和基于阶级的政治概念。但是马克思对从大众政治到阶级政治的转变的预测太快了。特别是,欧洲社会民主党强烈地聚集在一起,以人民的名义为政治制度的民主化而斗争:“在19世纪70年代和90年代之间,欧洲地图上的一个又一个国家,社会主义政党的成立是为了给人民政府提供连贯、集中和持久的政治形式。直到第一次世界大战,在很大程度上,这些政党承担了欧洲民主倡导的主要负担”(Eley, 2002, p. 5)。劳工运动在很大程度上回到了以人民为中心的政治,并围绕争取普选权而团结起来。正如亚当·普泽沃斯基(Adam Przeworski)在他对欧洲社会民主的比较研究中所展示的那样,人们可以观察到从阶级政治到大众政治的转变:从19世纪40年代开始,活动家们试图通过“将无产阶级与人民群众分开”来将无产阶级作为一种独特的力量,从19世纪70年代开始,作为群众的人民成为了参考的中心点(Przeworski, 1987,第54页)。伯恩斯坦认为,工人阶级可以发挥“人民内部的霸权”,并将“完全不同的人口因素”聚集在一起,直到“劳工党”和“人民党”变得“相同”(伯恩斯坦,1899,第103页)。尽管列宁仍然致力于社会主义战略,但他很清楚需要将社会的复杂性降低到“单一图景”,并收回民意。伯恩斯坦和列宁之间的这些潜在联系提出了一个问题,即如何理解欧洲社会民主主义批判和以人民为中心的政治回归之间的摇摆。与马克思关于有意义的政治斗争从政治领域转移到经济领域的推测相反,政治制度在19世纪经历了进一步的宪法化。虽然参与了社会制度的资本主义整体,但宪政国家在制定集体约束决策方面的作用日益扩大,这些决策声称要构成和约束整个社会。 23因此,短期的争论,如果只是适当地政治化,可能会引发“对这些链条的自发摇动和拉扯”(Luxemburg, 2008,第129页),这将使资本主义社会已经形成的社会分化程序和机制受到质疑。卢森堡设想了一场“真正的人民运动”:“如果群众罢工,或者更确切地说,群众罢工和群众斗争要取得成功,它们必须成为一场真正的人民运动,也就是说,无产阶级最广泛的阶层必须被吸引到斗争中来”(卢森堡,2008年,第158页)。有趣的是,卢森堡颠覆了人们普遍反对民粹主义政治的观点。许多观察家认为,在“人民”的概念中,存在着一种整体的观点,认为这是一种对社区联合的不受约束的激情和对把握整体的非理性冲动的表达。但对卢森堡来说,《人民社会》是理性地理解资本主义作为一个包罗万象的社会框架是如何运作的优越场所,因为它旨在把握社会整体。可以说,卢森堡从左翼民粹主义——被理解为为了进一步实现某些政治目标和在政治权力斗争中取得进展而呼吁人民——走向变革的民粹主义:它应该建立一个“自下而上”的集体学习过程,并克服卢森堡在1917年俄国革命中再次出现的雅各宾派缺陷:“布尔什维克是英国平等派和法国雅各宾派的历史继承者”(卢森堡,1974c,第342页)。因此,政治不仅仅是强加政治意愿。它是关于阐述一个充分的揭露世界的批评和一个公开的自我纠正过程。根据卢森堡的说法,一条艰难的“自我解放的荆棘之路”开启了,在这条道路上,人民应该能够在集体学习的过程中从多余的统治关系中解脱出来。在这些段落中,卢森堡认为领导力在促进学习过程中起着重要作用。然而,全面的领导主义不利于自我解放,因为它阻碍了知识的收集。卢森堡暗示,在这个过程中,领导人和干部的角色可能会被颠覆。在这里,她暗指了一种相当卢梭式的垂直器官分离概念:在成功的“人民社会”(Volksbewegung)过程中,干部们的角色从领导者转变为简单地成为群众自愿行动的执行“工具”。诚然,目前尚不清楚这种转变如何才能有效实现。然而,卢森堡提到了政治行动的基本结构本身可以被颠覆的可能性。同样,本书强调的是一个超越政治限制的开放式过程——无论是在社会问题上英勇地强加政治意愿,还是个性化领导的角色。诚然,卢森堡经常在一般性陈述中给我们提出关键的挑战:运动能够持续而不是失败的条件是什么?我们如何理解从宏观社会层面延伸到微观基础的集体学习?显然,重新声明将是一项艰巨的任务这不应该导致我们忽视这样一个事实,即卢森堡的方法可以被重构为一种进步;它本身可以被看作是学习过程中的一个步骤,因为它从对现有经验的批判性评估中得出结论,这些经验包括雅各宾派的缺陷和阶级政治的局限性,以及工业宪政的分散趋势。正如我们所看到的,有可能重构围绕社会民主主义群众政党出现的反思,因为它已经解决了左翼民粹主义的一些复杂问题。欧洲社会民主党最初是一场坚持批判人民主权的运动。尽管有这些见解,它还是回到了民意。人们应该谨慎地将欧洲社会民主党与2010年代以来欧洲左翼民粹主义的激增相提并论。但是,正如许多研究指出的那样(Gerbaudo, 2017;Katsambekis,Kioupkiolis, 2019;Kioupkiolis, 2016),可以观察到类似的趋势:从社会运动实践和意识形态开始,西班牙,法国或希腊等国家转向以人民为中心的政治。正如本文所论证的那样,民粹主义的再现不应被视为反民粹主义与民粹主义的相互作用,而应被视为一种学习循环。在社会运动的背景下,学习周期的概念被德国历史学家迈克尔·韦斯特(Michael Vester)用于他对1792年至1848年英国劳工运动的开创性研究(韦斯特,1975年,25页)。 在这项研究中,韦斯特考察了新兴罢工和运动中的实际“斗争周期”如何与从这些经验中得出结论的知识进步相交叉,从而导致政治战略的改进和重新定位。尽管有挫折和失败,Vester还是能够在政治行动和思想反思的交叉点上识别出“反馈周期”(Vester, 1975,第19页)。本文重构的周期经历了三个阶段:第一阶段始于19世纪中期,马克思和恩格斯从雅各宾派明显的叛乱倾向缺陷中得出结论。他们认为,一个健全的政治概念应该考虑到现代资本主义社会的结构。这导致了将有希望的政治行动路线转移到经济领域及其内在矛盾(“阶级政治”)。在第二阶段,即19世纪后期,欧洲社会民主党带着其所有改良主义和革命分支回归到旨在通过唤起民意实现社会转型的政治。这在很大程度上是由于政治制度的宪法化,这意味着采取集体约束的决定,并使克服阶级政治成为必要。在第三阶段,卢森堡从工业宪政的明显问题中得出结论,设想了一种变革性的民粹主义:一方面,它应该通过援引整体人民作为变革杠杆来克服分散的缺陷。另一方面,它应该通过强调集体学习过程来克服雅各宾派的缺陷。设想中的人民宫不仅是对抗力量的地方,也是探索、收集知识和自我纠正的地方。因此,卢森堡为变革性的民粹主义奠定了基础:这种民粹主义不仅要推进简单的目标或征服公职,而且要改造社会和代理人本身,直到超越现代社会的特征矛盾和社会分化。卢森堡对集体学习过程的看法相当粗略。对政治、民粹主义和集体学习过程之间的关系提供一个全面的解释,将超出本文的范围。然而,必须考虑到卢森堡的说法的一些缺点。一个严重的问题——从一开始就伴随着“卢森堡主义”的政治方法——是她基本上将社会分化等同于资本主义社会,并拒绝它的所有分支。她采用一种相当生机主义的观点,主张“无拘无束、充满活力的生活”、“创造力”和“社会本能而不是利己主义,群众主动性而不是麻木”(Luxemburg, 1974c, 360 ff)。因此,调查从一开始就受到限制,因为社会分化的构成程序和机制被视为总是在消极的方向上发挥作用——无论是通过将反对派纳入社会制度,还是通过混淆对社会整体的合理看法。在这里,卢森堡倾向于忽视她自己的社会运动的艺术状态,即欧洲社会民主主义,它关注的是对现代社会更复杂的分析。至少,在这一传统中,人们一直承认,分化过程可以朝着进步的方向发展,资本主义必须从社会制度的内部矛盾中克服——而不仅仅是通过在社会整体上假设一个普遍反对的“群众”立场。卢森堡忽略了这样一个事实,即在许多非民粹主义的时刻,热情的自我赋权和整体运动可能不利于带来社会转型。她的构想夸大了“人民意志”,有可能破坏必要的集体学习,因为很难探索在许多情况下可能被证明是有希望的非民粹主义行动方针。因此,她剥夺了变革性民粹主义具体化学习过程的手段。为了探索世界,应对知识洪流,实现(并承认)部分进步,迫切需要分化机制。通过分解成整体的群众动力,人民社会可以崩溃成一个封锁,因为学习过程从一开始就超负荷了。从整体项目的角度来看,每一个局部步骤都要在“整体”的背景下进行权衡,必须立即接近。建立间接的或更复杂的实现目标的策略仍然很困难。学习的范围受到严格限制,因为一切都是为了不触及群众动员的理想。 28 .对变革性民粹主义的重述将不得不依赖于一种更开放的调查模式,这种模式考虑到整体观点的优点,但从一开始就不否认分化机制。最重要的是,需要一种反身性,使自己对社会变革的多种来源——科学知识、经济创新、审美经验——保持开放,而不是不断强调高强度运动激进主义的重要性。总之,必须进行细致入微的检查,以确定在特定情况下,民粹主义方法何时似乎适合于进一步的社会转型,或者何时——相反——它们被证明是弄巧成拙的。与其鼓吹左翼民粹主义或反民粹主义本身,我们有必要对历史上的左翼民粹主义以及当代世界的左翼民粹主义进行更多情境相关的调查,并询问它们是否会煽动或阻碍集体学习过程,是否会回归到典型的缺陷,或者是否会从过去的经验中得出结论。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
From Jacobin flaws to transformative populism: Left populism and the legacy of European social democracy

In the established landscape of research in the social sciences, populism is seen as a type of politics that chiefly revolves around the distinction between the “people” and the “elite”.1 Within this, different forms of populism can be distinguished—ranging from right-wing and authoritarian to liberal-centrist and religious varieties. In the camp of the political left, populism is often cast as essentially a democratic endeavor. Drawing on a conception of inclusive peoplehood, which is not opposed to other vulnerable social groups “below” but solely to the “elite above”, many authors emphasize that it is crucial to pursue a populist strategy in order to overcome existing hegemonies, democratic deficits, ossifications, and class-rule (Grattan, 2016; Howse, 2019; Kempf, 2020; McCormick, 2001; Mouffe, 2018). Throughout the past few decades, the landscape of research on left populism has grown considerably. Various studies have investigated the history of anti-establishment popular movements of the 19th century, such as the Narodniki in Russia or the American Populist Party (Canovan, 1981; Kazin, 1995). Further, research has also looked at how, from the 1990s, anti-neoliberal alliances in Latin America had their momentum, entered governmental office, and established a far-reaching renewal of constitutional orders (Linera, 2014; Weyland, 2013). And in particular, in the last decade, the rejuvenation of left politics in Europe and the United States has often relied on populist approaches (Katsambekis & Kioupkiolis, 2019).

Taking a more systematic stance, theories of radical democracy have sought to demonstrate that politics in modern societies is structured around the embodiment of the “people” as an empty signifier. From this perspective, it is not by accident that left varieties of populism can be recurrently observed; their persistence reflects that politics is, at its heart, not only concerned with policy-issues but with “constructing the people” (Laclau, 2014). Thus, populism may not be episodic, accidental, or a specific ideology that brings the vital interests of ordinary people to the fore. Rather, it must be seen as a generalizable discursive strategy—in the words of Ernesto Laclau: the “royal road”—when it comes to the strive for political power (Laclau, 2005, p. 67).2 In recent years, a neo-Machiavellian strand of research has emerged that is not so much concerned with the discursive construction of peoplehood, instead focusing on the materiality of social power. Drawing inspiration from the political philosophy of Early Modernity and Niccolò Machiavelli's insights on the exercise of political rule, these approaches assume that societies are constantly split between the “plebian” people and the ruling elites (McCormick, 2001; Vergara, 2020a). Against this backdrop, populism amounts to a plebian politics that “springs from the politicization of wealth inequality in reaction to systemic corruption and the immiseration of the masses, an attempt to balance the scales of social and political power between the ruling elite and the popular sectors” (Vergara, 2020a, p. 238).

However, the historical balance sheet of left populisms remains ambivalent. Though recurring attempts to change society through mobilizing the people against the elite can be observed, they have often revealed self-defeating dynamics:3 the collapse into authoritarian government once populism is in power, the inability to account for how complex modern societies actually operate by adhering to an all-too simple people/elite binary distinction; and the arising incapacity to identify reasons for political failure and success apart from stressing that popular mobilizations played a key role (when successful) or were diluted (when unsuccessful). In the current debate on left-populism, however, a broader camp of anti-populist critiques mainly advances objections from a normative angle (Arato, 2016; Cohen, 2019; Urbinati, 2019; Müller, 2014). It is argued that populist forms of politics are, in principle, incompatible with central achievements of liberal democracy, such as pluralism, the separation of powers, or parliamentary representation. They seem to be unavoidably entangled in authoritarian politics and, therefore, in need of being rejected as a course of political action.

This article aims to move beyond the rigidified divide between appraisals and rejections of left populism by shifting the field of inquiry: instead of investigating the relation of populism and the political as such or evaluating whether populism is compatible with principles of liberal democracy, it conducts a reconstruction of discussions in the broadly conceived camp of European Social Democracy in the “long 19th century” (Hobsbawm). Thereby, it focuses on how the leading intellectuals of this political current were reflecting on the practical potentials and limitations of a politics that is centered on the popular will. As emphasized by contemporary discourse theoretical approaches to the study of populism, politics in modern societies largely revolves around the role of the people and the conflicts that surround its articulation.4 Therefore, a wide range of people-centered politics can be identified—popular, populist or folky. While the article echoes the definition of populism as people-centered politics that opposes the elites, it stresses not only its inevitability but also its limitations. It scrutinizes populism's internal pitfalls and how it reacts to the contradictions and problems inherent to the structure of the given societal order. Thereby, the article aims at circumventing a transhistorical per se perspective and at a closer examination of the respective social circumstances.

The ambition is not to provide an encompassing investigation of the whole theoretical landscape of social democracy, but to look for how some of the leading intellectuals grappled with the problems of a people-centered politics in the light of practical experiences in political struggle. It will be argued that we can identify an intellectual trajectory that dealt with the question of whether a politics that is centered on the popular will as opposed to the elites is able to incite social transformation and collective learning processes or, to the contrary, thwarts them. Admittedly, one should not overlook that there are severe differences between the social democratic mass parties of the 19th century and the contemporary disorganized party landscape. However, the article encourages an investigation that overcomes the juxtaposition of left populisms and other variants of progressive politics such as social movement politics (Arato & Cohen, 2021) or class-politics (Seferiades, 2019).

Drawing on the recent work of the historian Christina Morina, European Social Democracy is understood in the following as a broader social movement that extended from the mid-19th century to the First World War (Morina, 2022).5 It was characterized by the advent of new forms of political organization, most notably trade unions and social democratic mass parties. Despite severe internal conflicts, it was driven by a shared approach to history and society that was drawn from the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The defining feature of European Social Democracy was located in a specific mode of social inquiry. As stressed by Morina, activists and intellectuals may have engaged in controversies around a whole set of issues. They all assumed, however, that modern societies take part in the course of historical evolution and that a sound type of political action must be derived from a comprehensive inquiry that clarifies the scopes for social transformation at a given historical moment. The common denominator that constituted coherence within the movement was the assumption that societies undergo a historical development (often described as “stages”) and that a tenable conception of political action must react to the objective problems and contradictions inherent in this process. According to Morina, the “attraction lay not primarily in a vaguely suggested utopian perspective, but in the concretely demanded scientific relevance to the present. They [the leading intellectuals and activists of European Social Democracy] drew from Marx's work primarily a promise of knowledge geared to the here and now, not a belief in the future oriented only to tomorrow. For them, Marxism was actually a never-completed study of the real world […]” (Morina, 2017, p. 16). This was the unifying thread of European Social Democracy that spread from the works of Marx and Engels to very different activists and intellectuals, such as Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Ilych Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg.6 It needs to be noted that the Second International was a broad political movement. Not the least, syndicalist and anarchist ideas were prevalent in many countries and the theories of Marx and Engels were not the only intellectual resources available at the end of the 19th century.7 However, if it comes to reconstruct the overall mindset that ultimately coined the characteristic controversies within the European labor movement, the “invention of Marxism” (Morina) played a crucial role.

This article reconstructs how this political movement dealt with the potentials and short-comings of populist approaches: Section 2 demonstrates that, initially, the young Marx and Engels of the 1840s and 1850s took a skeptical stance on people-centered politics. Quarrelling with the insurrectionist movements of their time, they identified Jacobin flaws that tended to construct considerable hurdles for achieving social transformation. In contrast to this critique, demonstrated in Section 3, European Social Democracy in both its reformist as well as its more radical ramifications returned to mobilize the popular will from the 1870s onward. Section 4 investigates how Rosa Luxemburg—an important figure of European Social Democracy—reacted to the rising constitutionalization of politics and society through a proto-populist restatement of social democracy as Volksbewegung around the 1900s. This transformative populism was meant to mobilize the people, but it should also overcome the Jacobin flaws by establishing collective learning processes. Section 5 presents the argument that European Social Democracy's trajectory can be seen as a learning cycle itself with regard to potentials and pitfalls of left populisms. Contemporary controversies should be sensitive to these insights and thus engage in more context-dependent inquiries.

Studies on the history of populism demonstrate that social movements have often relied on the distinction between the people and the elite: ranging from the different attempts to mobilize the populus dei (people of god) against the system of offices in the catholic church to the popular city revolts in early modernity, and then from bourgeois revolutions to large segments of the early labor movement, the reference to the people as opposed to the elites has always played a pivotal role (Dupuy, 2002; Hermet, 2001; Möller, 2020). As the French intellectual historian Pierre Rosanvallon has argued, the 19th century was a decisive stage for the spread of a people-centered politics. National statehood was consolidated and struggles for its constitutionalization became a central site of political conflict. Questions concerning how to conceive of the popular will and how it can be represented amounted to a controversial issue: “Since 1789 the instituted and the instituant, the people moving in the streets and the people embodied in representative institutions, the diversity of social conditions and the unity of the democratic principle were opposing each other” (Rosanvallon, 1998, p. 17). Though partial at the outset, nascent constitutional states established forms of popular legislation and reflected themselves as being authorized by the people as constituent power. Not least, the reference to the people was a point of departure within a politics that conceptualized under the category of “Bonapartism” and “Caesarism”.8 The latter combined personalized leadership with plebiscitarian legitimation, as was the case in Louis Napoleon III's ascent to power that toppled France's democratic revolution in 1848 and paved the way for a “unitary combination” of popular sovereignty and monarchical authority (Groh, 1972, p. 732).

However, the overall turn to the people was only one part of the story. From the early 19th century, a rather critical engagement with popular sovereignty could be identified as well. One could delve at this point into the classical works of the nascent discipline of sociology, but it was probably none other than G. W. F. Hegel who took, in his “Philosophy of Right,” a rather critical stance on popular sovereignty. After an inquiry into the differentiation of social spheres, such as the state, the family, and the market, he advocated for a mixed constitution that should regulate the complexities of modern society instead of subordinating them to the sovereign will of the people. Hegel suspected the latter would lead to totalizing and, ultimately, destructive effects by imposing a political voluntarism that disregarded the historical achievements within these social spheres. He qualified popular sovereignty as “one of those confused thoughts which are based on a garbled notion [Vorstellung] of the people” (Hegel, 1991, §279, 319). He explained that, since popular sovereignty ran the risk of relying on “a formless mass,” it was likely to undermine the “internally organized whole” of the state (Hegel, 1991, §279, 319). With this argument, Hegel set the scene for a whole strand of discussions revolving around the relationship between politics and popular sovereignty. Admittedly, it was not his defense of the state, but the skeptical remarks on achieving historical progress through a people-centered politics that were taken up by Left- and Young Hegelians and then migrated into activist circles.9 From then on, attempts to change society had to deal with a fundamental problem: on the one hand, society could be characterized by a differentiation of social spheres. Against this backdrop, holistic approaches to transforming this ensemble as a whole were considered as being likely to exert destructive effects. But on the other hand, society was conceived as a totality and, hence, a transformative politics required searching for “levers” or windows of opportunity that still transcend the whole context. The main question was: to what extent is a politics that relies on the popular will a viable course of action for overcoming the societal contradictions of modern society?

Most importantly, Marx and Engels, whose works became the intellectual base for European Social Democracy, instigated a shift in evaluating popular politics. It has become a certain trend in recent political philosophy to make use of Marx's early writings in order to think about democracy and social freedom (Abensour, 2011; Honneth, 2016; Leipold, 2020). However, there is no running away from the fact that Marx critically discussed political action. Indebted to Hegel, he started from the assumption that bourgeois societies are regulated by an interplay of different forms in politics (state form), law (legal form), and civil society.10 Thus, Marx not only defended a bold conception of “true democracy” (Marx, 2010e, p. 30) in his early writings, but he was also interested in providing an explanatory model for how the hegemony of the emerging capitalist economy and its ideological tenets were consolidated through a mutual coupling (and separation) of the political, the economic, and the legal sphere.

This point of departure had huge repercussions when it came to clarifying the role of political action. Given the circumstances of modern society, a people-centered politics could not be seen as the privileged site for inducing sudden social change. This led to political tensions within the circles of the early labor movement: as noted by Alan Gilbert, Marx adopted “a long-term strategic view and openly disdained immediate popularity” (Gilbert, 1981, p. 122). His “views differed fundamentally from those of more short-sighted democrats, anarchists, or communists who demanded instant victory (Weitling, Heinzen, Bakunin, Kriege, Ruge)” (Gilbert, 1981, p. 122). Marx remained ambivalent: on the one hand, he lauded democracy as the “solved riddle of the constitution” and defended popular sovereignty against Hegel's conception of statehood in the “Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts” (Marx, 2010b, p. 29). On the other, he was highly critical of approaches to political action that aimed at resurrecting the Jacobin legacy of the French Revolution.11

This critical attitude can be reconstructed from his critique of French insurrectionism in the 1840s.12 By French insurrectionism, one has to understand the circles of revolutionaries—mainly inspired by Filippo Buonarroti's Jacobin activism in the late French Revolution and his later published book “Babeuf's Conspiracy for Equality” (Buonarroti, 1836)—whose aim was to incite an insurrection in the city of Paris and, thereby, commence a revolutionary process “in the name of the sovereign will of the people” (Deppe, 1970, p. 47).13 A central figure was the revolutionary Auguste Blanqui who amounted to political leader in France's revolution of 1830 and from then on stuck to an insurrectionist political strategy (Draper, 1986, 120 ff). Marx and Engels argued that the French insurrectionist circles undermined the “process of revolutionary development” because they envisaged launching “a revolution on the spur of the moment, without the conditions for a revolution” (Marx & Engels, 2010, p. 318). They qualified the insurrectionists as “alchemists of the revolution” who make use of “incendiary bombs, destructive devices of magic effect, revolts which are expected to be all the more miraculous and astonishing in effect as their basis is less rational” (Marx & Engels, 2010, p. 318). In the later introduction to Marx's writings on the class struggles in France, Engels echoed this stance; he described the insurrectionist endeavors as “rebellions in the old style” which relied on “street fighting with barricades,” but eventually turned out to be “outdated” as they did not engage with the central tenets of modern society (Engels, 2010, p. 517).

The voluntaristic approach collapses into an epistemic flaw: the political mind erects limits that undermine the search for adequate strategies in the quest for social change. As this approach revolves around the “omnipotence of the will,” it insinuates that society is governed by the struggle between free-standing will-formations and not by the contradictions between and within social spheres.

This can be read as a critique of people-centered politics. Casting the popular will as the unity that sets everything in motion, the political mind is not able to understand the avenues of historical evolution. Society, however, does not evolve solely through political will-expression, but also through other sites of social change. Still indebted to the legacy of the late French Revolution, this popular voluntarism gives rise to a Jacobin flaw and momentous shortcuts when it comes to self-reflection and strategy choices. People-centered approaches advocate, without proper scrutiny, that the mobilization of the people is the prime strategy of choice. This assumes that any possible defeats must always be due to a weakness of popular will—either it was not mobilized intensely enough, it was not broad enough, or it was diluted. A tragic circle unfolds: the radical activists build barricades and the reformists issue reform bills, and so on, with even more enthusiasm, intensity, and will-power than before. However, they ultimately fail in many cases, not due to weakness of will but due to the avenues of social evolution. By adhering to a narrow political mind, they have deprived themselves of the means for understanding why they failed.

Through this critique, Marx rejected French insurrectionism as well as Ruge's popular appeal to the Prussian King. It may be hyperbolic to follow Shlomo Avineri at this point, who identified in Marx a “stubborn opposition, throughout his life, to a political émeute of the working class” (Avineri, 1969, p. 194). Nevertheless, one can identify an evaluative shift in discussing people-centered politics: instead of engaging in recurrent and, in many cases, utterly failing attempts to change society through collective action centered on the popular will (be it in the guise of reformist or insurrectionary approaches), one must take interest in the more delicate question concerning how political action is able to contribute to the transformation of the systemic set-up of modern societies at all.14

In this passage, the “Randglossen” brought a conception of class-based politics to the fore that opened up an alternative to insurrectionism. It was ultimately taken up by the social democratic current in the labor movement: to overcome the Jacobin flaws, it seemed more plausible to adopt an analytical perspective on capitalist societies and envisage a class-based politics centered on labor.

In sum, Marx and Engels pursued a strategic approach and defined their stances according to the concrete situation at stake. However, as it turned out, the problem of the popular will and popular sovereignty could not be bypassed by transferring it to the economic sphere and class-based politics. The more that social democratic mass parties emerged in different countries, the more the decisive conflicts again revolved around the representation of the people. Not the least, Marx partly changed his attitude toward communal ownership in his late writings and sympathized with parts of the Russian Narodnik movement (e.g. lauding Chernyshevsky, the author of the influential novel “What is to be done?,” in the foreword to the second edition of capital). As evidenced by Jones, this was mainly due to Marx's engagement with the legal regulation of communal land tenure in Germany that ultimately led him to re-evaluate Russia's economic structure (Jones, 2016, 579 ff).18

From the 1870s, European Social Democracy had its heyday. Trade unions and social democratic parties emerged which were committed to a Marxist variety of anti-capitalism and a class-based conception of politics. But Marx was too quick in his forecast of a shift from popular to class-based politics. In particular, European Social Democratic Parties strongly congregated around the struggle for democratizing the political system in the name of the people: “Between the 1870s and 1890s, country by country across the map of Europe, socialist parties were formed to give government by the people coherent, centralized, and lasting political form. Until the First World War and to a great extent since, those parties carried out the main burden of democratic advocacy in Europe” (Eley, 2002, p. 5). The labor movement largely returned to people-centered politics and rallied around the fight for universal suffrage. As Adam Przeworski has demonstrated in his comparative study on European Social Democracy, one can observe a shift from class-based politics to popular politics: while from the 1840s, activists were trying to constitute the proletariat as a distinct force by “separating it from the masses of the people,” from the 1870s the people as mass became the central point of reference (Przeworski, 1987, p. 54).

Bernstein assumed that the working-class could exert the “hegemony within the people” and assemble “completely different elements of the population”—up to the point that the “labor party” and the “people's party” become “identical” (Bernstein, 1899, p. 103).

Although Lenin was still committed to a socialist strategy, he was clear about the need to reduce the complexities of society to a “single picture” and reclaim the popular will.

These underlying connections between Bernstein and Lenin raise the question concerning how to make sense of the oscillation between the critique and the return of a people-centered politics in European Social Democracy. Contrary to Marx's speculations about the transfer of meaningful political struggle from the political sphere to the economy, the political system underwent a further constitutionalization in the 19th century. Though taking part in the capitalist ensemble of social systems, the constitutional state increasingly expanded its role in making collectively binding decisions that claimed to constitute and bind society as a whole. In his encompassing analysis of the advent of modern statehood, the constitutional sociologist Chris Thornhill has demonstrated that “rudimentary features of constitutional orders” were emerging in most European states, guaranteeing “basic mechanisms of representation” as well as “clear public procedures to determine the introduction, promulgation and enforcement of laws” (Thornhill, 2011, p. 254). To contest existing power-relations, it became—under these conditions—attractive to espouse popular sovereignty. The turn to the people was a reaction to the fact that constitutionalism was established (and, vice versa, contributed immensely to the constitutionalization of the political sphere). The existing order was contested by re-claiming the role of the people against the ruling constituted powers.

Rosa Luxemburg's proposal for strategic renewal from the 1900s on reacted to the apparent problem that surrounded this shift. As European Social Democracy increasingly took part in the constitutionalized spheres of modern society, it established internal divisions of labor ranging from the participation in communal and regional councils to the trade unions that started to bargain on institutionalized grounds with the entrepreneurs. Luxemburg was highly critical of social democracy falling prey to dispersion within—what she called—“industrial constitutionalism” (Luxemburg, 2008, p. 134). Instead of achieving partial advances in these different spheres, she advocated a political strategy that aimed at mobilizing the masses through a holistic Volksbewegung (people's movement; Luxemburg, 1974a, p. 149). Luxemburg inserted an innovative twist because she considered such collective action not simply as counter-power; as the following shows, she envisaged a transformative process that was meant to incite collective learning processes. Thereby, she stepped beyond the Jacobin flaws. Politics was not solely concerned with the imposition of will but with the discovery of latent transformative options within the social fabric. Admittedly, she threw the baby out with the bathwater, as will be argued later, because of her generalized dismissive attitude toward all types of societal differentiation. However, one can identify a considerable move from a left to a transformative populism.

At the outset, Luxemburg observed new types of social conflict in modern societies and emphasized the role of new popular movements (Volksbewegungen):20 “The historical hour itself calls for forms of popular movements and creates new ones, improvises hitherto unknown means of struggle, examines and enriches the arsenal of the people, unconcerned with the party's decrees” (Luxemburg, 1974a, p. 149).21 Their characteristic trait was that they were not painstakingly prepared and directed by organized party sections or trade unions. They relied on spontaneous mass activity and eventually created their own institutions of self-organization: the councils.22 Luxemburg gave a systematic outline of this observation in her famous text “The Mass Strike” from 1906. Taking her cue from the strike movements in Russia and the St. Petersburg insurrection in 1905, she relocated the role of collective mass-action. The few industrial workers in Russia at that time were not the only ones to gather in the streets; rather, as Luxemburg analyzed, there was “a many-colored complex of various sections of the population, a chaos of conflicting interests” (Luxemburg, 2008, p. 113). Luxemburg elevated this popular movement to a lesson for European Social Democracy, urging that the repertoire of politics must be expanded: the general mass strike was the decisive step toward making the envisioned social democratic transformation of capitalist societies conceivable.

By focusing its politics on either parliamentarism (political system/state constitution) or on the trade unions and corporatism in the workplaces (economic constitution), social democracy underwent a dispersion. The transformative goal was abandoned as a result of being absorbed within the respective patterns of bargaining and conflict resolution. Class conflict communicated itself not as a general struggle for a new societal whole, but either as a conflict between different parties in the political system running for public office or as a sectoral conflict between specific groups of the workforce and business interests. It dispersed into “a multitude of individual struggles”.

The mass strike, however, presented itself as a course of action that could bring the holistic ambition into play again. For Luxemburg, it should reunite the whole of social democracy into a movement-like unity: taking its cue from simple conflicts—for example, over wages, working hours, and so on—it seemed possible that a popular transgression could address foundational issues in society as a whole.23 Accordingly, short-term disputes, if only properly politicized, could provoke “a spontaneous shaking and tugging at these chains” (Luxemburg, 2008, p. 129), which would put the already constituted procedures and mechanisms of societal differentiation of capitalist societies into question. Luxemburg envisaged a “real people's movement”: “If the mass strike, or rather, mass strikes, and the mass struggle are to be successful, they must become a real people's movement, that is, the widest sections of the proletariat must be drawn into the fight” (Luxemburg, 2008, p. 158).

Interestingly, Luxemburg turned a widely held objection against populist politics upside down. Many observers have cast the holistic standpoint that creeps within notions of the “people” as an expression of unrestrained passions for communal association and irrational impulses toward grasping the whole. But for Luxemburg, the Volksbewegung was the privileged site for rationally understanding how capitalism as an encompassing societal framework operates precisely because it is geared toward grasping the social whole. One can say that Luxemburg proceeded from a left-populism—understood as invoking the people in order to further certain political objectives and advance in the struggle for political power—to a transformative populism: it should establish a process of collective learning “from below” and overcome the Jacobin flaws that Luxemburg saw—again—resurfacing in the Russian Revolution of 1917: “The Bolsheviks are the historical heirs of the English Levelers and the French Jacobins” (Luxemburg, 1974c, p. 342).

Thus, politics is not only about imposing political will. It is about the elaboration of an adequate world-disclosing critique and an open process of self-correction. According to Luxemburg, a laborious “thorny way of self-liberation” opens up, on which the Volksbewegung should be able to free itself from superfluous relations of domination in a collective learning process.

In these passages, Luxemburg argued that leadership plays an instrumental role in fostering the learning process. Full-blown leaderism, however, is detrimental to self-emancipation as it thwarts knowledge-gathering. Luxemburg hints at the possibility that the role of leaders and cadres is subverted in the process. Here, she alludes to a rather Rousseauian conception of vertical organ separation: in the course of the successful Volksbewegung, the cadres switch their roles from being leaders to simply becoming executive “tools” of mass-action's volonté générale. Admittedly, it remains unclear how this switch can be effectively achieved. However, Luxemburg refers to the possibility that the basic structures of political action themselves can be subverted. Again, the emphasis is on an open-ended process that transcends the limitations of politics—be it the heroic imposition of political will on social matter or the role of personalized leadership.

To be sure, Luxemburg often formulated in general statements leaving us with crucial challenges: what are the conditions for movements that endure rather than fail? How can we make sense of collective learning extending from the macro-social level to its micro-foundations? A restatement would, obviously, be a demanding endeavor.25 This should not lead us to overlook the fact that Luxemburg's approach can be reconstructed as an advance; it can be seen as a step in a learning process itself because it drew conclusions from the critical evaluation of existing experiences ranging from Jacobin flaws and the limitations of class-politics to the dispersive tendencies in industrial constitutionalism.

As we have seen, it is possible to reconstruct the reflections that surrounded the advent of social democratic mass parties as already addressing some intricacies of left populism. European Social Democracy started as a movement that adhered to a critique of popular sovereignty. Despite these insights, it reverted back to the popular will. One should be careful to equate European Social Democracy with the recent surge of left populisms since the 2010s in Europe. But, as pointed out by numerous studies (Gerbaudo, 2017; Katsambekis & Kioupkiolis, 2019; Kioupkiolis, 2016), a similar tendency can be observed: Starting from social movement practices and ideologies, the turn to a people-centered politics in countries such as Spain, France, or Greece were identified.

As demonstrated in this article, the recurrence of populism should not be seen as an interplay between anti-populism and populism, but as a learning cycle. The concept of a learning cycle in the context of social movements was used by the German Historian Michael Vester in his seminal study on the advent of the British labor movement from 1792 to 1848 (Vester, 1975, 25 ff).26 In this study, Vester examined how the practical “cycles of struggle” in the emergent strikes and campaigns intersected with intellectual advances in drawing conclusions from these experiences, leading to a refinement and re-orientation of political strategy. In spite of setbacks and failures, Vester was able to identify “feedback cycles” at the intersection of political action and intellectual reflection (Vester, 1975, p. 19).

The cycle that this article has reconstructed passed through three stages: it started with stage one in the mid-19th century, where Marx and Engels drew conclusions from the apparent Jacobin flaws of insurrectionary tendencies. They assumed that a sound conception of politics should take the structure of modern capitalist society into account. This led to the transferal of promising courses of political action to the economic sphere and its inherent contradictions (“class-politics”). In stage two, in the late-19th century, European Social Democracy returned in all its reformist and revolutionary ramifications to a politics that aimed at achieving social transformation through invoking the popular will. This was largely due to the constitutionalization of the political system that was meant to take collectively binding decisions and made it necessary to overcome class politics. In stage three, Luxemburg drew conclusions from the obvious problems of industrial constitutionalism by conceiving of a transformative populism: on the one hand, it should overcome the dispersive flaws through invoking a holistic Volksbewegung as transformative lever. On the other, it should overcome the Jacobin flaws through an emphasis on collective learning processes. The envisaged Volksbewegung was not only the place of counter-power, but also of exploration, the gathering of knowledge, and self-correction. Thereby, Luxemburg laid the foundations for a transformative populism: a populism that should not only further simple goals or conquer public offices, but should also transform society and the agents themselves up to the point where the characteristic contradictions and societal differentiation of modern society are transcended.

Luxemburg's take on collective learning processes was rather sketchy. It would go beyond the scope of this article to provide a comprehensive account of the relation of politics, populism, and collective learning processes. However, some short-comings of Luxemburg's account must be considered. A serious problem—which has accompanied “Luxemburgist” political approaches from the outset—was that she basically identified social differentiation as such with capitalist society and rejected it in all its ramifications. Adopting a rather vitalistic perspective, she advocated “uninhibited, effervescent life,” “creative power,” and “social instincts instead of egoism, mass initiative in place of lethargy” (Luxemburg, 1974c, 360 ff). Accordingly, the inquiry is, from the outset, restricted because constituted procedures and mechanisms of social differentiation are seen as always playing out in a negative direction—be it through co-opting opposition into social systems or through obfuscating a sound perspective on the social whole. Here, Luxemburg tended to neglect the state of the art of her own social movement, namely European Social Democracy, which was concerned with a more sophisticated analysis of modern society. At least, it has always been conceded in this tradition that differentiation processes can play out in a progressive direction and that capitalism must be overcome from within the internal contradictions of social systems—and not solely through assuming a generalized oppositional “mass”-standpoint on the social whole. Luxemburg neglected the fact that there can be many non-populist moments where enthusiastic self-empowerment and holistic movement may not be conducive to bringing about social transformation. By inflating the Volksbewegung, her conception runs the risk of undermining the necessary collective learning as it becomes difficult to explore non-populist courses of action that may prove to be promising in many situations.27

Thereby, she deprived transformative populism of the means to concretize learning processes. Mechanisms of differentiation are urgently needed in order to explore the world, cope with the flood of knowledge, and achieve (and acknowledge) partial advances. By the dissolution into holistic mass dynamism, the Volksbewegung can collapse into a blockade because the learning process is overloaded from the outset. In light of the holistic project, every partial step weighs itself against the backdrop of a “whole” that must be immediately approached. It remains difficult to establish indirect or more complex strategies of goal attainment. The scope of learning is severely restricted as everything is geared toward not touching upon the ideal of mass mobilization.28 A restatement of transformative populism would have to rely on a more open mode of inquiry that considers the merits of a holistic perspective, but does not dismiss mechanisms of differentiation from the outset. Most importantly, a reflexivity is needed that keeps itself open to the manifold sources of social transformation—scientific knowledge, economic innovation, aesthetic experience—instead of constantly highlighting the importance of high intensity movement activism.

To conclude, a nuanced inspection must be conducted in order to determine when populist approaches seem suitable for furthering social transformation in a given situation or when—to the contrary—they prove self-defeating. Instead of advocating left populism or anti-populism per se, it is necessary to engage with more context-dependent inquiries of left populisms in history, as well as in our contemporary world, and ask whether they incite or block collective learning processes, whether they regress to typical flaws, or whether they draw conclusions from past experiences.

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