GMT

This is caused by two main factors. “Class” has been identified in the modern tradition with “class as a political subject.” In Central Europe a hundred and twenty years ago, “socialism” meant in the press, simply, “the proletariat, the working class,” and vice versa.

The workers’ movement was internationalist, as it was also opposed to property, to the state, to the family, to the Church, to the army, to corrective justice, and so on in the revolutionary manner. The tone of the most humdrum trade union meeting then would astonish the boldest ultra-left vanguard groupuscule today.

The movement was destroyed by social democracy and Stalinism, precisely because they have abandoned the idea of communism and created two versions of planned state capitalism, quite egalitarian and plebeian, and have weakened or obliterated altogether the political class rule of the old bourgeoisie, but did not (or could not do) anything about the separation of the means of production (means of subsistence) from the producers. Commodity production and wage labor continued unabated.

The official communist parties had become nationalist already in the Popular Front period (in the 1930s) and remained so until the discomfiture of the traditional left in 1989. The proletariat exists, as it were, “objectively,” but it has vanished “subjectively” — that is, politically.

Second, cross-class solidarity against hegemonic powers is nothing new, it has always been implicit in revolutions (even October was in part a peasant jacquerie and an anti-war uprising — no pure workers’ commune — and it was consolidated after a brief war against Western interventionist armies) and especially in anti-imperialist struggles.

“Populism,” particularly its egalitarian, “left” variety, is nothing else but an alliance of different classes and groups against hegemonic elites or powers perceived as such, and I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world — on the contrary.

But this, too, shows that we haven’t leapt over the threshold of “socialist revolution” yet. These movements are aiming at economic and social equality, at an equality of dignity, at true popular sovereignty, at national independence, things traditionally believed by Marxists to be bourgeois in character, as they are not addressing the substance, the deep structure of capitalism.

An authentic bourgeois democracy — if there is such — could cure the ills which populists are taking exception to. And it might. We should support, critically and selectively, such movements, as we are on the side of the oppressed, but it would be a great mistake to believe that they have much to do with socialism. We are supposed to be internationalist, not anti-Western, even if the nationalism of the downtrodden is morally superior to the chauvinism of the rich.