Seven Essays on Populism expressly takes the title of one of the founding texts of Latin American politics: Siete ensayos sobre la realididad peruana by José Carlos Mariátegui. Following the example of the Peruvian essayist, the aim of this book is to show, behind populism, the singularity of Latin America’s historical, cultural, and political trajectory (54–55). From there, it tries to show its “situated universalism” (xxiii). However, the main difference with Mariátegui’s perspective is the scientific purpose of such an analysis. Unlike the Peruvian sociologist, Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia reject any objectivity: their aim is not to produce a scientific analysis of populism, informed by sociology or history, but to develop a militant strategy based on the phenomenon (xxii).
Each of the essays focuses on a problem related to populism. The first one provides a theoretical framework for rethinking populism: the authors reject its definition as a “political moment” (4) or a “conjunctural political strategy” (20) in order to develop an ontological understanding. Following Laclau and Mouffe, they define populism as an ontological construction of politics: a certain logic of structuring political identities. The second essay follows this idea to criticize the “ontic classification” (22) of a “left-wing populism” and a “right-wing populism.” If populism is not a contingent political strategy, then it cannot fit into a right-wing and a left-wing logic. First, this divide is not present in Latin America in the same form as in Europe, which makes populisms on either side of the Atlantic truly incommensurable. Second, and more important, the “peoples” of the two populisms have nothing in common. So-called right-wing populism is based on “a mechanism of identitarian exclusion—by showing that an external element threatens identity” (42), while left-wing populism constructs a people “as something to be built on the basis of constitutive difference and its ontological indeterminacy” (42).
The third essay seeks to think about the relationship between populism and neoliberalism. Contrary to the arguments asserting an inherent link between these two modes of constructing political subjectivities, the authors highlight their opposition. Compared to the neoliberal individual obliged to be responsible for everything he or she lacks, populism constructs a type of political subject based on another model of “absence”: the absence of this “political other” who allows, through their unsatisfied demands, meaning to be given to individual dissatisfactions. The “people” of populism is the very antithesis of the neoliberal individual (60).
In the fourth essay, the authors criticize the idea that populism, with its antiestablishment politics, is incapable of creating its own political institutions. On the contrary, Latin American populisms show “a form of articulation between political leaders and popular demands that takes as its object of inquiry the egalitarian aspect of institutions” (67). The fifth essay is devoted to the national dimension of populist identities. The authors rightly insist on the symbolic openness of the “national-popular” identities linked to populisms. Related to the anti-imperialist political imaginary that characterizes Latin America as a “global periphery” (96), this openness allows for “constituting internationalist solidarity among oppressed subjects” (91).
In the sixth essay, the authors outline a populist strategy. It consists in breaking with “the classic logic of the left; namely, to embrace a predetermined subject and cause” (110). That is to say, the working class and the socialist cause, to build a people against neoliberal rationality (112) without any guarantee of the political landscape that popular struggles would draw in the future (107).
The seventh and final essay attempts to articulate this populist strategy with feminism. Their “missed encounters” (117) would be due to feminists’ focus on the domestic sphere to the detriment of structural political antagonisms, and to populists’ failure to take into account the articulatory potential of feminist mobilizations (128) and the essential contribution of women to the reproduction of social life (119).
The book’s interest is twofold. First, the authors’ decolonial perspective makes it possible to rethink populism from its structuring in Southern societies, as opposed to the “Eurocentric tendency” (77) to understand it in light of liberal modernity. In this respect, the book is innovative because it approaches populism from a very welcome “epistemic decolonization” angle. It successfully criticizes this mainstream discourse, both right and left, which leads European intellectual and political elites to reject populism (and Latin America with it) as unreasonable, resentful, and negative (30–31).
Second, the book shows the potential of a left populist strategy for our neoliberal democracies in crisis. The strategy goes hand in hand with a valuable analytical clarification: populism is not transideological, and the so-called right-wing populism has nothing in common with left-wing populism. Biglieri and Cadahia insist on the need to categorize differently the political movements that continue to be wrongly confused under the name of populism, referring to the so-called right-wing populisms as a synthesis between fascism and neoliberalism. “The identitarian logic of what has been called right-wing populism is in reality a reactivation of fascism, in Europe and Latin America alike …, which has the particularity of combining an identitarian and immunitarian logic with neoliberalism” (39–40). On this point, the authors go beyond one of the main aporias of the approach they strictly follow: the Essex School, which considers that the populist logic structures both the radical left and the contemporary far right.
While this distinction is relevant, the book nevertheless identifies populism with genuinely emancipatory politics: in Latin America, “the triumph of populism has meant access for plebeian forces to the State as an inscription surface for emancipatory popular demands” (47). This loses sight of the concrete dynamics of Latin American populisms, which have created strong power relationships between popular struggles, the state, and economic interests. Even in the most successful populist experiments, Latin American states have not been mere tabulae rasae at the disposal of popular demands. The authors give a few examples from neopopulisms: “the media and same-sex marriage laws in Argentina [under Cristina Kirchner], the nationalization of water in Bolivia [under Morales], or the regulation of domestic workers in Ecuador [under Correa]” (49). One might retort: Maduro’s repression of social movements, the adoption (against the 2016 referendum) of indefinite presidential reelection in Bolivia, the pursuit of an extractivist policy in Ecuadorian Amazonia at the expense of indigenous people! The complex reality of populisms, which is not as “pure” as the authors think, disappears here behind the concepts; in a Hegelian way, populism becomes a kind of history’s Geist.
This argumentative drift can be easily explained. Biglieri and Cadahia do not deal with the historiography of populist experiences, or with their political sociology, on the pretext (originally formulated by the Essex School) that they would prevent us from grasping the “ontological” dimension of the phenomenon (13–19, 66). In doing so, they overlook the contradictions of concrete populist experiences, which should positively inform a political strategy. Biglieri and Cadahia consider that this “empirical perspective”, analyzed in 8 pages of a 132-page book, would manifest the same flaws as those of the prevailing antipopulist discourse: “the assumption that populism represents … an unsatisfactory response to a purported European model delineating the horizon of progress for any kind of democracy” (5). However, empirical research on populism is broader, richer, and more innovative than the authors believe, reducing it to three paradigms from half a century ago: modernization theory, Marxist analyses, and comparative political science.
Drawing more on empirical works would not have taken the authors farther away from the grail of ontology, but would have confronted them with the ambivalent reality of political processes. Staying on the Latin American terrain, how to defend unilaterally the idea that populism is a path to democratic emancipation tout court? If populism refers, as the authors agree (3), to the three matrix experiences of Peronism, Varguism, and Cardenism, and then to the governments of Chávez and Maduro, Morales, Correa, Lula da Silva, and Cristina Kirchner, how to ignore the contradictions of these political experiences, certainly marked by democratization processes but also by personalism, ideological polarization, and in some cases, by authoritarian drifts? Are these unintended, secondary, or negligible effects of “actually existing populisms” to quote the classic article by Ípola and Portantiero? Is criticizing the populist leaders a form of acquiescence to the neoliberal establishment that they criticize, and a reproduction of the “stereotypes historically associated with Eurocentric epistemic colonialism” (78)?
That is highly questionable; the mission of social sciences is to exercise critique, however ideologically close to the positions defended by populist leaders the analysts may be. From this standpoint, it is undeniable that Latin American populist leaders are politically different in their exercise of power from totalitarian leaders (85–86). But this depends on the durability of their egalitarian articulation with social movements, which, in turn, depends on the autonomy of popular organizations from the populist state and of democratic institutions from the leader’s will. The example of Perón addressing his supporters on May 1, 1974, with which the authors are certainly familiar, shows one drift and the other.
Including these real dynamics of populism could have led the authors to more prudence, due to the greater complexity of the phenomenon. The debates on “real socialisms” in the 1960s forced some defenders of the communist utopia, such as those of Socialisme ou Barbarie (Castoriadis and Lefort), to deal with this complexity of concrete politics. This is to avoid, inter alia, that this defense of populism, bordering on a “new political theology” to use Wendy Brown’s expression (xvi), remains as criticizable as the ideological invective of antipopulists.
