This post was made for an After Hours event and doesn’t reflect the positions of the organization as a whole.
Why This Topic Is Interesting
Populism and critiques of populism have a mixed history
- [[Thomas Frank]] has argued against the perception that liberals held that the original U.S. [[Populist]] movement was fueled by ignorance, resentment, or authoritarianism. It was rooted in a mass economic uprising of farmers, workers, and cooperatives. They worked through newspapers, lecturers, and political education about money, banks, monopoly, and democracy.[1]
- Treating all populism as stupid or reactionary only replicates what liberals did and leaves us sounding like an expert class telling working people to leave politics to professionals.
Populists are right about elite failure
- People do not trust elites for good reason. Wars, deindustrialization, unaffordable housing, austerity, and corporate power have all been managed by people with credentials, foundations, think tanks, and industrial authority, with little input from the vast majority of people.
- Liberals often protect these people through liberal politeness. Populists name corruption, contempt, and narrow class rule.
The limits of representation
- The working class is not automatically unified. Social movements do not automatically cohere. People do not move from exploitation to socialist politics as if history were a conveyor belt.
- Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe saw that political unity has to be constructed. Demands around wages, rents, debt, and climate do not automatically merge into one movement. Their answer was left populism: build a “people” by linking fragmented demands against a common enemy through slogans, parties, leaders, and shared political symbols.
- Michael Bray’s critique is that this answer makes representation carry too much of the burden. Once class interests and material leverage are treated as too “essentialist” to organize around, unity has to come from the representative who names the people: the party, the leader, the empty signifier. The result is that the people are often constituted from above after the fact, rather than organized from below through shared struggle.[2]
- The question is not whether unity must be constructed. It must be. The question is what constructs it: leaders and slogans that represent a people, or democratic organizations that help workers and tenants discover their common interests, test their differences, and build collective power?
Daniel Tutt’s and Christopher Derick Varn’s challenge is that populism names the anger but incorrectly builds the subject
- Varn names three dangers: Bonapartist leadership that manages conflicting class interests from above, the flattening of class differences inside “the people,” and authoritarian state responses when populist governments cannot satisfy the contradictory demands they collect.[3]
- Tutt adds that populism turns real class antagonism into a two-class moral map: underdogs or plebs against elites. That map can feel intuitive, but it does not give organizers a serious account of class composition, ideology, political economy, or organizational limits.[4]
Challenges for WCU
- It would be too easy for us to say, “Yes, left populism is bad; we already believe in organization.” But we can still ask ourselves: Where does WCU still drift toward vague people-talk, moral anti-elite language, or a romantic picture of the working class?
What Left Populism Gets Right
It recognizes that technocratic liberalism is politically exhausted
- Professionalized politics often tells people that experts, nonprofits, courts, and consultants will handle problems on their behalf. That model has lost trust, for good reasons. There has been a long shift away from mass member organizations and toward professional advocacy organizations with weak ties to working-class communities.[5][6]
It tries to break out of tiny-left isolation
- A left that only speaks to people who already share its language will not become a mass force. Left populism at least asks how to speak across existing ideological boundaries.
It understands that politics needs an enemy
- “People vs. elites” gives people a conflict they can understand. The problem is not that it names enemies. The problem is that it often names them too vaguely and assumes “the people” have no internal conflicts.
It can open a bridge from common grievance to class politics
- Anti-elite anger can be a starting point. A tenant may first say, “politicians do not care.” A worker may first say, “the system is rigged.” A socialist organizer can begin there.
It notices that affect matters
- People do not become political through correct analysis alone. They move through anger, shame, hope, betrayal, loyalty, fear, pride, and shared experience. The left populist insight is that politics has to speak to these affects.
Where Left Populism Breaks Down
“The people” can hide class antagonisms
- In a local fight, “the people” might include tenants and small landlords, warehouse workers and contractors, immigrant workers and employers, union members and union officials, homeowners and renters, nonprofit staff and the people their grants claim to serve.
- Those groups may share anger at “the elites.” They do not share the same interests once a fight gets costly.
- If a campaign refuses to name those conflicts, the better-organized and better-funded layers usually win inside the coalition.
There is no democracy without organization
- When “the people” are internally divided, someone has to represent them and paper over those differences. In left populist strategy, that role often falls to a political candidate, media figure, or informal inner circle.
- A critique of La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, argues that a movement can call itself horizontal while leaving ordinary participants without dues, rights, representative structures, or any meaningful ways to discipline leadership.[7]
Popularity is not leverage
- Popularity can help. It can spread language, attract people, raise money, and make a campaign visible. But leverage means the ability to force, block, discipline, bargain, or punish your enemy.
- An elected socialist without a disciplined organization behind them might have a lot of attention, but that does not necessarily mean they have leverage. A large rally without workplace, tenant, or member organizations has visibility, not necessarily the leverage to impact capital. And as we have seen, a slogan without institutions can be hollowed out and reused by stronger forces.
Workers become an identity instead of a governing class
- A lot of left politics now treats “working class” as a cultural identity or moral symbol. That can produce anti-PMC branding, hard-hat aesthetics, or speeches made “for” workers without giving workers power over strategy.[8]
- The Marxist point is not that workers are morally better people. It is that workers occupy a strategic relation to capitalist production and social reproduction. Their power has to be organized, not flattered.
Class formation is difficult, costly, and contingent
- If class formation is not automatic, then “the people” cannot simply be named into existence. Working people often know their interests and still avoid collective action because retaliation, job loss, and fear are real. Organization has to lower those costs and increase confidence.[9]
Base-building can become a trap too
- The answer to left populism cannot be to simply say we should base build instead and relax. The history of the base-building tendency shows that projects were intervening in real problems but often drifted into service provision, charity, social work, or programs with political education added after the fact.[10]
- Some base-building projects treated the working class as an abstraction to be reached, rather than asking how working-class people were already informally organized, what they actually demanded, and what forms of organization made sense in their lives.[11]
Hyperpolitics makes everything feel urgent and nothing feel durable
- Hyperpolitics describes a world where political emotion rises while unions, parties, churches, clubs, and civic membership decline.[12] Alex Hochuli’s account of anti-politics and hypermediated politics points in the same direction: politics is everywhere, but it is often personalized, performative, and weakly institutionalized.[13]
- Left populism can fit this world too easily. It gives hyperpolitics a language and a campaign, but not always an organization that survives the campaign.
References
Thomas Frank, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism (Metropolitan Books, 2020). ↩︎
Michael Bray, “Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Post-Marxism Can’t Give Us a Political Strategy,” Jacobin, July 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/07/left-populism-laclau-mouffe-post-structuralism-politics-class. ↩︎
Strange Exiles X Revol, “Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn,” Strange Exiles Podcast, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qTWiu9ep88. ↩︎
Strange Exiles X Revol, “Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn,” Strange Exiles Podcast, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qTWiu9ep88. ↩︎
Darel E. Paul, “Why NGOs Run Your World,” Compact, February 23, 2024, https://www.compactmag.com/article/why-ngos-run-your-world/. ↩︎
Anthony Nadler, “How Progressive Civil Society Became Professional NGO Culture,” Jacobin, December 22, 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/12/civil-society-working-class-democrats. ↩︎
Fiedia Armoise and Armanda Levi, “The Populists and the Workers Party,” March 4, 2026, https://prometheus-mag.com/2026/03/04/the-populists-and-the-workers-party/. ↩︎
Strange Exiles X Revol, “Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn,” Strange Exiles Podcast, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qTWiu9ep88. ↩︎
Vivek Chibber, “How Capitalism Endures,” Compact, May 13, 2022, https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-capitalism-endures/. ↩︎
C. Derick Varn, “Varn Vlog Solo: More Thoughts on the Base Building Tendency,” June 9, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS3kfbqLbnc. ↩︎
Teresa Kalisz, “Letter: The Fatal Flaw of Base Building,” Cosmonaut, November 29, 2022, https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/11/7230/. ↩︎
Anton Jäger, “Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences,” February 10, 2026. ↩︎
Alex Hochuli, “After Anti-Politics: The Apeiron,” July 29, 2022, https://sublationmedia.com/after-anti-politics-the-apeiron/. ↩︎