Excerpts from One Struggle internal document (not finalized)
. . . Through history, powerful movements for social and economic liberation have been co-opted and diverted by populism with very reactionary, repressive results, such as the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, the election of the imperialist puppet Martelly (“Sweet Micky”) in Haiti, and the ascendency of the Muslim Brotherhood within the struggle against Mubarak in Egypt.
. . . Populism is a way of thinking that doesn’t acknowledge the fact that we live in a system of class domination—that the capitalist class exploits the working class, and uses the middle classes to stabilize this social inequality. Instead, populist rhetoric masks this reality by contrasting more vague economic/social divisions, commonly “the people vs. the elite.” In other words, populism hides class struggle. Some commonly populist concepts in use are: the dispossessed, disenfranchised, oppressed, 99% . . . concepts that describe a general condition without addressing its root cause and core contradictions.
The majority of people in the US consider themselves “middle class,” even many who actually belong to the working class. The concept of middle class itself is often constructed empirically in order to defray class contradictions. Thus there is not widespread consciousness of working class anti-capitalist interests—fundamentally, that capitalism must be eliminated and that the ruling class (large capitalists and their high-level representatives) are an enemy to be defeated.
Instead, the petit bourgeoisie (“middle class”), which has some privileges and advantages within this system, tends to promote its own interests as universal. Vague terms such as “freedom,” “democracy,” and “fairness” are not given context. What does it mean to have “freedom” and “democracy” if we are trapped in a system characterized by capitalist class dictatorship, a system that is fundamentally exploitative and oppressive?
The danger, then, is that when the petit bourgeoisie achieves the partial reforms that it wants, it can then snuggle back under the wing of the ruling class, and end up abandoning the working class and even turn against it. This strangles the process of liberation and turns it into its opposite.
The ruling class understands this very well, and leans on the petit bourgeoisie to divert the overall struggle back into the framework of the system. In South Africa, for example, as soon as the interests of the petit bourgeoisie and ruling classes were satisfied, they quickly moved to squash the workers’ struggle for total emancipation, by claiming that the workers were promoting instability against the newly reformed state. And so we see that even decades after the end of apartheid, the conditions of the vast majority of South Africans have not changed. A similar process occurred in Nicaragua after the fall of Somoza.
. . . Global capitalism is a system that is structured upon, enforces, and reproduces domination. It is our enemy. Our goal must be to liberate ourselves by eliminating this exploitative system altogether. We must keep this uppermost in mind—and learn our history and political theory—if we are to avoid being the unwitting foot-soldiers of any of the fractions of the capitalist class. The struggle against opportunism must be linked with the struggle against populism in order for our struggles to advance.