Barely into Occupy’s second month, Daniel raised a warning about populism. “This, along with opportunism, is the biggest danger. It could set the movement back decades, and the American left is totally unprepared,” he said.
Most of the rest of us didn’t have a clear conception of what populism was. I had some vague notion that it referred to ideas that were prevalent while not explicitly working-class-oriented, but I didn’t understand what the problem was. Public wrath at “the elite” or “the 1 percent” was basically good, wasn’t it? We were so excited that something—anything—was finally happening that this wasn’t on the top of our worry list (inactivity was). But Daniel, who had seen populism wipe out years of revolutionary work in Haiti, insisted that we talk about it.
He proposed a document on the topic for us to discuss within One Struggle, and worked with two others to produce it. “Too much jargon,” was the verdict of one young member. “Our conception of popular movements needs to be more fluid,” said another. With so much going on in the first months of Occupy’s rapid growth, we couldn’t collectively focus on it long enough to refine it to a point where we could all agree on it, so it wasn’t publicly released. (I include excerpts as an Appendix with the group’s permission.)
Daniel set the topic aside for the time being. He’d tried. “One Struggle itself is separated by only a thin hairline from populism,” he said. “It’s the nature of this moment. At least we raised the question among ourselves.”
Later I was reading Slavoj Žižek’s Living in the End Times. He also warned: “The key question now is: who will articulate this [social] discontent? Will it be left to nationalist populists to exploit? Therein resides the big task for the Left.”
Most of us in the US don’t understand populism or many other concepts relevant to political struggle. Even those of us who are active lag far behind much of the world in our grasp of theory—we don’t recognize views as coherent lines, and therefore we’re incapable of calling them by name, much less foreseeing their far-ranging implications.
But we can’t keep blithely disdaining the use of “jargon.” These words may feel cumbersome and persnickety in our casual, 140-characters-or-less, news-o-tainment culture, but their precision allows us to conceptualize, identify, and decide to accept or reject ideological and political phenomena that could make all the difference to our eventual success or failure.