A Cauldron of Anxiety: Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century by William Briggs

Author:William Briggs [Briggs, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789046090
Google: eB-YzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Zero Books
Published: 2021-11-15T23:27:55.162359+00:00

The state learns to embrace populism

Populism ought to be a worrying thing for the state. Its theorists and, importantly, its supporters rail against the “elite”. The state apparatus, one would have to accept, is the embodiment of the political elite. It is the state, after all, that calls the shots. Populism, in any telling of the theory, demands a “bottom-up” approach to politics. The state and populism, one might imagine, are sworn enemies. Something rather odd seems to have happened along the way. Populism has begun to be legitimised. While this might be odd, it is not entirely unusual.

Capitalism and the state have a long and somewhat distinguished career in co-opting ideas and organisations to serve their version of the “greater good”. The organisations of the working class are a prime example. It was briefly discussed earlier how the union movement became legitimised and integrated into the state through a three-phase process of first, hostility, then tolerance and finally cooperation and partnership. A consequence of this integration, as far as the working class is concerned, has been a loss of independence. This is by no means a recent development in state and class relations. “Capitalism is less and less willing to reconcile itself to the independence of trade unions. It demands of the reformist bureaucracy...that they become transformed into its political police before the eyes of the working class” (Trotsky 1972: 11). Trotsky wrote those words in 1926. How is it not possible to see similarities in how populism is being regarded?

A “bottom-up” movement can, of course, be a little troubling if you want to maintain control of things. Slowly, the language begins to change. We begin to see the promotion of the idea that populism might have an “up-side”. Damon Acemoglu and James Robinson, writing in the influential American Foreign Policy magazine (2019), describe two potential states – the despotic and the impaired – and that between these two runs a narrow corridor. It is in this corridor, they assert, that liberty can rise. Speaking specifically about the American experience, they argue that despite all of the negatives associated with populism, its xenophobia and its nationalism, this very bottom-up mobilisation has the capacity to pull the US back from the edge. What we appear to be witnessing is the legitimisation of populism, the accommodation of the state to populist rhetoric and the integration of the disempowered into the apparatuses of state that first disempowered them. It’s a neat bit of conjuring.

This idea is given credence by recent research from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. As at March 2019, 68 per cent of G20 GDP was controlled by governments that could be described as populist. The same research shows that in 2018 there were 20 elected state leaders who were described as populist (Kyle and Gultchin 2019). What the research is less clear about is that there are more and more instances of mainstream parties adopting elements of populist ideas. The case of Australia, for instance, shows both governing and opposition parties taking on board policies that are clearly populist in nature.

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