Abstract
The motives for writing this essay are twofold. First, there is a risk that the stigma currently associated with populism may contaminate the notions of people and popular struggles that are so relevant in the Latin American political and organizational context. Thus, this essay contributes towards overcoming the predominant discussion on populism from the perspective of the Global North West. The second motive arises from the understanding that the organizational processes within popular movements and struggles cannot be comprehensively studied without fully appreciating the knowledge theoretically elaborated in, and that emerges from below, which most often remains restricted to the practices and spaces of struggle. Dussel’s philosophy and ethics of liberation can contribute to a renewal of the way we study and theorize organization to include the radical potentiality of developing anti-management studies in the engagement with popular struggles, such as those organized against the destructive impacts of business and management in the production and reproduction of people’s lives and livelihoods. Therefore, this contribution is directed specifically to the study and theorization of these processes, providing inspiration for our practices of co-constructing knowledge that can be relevant and meaningful for activists and their organizational processes. Besides that, Dussel’s philosophy and ethics of liberation also provide contributions for the negative critique of populism as the political expression of fetishized vertical power that, in concrete historical situations, subordinates the original foundational popular power.
The motives for writing this essay are twofold. First, there is a risk that the stigma currently associated with populism may contaminate the notions of people and popular struggles that are so relevant in the Latin American political and organizational context. Thus, this essay contributes towards overcoming the predominant discussion on populism from the perspective of the Global North West (Masood and Nisar, 2020). The second motive arises from the understanding that the organizational processes within popular movements and struggles cannot be comprehensively studied without fully appreciating the knowledge theoretically elaborated in, and that emerges from below, which most often remains restricted to the practices and spaces of struggle (Rauber, 2004).
According to Kipfer (2016), ‘the ambiguity of populism alerts us to the challenge of pinning down the meaning of the popular’ (p. 1) in social life and political praxis. Therefore, the aim of this essay is to argue for the relevance of the people and the popular when addressing the organizational, political and strategic horizon of social struggles from below by contrasting Dussel’s contribution on the subject with Laclau’s (2005a) proposition of politics as populism.
Dussel and Laclau 1 are public intellectuals who share the perspective that nothing is definitive and there is always the possibility of transformation. Both positioned themselves in solidarity with popular processes intended to transform existing political institutions. However, there are important differences regarding the content of their propositions. After discussing some of those differences, I briefly address the opportunities offered by Dussel’s philosophy and ethics of liberation towards the development of an anti-management organizational perspective in the study of popular struggles.
Dussel’s philosophy and ethics of liberation seek to contribute to the liberation of the oppressed by elucidating and unmasking the sources of that oppression (Mendieta, 2007). It is based on an ethical-normative material principle enunciated as follows: Whoever acts ethically presupposes a priori and always in actu the requirements [. . .] of the reproduction and self-responsible development of the human subject’s life, as mediations with the practical truth, in a community of life, in the perspective of a good cultural and historical life [. . .], which is in solidarity and have as ultimate reference the humanity and, therefore, has a universal claim. (Dussel, 2004: 345)
The Other is at the centre of this proposition. This category refers to a position of exteriority that is indispensable for understanding the experience of domination and exclusion in its multiple dimensions: at the world dimension (since the beginning of the European expansion in 1492 – the original constitutive fact of modernity), at the national dimension (elites–working class and people), at the erotic-gender dimension, at the pedagogical–cultural dimension, at the racial dimension and so on. (Dussel, 2008a).
Dussel (2001) realized that the category of social class was important, but insufficient to address the various concrete aspects of oppression, such as those of gender, pedagogy, politics, culture, race and ecology. Looking for inspiration, he asked himself what Marx’s thoughts on people were. As part of the study of the Grundrisse, Dussel (1985) found that Marx used the word pauper (poor in Latin) to refer to those expelled from the pre-bourgeois mode of production. When there was not yet a working class (‘living work as capital’), there were the poor and the socio-historic community of the people. Examining Marx’s historical analysis of the dissolution of one economic system and the emergence of another, Dussel (1985, 2001) was able to confirm his intuition that exteriority was the connection between the people and the poor as victims of the system. This Other of the system ‘is the essence and origin of the critique, the protest, the rebellion and, in some extreme situations, of the revolution’ (Dussel, 2016: 13).
From this starting point, Dussel (2008b) develops the political concept of ‘the social bloc of the oppressed’ (pp. 74–75), based on at least three sources of inspiration: (1) Fidel Castro’s reference to the people when he speaks of struggle and includes ‘all those who know misfortune and, therefore, are capable of fighting with limitless courage’; (2) Latin American indigenous tradition, in which ‘the word pueblo refers to concrete ways of living in community based on the “we” that has been forgotten by modern, Western experience’ and (3) the interpretation of Gramsci’s (1971) notion of the historical bloc as the political expression of a constructed collective will of subaltern social groups.
In Dussel’s (2008b) interpretation, a bloc ‘is not hard as a stone but instead represents a whole that can be both integrated and disintegrated’ (p. 76). It is social because ‘it originates from conflicts in the material field (ecological extinction, economic poverty, the destruction of cultural identity)’. The people constitutes itself in the struggle, in ‘critical political conjunctures when it achieves explicit consciousness’ from which ‘it defines strategy and tactics, thereby becoming an actor and constructing history based on a new foundation’. The notion of ‘people for itself’ (Dussel, 2015: 232) is explicit, incorporating Freire’s (2005) process of consciousness (conscientização). It is at this negative moment that, for Dussel (2004), ‘the victim exposes the normal system which exists as “natural” and “good”, like the “fetishist capital” of Marx, the ethically perverse “Totality” of Levinas, the “non-truth” of Adorno. As a consequence of that exposure, the system loses its validity’ (p. 355). Thus, in the eyes of the victims, of the dominated, the system solely appears as repressive, as a ‘dominating anti-validity’.
However, such a critical consensus is not enough to constitute the social bloc of the oppressed: ‘a deepened consciousness of their situation leads people to apprehend that situation as a historical reality susceptible to transformation’ (Freire, 2005: 85). That is, the process of consciousness demands critical interventions in reality, and critical interventions demand organization. This is the moment of critical-instrumental reason, which has a specific place in the ethical praxis of liberation. For Dussel (2004), an action, an institutional or systemic norm is ethically operational and concretely feasible if it ‘is necessary for the actualization of basic human needs (materially – the reproduction and development of life; formally – the participation of those affected by the decision-making)’ (p. 353) and if it complies with the logical, empirical, technical and economic conditions, for example.
His realistic ethics requires the creative transformative moment, in which institutional–practical relations are constructed to replace those judged as morally invalid. To make this proposition clear, it is necessary to introduce a positive concept of power: potestas as the delegated exercise of power, which differs from power in itself, usually exercised in a fetishized way separated from its foundation.
This is a central aspect of Dussel’s (2009) politics of liberation, which is elaborated from a decolonial perspective situated at the epistemological position of the victims, the oppressed, the excluded, the new popular movements and the originary peoples colonized by capitalist modernity. It includes, as a starting point, a critique of the system of categories of modern Western political philosophy. The central category under discussion is power, which in this field of knowledge is usually equated with domination.
In his propositions, Dussel (2008b) uses the term potentia ‘to refer to the power that is a faculty or capacity inherent in the people as the final instance of sovereignty, authority, governability, and the political’ (p. 17). Potentia is the political foundation. However, if it is not determined by some heterogeneously institutionalized means, it remains a political nothingness: pure potentia without realization. Potentia is the starting point, but on its own, this power still lacks real, objective, empirical existence. The necessary institutionalization of popular power constitutes what Dussel (2008b) terms potestas: in fact, any exercise of power is institutional, because the power of the community as potential in-itself is not an initial empirical moment in time but rather a foundational moment that always remains in force beneath institutions and actions (that is, beneath potestas). (p. 21)
When one speaks, then, of the exercise of power, it means that this power is actualized as one of its institutional possibilities, and like all mediation, it is heterogeneously determined.
As a mediation, potestas is ambiguous. When it affirms itself as the centre, as the foundation, as the being, as political power properly speaking, as the will of the governor, the representative, the institutions, ‘those who command, command by commanding: and they command the obedient’. Potentia has been de-potentiated and ‘has become a passive mass that receives orders from political power (dominant classes, powerful elites, political institutions, the state, the Leviathan)’. The fetishization of potestas has occurred and ‘when it happens, potestas destroys potential’; it divides the people, and it impedes the construction of a consensus from below. Fetishized power is ‘self-grounded on its own despotic will’ (Dussel, 2008b: 31). However, another kind of institutionalization can be constructed in the form of obediential power – command by obeying (Dussel, 2008b): ‘those who lead are representatives who must fulfil a function of potestas’ (p. 26).
To sum up, people is a category at the level of the socio-economic formation used by Dussel (2008b) to designate the social bloc of the oppressed, the diverse sectors, classes and social groups that must organize and struggle to guarantee the conditions for the production and reproduction of life. The people, outside these processes, are ignored; they do not exist, and they merely serve as a thing available for the use of the powerful. Only when organized and invested with the power it institutes can the people negate oppression. Even if a popular struggle is partial (reformist), it can potentially illuminate strategies for the not-yet-possible radical transformation. This practical dissent negates the dominating legitimacy and increases the critical legitimacy of the dominated. Coherently with this reasoning, Dussel (2001: 219) proposes a criterion to demarcate between popular and populism. Taking into consideration that ‘people’ designates ‘the vulnerable corporality that is alive and might die (that goes to the streets demanding bread, peace and work)’, popular refers to the social bloc of the oppressed as a collective historical subject, and ‘populism refers to the manipulation and interpellation of the people by the historic bloc hegemonized by groups that are not necessarily part of the people’.
Dussel’s arguments in relation to the people and the popular become clearer when we contrast them with Laclau’s (2005b) arguments regarding populism, which express three basic theoretical propositions: (1) ‘to think the specificity of populism requires starting the analysis from units smaller than the group’; (2) ‘the meaning of populism is not to be found in any political or ideological content entering into the description of the practices of any particular group’, but in ‘a particular mode of articulation of whatever social, political or ideological content’ and (3) that articulating form, ‘apart from its contents, produces structuring effects which primarily manifest themselves at the level of the modes of representation’ (p. 34).
Populism has three defining features: (1) ‘it requires a relation of equivalence between a plurality of social demands’ as the first necessary precondition for the emergence of the people as a collective actor; (2) the equivalential demands need the discursive construction of a socio-political enemy, the crystallization ‘in a discourse that divides society into two camps–the people and those in power’ and (3) ‘once the equivalential chain has been established, it is necessary to signify it as a totality’, a process that requires a hegemonic operation by which ‘a certain particularity, without ceasing being particular, assumes the representation of a universality’ (Laclau, 2012: 14–15). At the analytical level, a movement is not defined as populist because of the politics or ideology it presents, ‘but because it shows a particular logic of articulation of those contents – whatever the contents are’ (Laclau, 2005b: 33).
The concept of ‘people’ designates an act of institution that creates a new agency out of a plurality of elements. For this reason, the minimal unit of analysis is ‘the socio-political demand’, which signifies both a request and a claim. Demands can be infra- or anti-systemic. The former can be absorbed and positioned within the institutional order and are called democratic, whereas the latter, which remain unfulfilled, are called popular. It is interesting to note that Laclau and Mouffe (2001) also differentiate democratic struggles, which ‘imply a plurality of political spaces’, from popular struggles, ‘where certain discourses tendentially construct division of a single political space in two opposite fields’ (p. 137). For them, ‘the fundamental concept is that of democratic struggles; and the popular struggles are merely specific conjunctures resulting from the multiplication of equivalence effects among the democratic struggles’. However, in his individual writing, Laclau (2005a) not only puts popular demands at the centre of the political process, but populism replaces hegemony as the more pointed and powerful signifier of the inherently contingent unification of popular demands into a collective will.
If unfulfilled demands can potentially be articulated in equivalential chains, then the political operation is to articulate multiple demands and to ‘construct a people’ by establishing ‘an equivalential bond between them’. In the same way, ‘the identity of the enemy also depends on a process of political construction’. The consequence is that the internal frontier between the antagonistic fields tends towards indeterminacy (Laclau, 2005a: 86).
Any populist unification takes place in a radically heterogeneous social terrain, and the more extended the equivalential tie, the emptier the signifier unifying the chain. Consequently, naming and singularity are of great importance in establishing the unity of radically heterogeneous demands. If the chain is the only source of coherent articulation and if, the chain exists only in so far as one of its links plays the role of condensing all the others, in that case the unity of the discursive formation is transferred from the conceptual order (logic of difference) to the nominal one.
In other words, ‘the equivalential logic leads to singularity, and singularity to the identification of the unity of the group with the name of the leader’. It could be understood that the name of the leader is a reference to the structural function of an empty signifier of unity. However, the text immediately provides the actual names of actual leaders, such as Nelson Mandela, and the statement that ‘the symbolic unification of the group around an individuality is inherent to the formation of a people’ (Laclau, 2005a: 100). In this way, ‘the empty signifier of such equivalence – the names of Hugo Chavez or General Perón, for example – becomes the locus of populist political attachment: a surface of affective inscription becomes the subject of political change’ (Kraniauskas, 2014: 31).
Laclau (2005a) clearly asserts that the definition of populism is empty of any specific context, it ‘has no referential unity because it is ascribed not to a definable phenomenon but to a social logic’ (p. 155). However, he describes his work as an opposition to institutionalist political arrangements and its tendency to replace politics by administration. Therefore, the challenge would be to articulate populism as a means to reinvigorate democracy in the context of ‘globalized capitalism’ (Laclau, 2005a: 231).
As expressed by Laclau and Mouffe (2001), democracy is defined by the presence of ‘infinite pluralities in open spaces’ (p. 137). Accordingly, populism is potentially democratizing because unsatisfied demands can achieve a certain level of articulation and are granted institutional spaces. In this democratic openness, ‘there is no reason why a particular democratic demand could not be articulated to another with a completely different political orientation that we would approve of’ (Laclau, 2012: 15–16). Therefore, it would be ‘naïve to think that the racist and xenophobic discourses of right-wing political discourses are uniformly reactionary’ because, ‘even in them, there are interpellations to real needs and demands of the people which are, of course, associated with reactionary elements’.
In his critique of Laclau’s theory of populism, Villacañas (2017: 8) identifies the liberal assumption that society is made of infinite individual differences based on fragmented demands, as well as the neoliberal ontology of the individual as the source of demands expressed in desires. Instead of opposing this expression of the neoliberal version of democracy, ‘Laclau presents a way of overcoming the disintegrative capacity of the social idealized by neoliberalism incorporating the very neoliberal assumption’ of the circulation of desires under the discipline of the market. While avoiding any reference to the economic dimension and affirming that the social is constructed by politics as populism, the result is a notion of an empty signifier that has no material, existential or visible support. Therefore, ‘the people constructed by the magic of discourse expresses no more than a utopia of singularities that ignores the relations among living human beings’ (Villacañas, 2017: 10).
Dussel (2009: 122) also criticizes what he considers to be Laclau’s formalist politicism expressed in the dismissal of the material logic of the production and reproduction of life in favour of the primacy of the structuring role of political practices. That critique is based on the scant attention given by Laclau (2005a, 2014) to the critique of political economy, which severs the material connection of both the hegemonic and subaltern groups to the social structures. In such an approach, the economy is considered a kind of amorphous wallpaper, a virtual platform full of possibilities to be defined by the political. In fact, the content of unfulfilled demands articulated in equivalential chains is irrelevant. Instead, for Dussel (2004), it is necessary to ethically interpret the materiality ‘as an a priori of all critique (a negative critique which departs from the “absence” of material actualization of the subjects, namely the impossibility of living, unhappiness, suffering . . . of the victims)’ (p. 344). Such a critique cannot be separated from the primacy of the economy as the dimension in which the production and reproduction of life are made possible or impossible.
Evoking the people as the potentia for the organization of popular power is very different from evoking the institutional apparatus or a person as the locus of popular political attachment. The latter position leads to verticalism and to the logic of representation. This aspect is clear in Laclau’s (2011) explanation of the leader’s centrality: ‘the organization of the masses demands, at a certain point, a leader who depends on what is happening at the base of society’ (p. 4). In such an approach, popular demands are reconnected with a slightly transformed institutional apparatus, which then organizes the political community from top to bottom. It remains unclear what is left of the constitutive moment of constructing a people when the collective will is invested in the leader. It also remains unclear how ‘politics as populism could generate forms of democracy outside the liberal symbolic framework’ (Laclau, 2005a: 167) while remaining firmly anchored within the limits of liberal democracy in which leadership, delegation of power and vertical relationships are defining characteristics.
This critique of Laclau’s propositions expresses the view that popular movements and the people need organization, representing the passage from potentia to potestas as the concrete exercise of delegated power. It does not deny the role of the party as an organizational tool. However, critical-liberating political parties should be no more than ‘a location where the representative can regenerate his or her delegation of power constructed from below’, aiming to radically transform the world (Dussel, 2008b: 99).
Among the political and practical implications of these differences, some are made evident by the melancholic end of the cycle of so-called Latin American progressive or national-popular governments that opposed some features of neoliberalism in the region at the beginning of the 21st century. The lack of structural political and economic reforms and the incorporation of some popular demands, while co-opting social movements and workers’ organizations, created a context propitious to the return of explicitly neoliberal governments or, in the countries where it did not happen (Bolivia, Venezuela and Uruguay), to conflicts within the power bloc as well as the shameless deepening of extractivism with the inevitable destruction of ways of life associated with nature (mainly indigenous). The recent Brazilian electoral process is also an expression of the limits of Laclau’s reflexions on populism. They can be easily used for a superficial description of the political process, while leaving the actual relations of power and the historic-economic dimensions untouched. As a result, without taking into consideration the concrete material aspects that are at the basis of this political tragedy, we are left with the astonishment and impotency of discursive practices, unable to understand its actual causes and to organize to confront them.
Having said that, I can now briefly address the contribution of Dussel’s philosophy of liberation to the analysis of the critical praxis of organization, that is, an understanding that no organizational instance can substitute the protagonists of transformations, that is, the people (Rauber, 2003). As an example, I mention the people of Northern Argentina who have organized around the material conditions that define the possibility or impossibility of life to struggle against mega-mining projects in the area of Famatina Mountain. With the support of Dussel’s propositions, the authors who wrote about this struggle were able to understand ‘the metamorphosis of isolated individuals into a people’, when ‘the oppressed felt their life threatened, their critical consciousness awakens and, with it, the need to organize, to make decisions based on critical-strategic reasoning which is expressed in the many forms of struggle’. In the struggle, ‘the people have confronted the dominant and dominating system and, at the same time, have outlined a viable utopian project, aiming to build new possible norms and institutions’ (Misoczky and Böhm, 2015: 81). Applying Dussel’s ideas, it was possible to recognize the people as the popular subject that erupts in the struggle over concrete conditions instead of the people as a condition for the institution of populism as the subject of politics. In defence of life and the Famatina Mountain, the people constitute itself as the subject of politics.
Dussel’s philosophy and ethics of liberation can contribute to a renewal of the way we study and theorize organization to include the radical potentiality of developing anti-management studies in the engagement with popular struggles, such as those organized against the destructive impacts of business and management in the production and reproduction of people’s lives and livelihoods. The challenge posed to those of us who share the co-responsibility for the liberation of the victims of the prevailing system and that value transversal dialogues is to articulate our knowledge production with the knowledge produced as part of the critical praxis of popular organization(s). Of course, the choice of this path has political implications and poses theoretical challenges regarding the way we study popular organizations and their respective organizational processes. Therefore, this contribution is directed specifically to the study and theorization of these processes, providing inspiration for our practices of co-constructing knowledge that can be relevant and meaningful for activists and their organizational processes.
Besides that, as I presented in this essay, Dussel’s philosophy and ethics of liberation also provide contributions for the negative critique of populism as the political expression of fetishized vertical power that, in concrete historical situations, subordinates the original foundational popular power.
