POPULISM
Its Meaning and National Characteristics EDI
TED B
Y
GHITA IONESCU AND
ERNEST GELLNER
The Macmillan Company
© 1969
BY CHITA IONESCU AND ERNEST GELLNER
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 7380792 FIRST AMERICAN EDITION 1969 Published in Great Britain in 1969 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London The Macmillan Company Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
I
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE 1
NORTH AMERICA
R ichard 2
9
H ofst ad ter
28
LAT IN AMERI CA
A li s t a i r H en n essy 3
RUSSIA 62
A n d r z ej W a li ck i 4
EASTERN
EUROPE
97
G hi ta I one sc u 5
A F R IC A
122
J oh n S a u l PART TWO 6
PO PUL ISM
AS AN
IDEOLOGY
153
D o nal d M ac R ae 7
A SYNDRO
ME , NOT
A DOCTRI NE
166
P ete r W il es 8
THE
SOCIAL
ROOTS
18 0
A n g u s S tew a r t 9
POPU LISM
AS A PO LITICAL
MOVE MENT
197
K enne th M ino g ue 1 0 T H E CO NCE PT O F PO PU LI S M
212
P ete r W or sl ey
INDEX
251
CONTRIBUTORS
Professor Richard Hofstadter, Columbia University Alistair Hennessy, University of Warwick Dr Andrzje Walicki, Warsaw Institute of Philosophy and Sociology Ghita Ionescu, University of Manchester Dr John Saul, University College, Dar Es Salaam Professor PoliticalDonald Science MacRae, London School of Economics and Professor Peter Wiles, London School of Economics and Political Science A ngu s Stewart, Lo nd on Scho ol of Economics an d Pol it ic al Sc ien ce Kenneth Minogue, London School of Economics and Political Science Professor Peter Worsley, University of Manchester
INTRODUCTION
A sp ectre is haun ting the world - populism. A dec ade ago, when the new nations were emerging into independence, the question that was asked was - how many will go Communi st ? Today, this question, so plausible then, sounds a little out of date. In as far as the rulers of new states embrace an ideology, it tends more often to have a populist character. And populism is not an outlook re stricted to the new nations. In the Communist world, strong cur rents seem to move in a populist direction. And in the anxious or agonizing re-examination which has gripped several developed liberal societies of late, populist themes are prominent. There can, at present, be no doubt about the i mpor tance o f populism. But no one is quite clear just what it i s. As a doctrine or as a movement, it is elusive and protean. It bobs up everywhere, bu t in m any and contradictory shape s. D oes it have any und erl ying unity, or does one name cover a multitude of unconnected tendencies? The present relevance of populism has also brought about a revival of interest in some half-forgotten nineteenth-century cur rents which bore, or were given, the same name. Does the anger of American Middle Western farmers against urban lawyers, the droolings of Tolstoy over muzhiks, the rationalizations of East European resentments against alien traders, and the slogans in terms of which rulers of new nations legitimate themselves and sub vert liberal institutio ns - do a ll these have a common intellec tual source, and are they parts of one phenomenon? I s there one phenomenon corresponding to this one name? The present book is a determined attempt to answer this ques tion, to give a clear outline to this elusive yet insistent spectre. It is the work of a set of scholars whose joint competence covers the highly diverse areas which have been haunted by populism. But I
PO PU L IS M -IT S
NA TI ON AL CHA
RA CT ER IS TI CS
the book is not a mere addition of disjoined researches. The various contributors cover both the diverse geographical regions, and the various analytically distinguishable aspects of populism. Above all, their contributions dovetail with each other (without nece ssar il y agr eei ng - ther e has been no attempt to imp ose unity of vision), in as far as each author wrote with full knowledge of the contributions of the others. Each saw the early drafts of the other essays. Thus, though of course each author is responsible for his own views only, the final versions are co-operative in the sense that they were written or re-written in the light of the others. Besi des, thei r comm on ori ginal purpo se was t o ‘de fine’ popu lism. A discussion was held at the London School of Economics on 19-21 May 1967.* The fact that it brought together so many of
† in ‘ populis m’ with the object o f attemp ting ‘ to define’ * It had been organized by Gove rnmentand Opposi tion,a quarterly of
the experts
comparative politics, at the time published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, with the help also o f the London. The verbatim report of the conference can be consulted at the Library, London School of Econ omics and Political Science. A precis o f the discussion was published in Spring 1968. t The full list of participants was as follows: J.Allcock (Bradford), Prof. S. L.A nd res ki (Reading), Sir Isaiah Berlin
Humanitarian Trust,
Governmentand Oppo sition,
(Oxford, chairman of session), Dr Conrad Brandt (Oxford), Dr Peter Calvert (Southampton), Nigel Clive (Foreign Office), Maurice Cranston (LSE), F.W.Deakin (Oxford, chairman of session), Prof.R.P.Dore (L S E), Geo ffre y Engholm (S uss ex), E. Gallo (Oxford), Prof. Ernest Gellner (LSE, chairman of session), Prof. Julius Gould (Nottingham), George Ha ll (F oreign O ffice), C .A .M .H en n es sy (War wick) , Pr of. Richar d Ho f stadter (Columbia) , Gh ita Ionescu (L S E, rapport eur), Jame s Joll (O xfo rd), Ellen de Kadt (LSE), Emmanuel de Kadt (LSE), Dr Werner Klatt, Dr John Keep (School of Slavonic and East European Studies), Francis Lambert ( Institute of Latin American Stu dies ), D r E. Lam per t (K eele) , Shirley Letwin, Dr L.J.Macfarlane (Oxford), Prof. Donald MacRae ( L S E , chairman of session), D r I. de Madariaga (Susse x), P r o f. G .F . Manc ini (Bologna), Kenne th Minogue ( L S E ) , Pro f.W .H.M orr isJo ne s (Institute of Commonwealth Studies), Dr John Saul (DaresSalaam), Prof . Leona rd Schapiro ( L S E , chairm an of session), Prof. H ug h Seton Watson (School of Slavon ic and East Euro pean Stu die s, chair man of session), T.Shanin (Sheffield), Geoffrey Shillinglaw (School of Oriental and African Studies), Dr Zoltan Szabo, Prof. Alain Touraine (Paris), Prof . F. Venturi (Turin), D r Andrzej Walicki (Warsaw), De rek Waller (School of Or iental a nd Afr ican Stud ies ), Prof. Pet er Wiles (L S E ) , Prof. Peter Worsley (Manchester, chairman of session).
2
INTRODUCTION
it is in its elf signi ficant. T h e expression is used in English, Spani sh (populismo) and, to a lesser degree in French ( popu li sme ), and with the implication that the word means the same as the Russian N ar odni chestvo. (But Peter Worsley rightly remarks in his con tribution to this book that: ‘the translation of the Russian N ar odnichestvo has be en rendered as popu list, b ut this very a ct of tr ans lation is itself an imputation, not a “neutral” simple equivalence, which translation can never be, since it has to use categories available in language.’) But its use both as a noun and as an adjective has spread, and is spreading, increasingly. It now links such strange bed-fellows as young liberals who call themselves ‘populists’ and some die-hard socialists who claim to have ‘popu list traditions’. Some political scientists think that Maoism is a form of populism and Nazism another form. And some historians of ideas see it run like a distinct red thread from Chernishevsky to Frantz Fanon and Marcuse. Indeed, one of the reasons why it is very important to find out more about the expression and the concept is that so many people are inclined to think that movements ‘left-of-Soviet-communism’ such as Trotskyism, Titoism, Maoism, Castroism and the current ideology of the students’ movements are the strident reincarnations of populism in th e s econ d half of th e tw entieth century an d th at i ndee d fo r t he first time in history a ‘populist international’ could be conjured up-
There are perhaps six principal questions on which to base an assessment of whether populism is a unitary concept, regardless of the variety of its incarnations, or whether it is simply a word wrongly used in completely heterogeneous contexts. One question is whether populism was primarily an ideology (or ideologies) or a movement (or movements) or both. Perhaps, and this is the second issue, populism was a sort of recurring mentality appearing in different historical and geographic contexts as the result of a special social situation faced by societies in which, as the French sociologist, Alain Touraine, described it, the middle social factors were either missing or too weak. Thirdly, populism can be defined in terms of political psychology. The element of political persecu tion mania was more acute in its political psychology. It was imbued with the feeling that identifiable or unidentifiable con spiracies we re a t work, deliberately and tenacious ly, ag ainst the people. The basic attitude was one of apprehension towards
3
PO PU L IS M -IT S
NA TI ONA L CH ARA CT ER IS TI CS
unknown outside force s: colo nial oppression, peo ple livin g in town s with international roots or ramifications, bankers, international capitalists, etc. As such populism could be characterized by a peculi ar negati vism - it was a n ti : anti-capitalistic, anti-urban, as well as xenophobic and anti-semitic. In contrast, and this was the p eo p le. But the people the fifth point, populism worshipped the popu lists worshipped were the meek and th e m iserable, and the populists worshipped them because they were miserable and
because they were persecuted by the conspirators. The fact is that the people were more often than not identified in the peasants who were and are, in underdeveloped societies especially, the most mise rab le of the lot - and the more miserable they worshipped
should they be.
Finally,
until
were the more
no w th is recurring
mentalit y usually d isa ppea red in history by absor ption in to stronger ideologies or movements. There were three ways in which this happened. One led to socialism. One led to nationalism. And, as for instance in Eastern Europe before and after the First World War, one led to peasantism. The present book attempts to throw open to the public the dis cussion until now held only in intellectual conclaves; and with due modesty, it hopes to encourage an inquiry into this elusive concept and its many meanings which deserves to be continued in many other individual or collective volumes. The material as sembled in its pages is in the majority based on the papers initially pre sen te d at the 19 67 confer ence. T h e
studies
by
C .A .M .
Hennessy, G.Ionescu and Peter Wiles were added in order to complete, a s much as possible, the examination o
f th e sub ject. Eve n
so though the field has by no means been fully covered and the edito rs would lik e to express their regret th at, in sp ite of the ir eff orts to reorganize and complete the srcinal material, the book does not contain studies on Asian or Canadian populisms. T he exa mina ti on of ‘the meanings of pop ulis m ’ was div ided into two major headings. The first part groups the different historicogeographical examples: Russian populism of the nineteenth cen tury, American populism of the nineteenth century, Eastern European populism and peasantism of the nineteenth and twen tiet h centur ies an d Latin Ameri can pop ulism and A frican pop ulism of the twentieth century. The second part examines the concep tual meanings of populism: populism as an ideology, populism as a political movement, the social roots of populism, the
4
INTRODUCTION
econ om ic asp ects o f p opu li sm and an o ver al l vi ew o f the conce pt of populism. T h e p resen t boo k th us is the fi rs t o rganiz ed att empt t o cl ar i fy the m ain asp ects o f a concep t wh ich during the ni nete enth ce nt ur y an d even more in the twentieth century has been more fundamental to th e s ha pin g o f the politi cal m ind than is ge neral l y ac knowl edg ed. G.I. E.G.
P ARTO N E
CHAPTER ONE
NORTH AMERICA
Richard Hofstadter 1
The character of American populism derives in great part from the American tradition of entrepreneurial radicalism. Elsewhere, populism rested upon the role of the peasantry, but unless one identifies a peasantry simply with rural poverty, the United States has not had a peasant class; neither, despite the limited stratum of large landowners and slave owners in the South, has it had a class of rural grandees, an aristocracy with clerical and military connections and conservative traditions. What the United States has had, in place of a peasantry, is a class of cash-conscious commercial farmers, producing staples both for th e do m estic and the world mark et and linke d to the bust ling, competitive petty-capitalist life of the expanding small towns of the American interior. Alongside the farmers, because of the open character of the society, there has been the constant thrust o f ‘ne w m en ’ - am bitious entre preneur s, often re cruited from the farms, trying to break into established lines of enterprise and into the upper echelons of the political or social world. In the absence also of a powerful tradition of labour radicalism and of strong socialist parties, American radicalism has drawn a large part of its strength from heretical businessmen, village entre preneurs, and the petty capitalists of the small towns. This tradi tion was entrepreneurial in the sense that it accepted the basic principles underlying private capitalism, and tended to argue that its specific programmatic proposals would in fact strengthen the capitalist order by broadening opportunities and giving the com m on ma n a ccess to po sitions o f pr ofi t and po wer . But it w as also un less w e se t too stringen t dem ands upon the t erm - radical in its
9
POPULIS
M - IT S NATIONAL
CHARACTERISTICS
conti nuing assertion o f the claims o f demo cracy and egalitarianism, in its b road humanitarian s ympathies, in i ts sharp criticis m s, som e times merely rhetorical but at other times observant and telling, of the practices of vested interests and ‘m on op oli es’, and in givin g voice to persistent American suspicions of concentrated power. American radicalism was inevitably shaped by the conditions of rural life. At the time of the Constitution, the nation was about ninety p er cent agricu ltural , and its pre dom inan t in telle ctu al form s were established in rustic conditions. Not until nearly the end of the nin ete ent h cent ury did the porti on o f the po pula tion em ploy ed in industry match that of the farmers, and it was not until the twentieth that the urban population exceeded the rural. America presen ted a n economy ri ch in land and natur al resour ces, bu t sh ort of labour and capital. Under these conditions, there was a great premi um on capi tal-i ntensi ve agric ulture - that is, agricultural practices designed, through the use of machinery, to compensate for the scarcity of labour by taking advantage of extensive and relatively cheap land. The pressure for capital, both to acquire machinery for cultivation and to engross as much land as possible for speculative purposes, was always high. From its early beginnings, the American economy was always afflicted by an insatiable demand for money and credit, and it became the classic land of homes pun an d or igi nal monetar y theorists. It is im po rtan t to be aware, as American historians have not always been, that this demand did not exist solely among the rural classes or among pove rty- str ick en del ors. Even in the colonial perio d, f or ex am pl e, the inf luenti al spok esmen f or p aper mon ey were no t rural scr ib ble rs or demagogues but public officials, leading ministers and other professionals, and prominent businessmen. In fact, several of the Ameri can c olonies, and the new state s in the years ju st after 1776, had made ingenious and successful experiments with paper-money issues , in wh ich the expansi on of the currency was carefu lly ge ared to landed security.1 Oddly enough, alongside this
avant-g ar de finance, there grew
up in som e agrarian circles a contradictory fear, an alm ost p rim iti ve fear, o f ba nks, of pap er money - of everyt hing t hat Th om as Jeffer son and his agrarian contemporaries called ‘the paper system’. True wealth, the primitive agrarians believed, came from land and labour. An overbuilt apparatus of commerce and banking, an excessive rate of public spending, a large public debt with the
10
NORTH
AMERICA
consequent heavy taxation, could only be means by which an insatiable ‘paper aristocracy’ would exploit the honest fanner or planter. This duality in economic philosophy, which is apparent in the era of the Revolution and the Constitution, continued through the Jacksonian period. Jacksonian thought was divided between those who continued in the old hard-money, anti-bank ways, and those who were more interested in getting access to government funds and putting them to use in exploiting the great American bonanza. This cleavage in thought was paralleled by a cleavage in expressed values and in economic policy. As to values, Jacksonian democracy is marked by two conspicuous themes that seem quite at odd s w ith each o th e r: the firs t is the persistent cl amour of ne w enterprisers for greater opportunities, the cry against monopoly and aristocracy; the demand to give the commoners better and more even access to the big prizes in business, politics, and the professions. In it one can see the old American urge to get ahead, the passion for advancement. The second theme is what Marvin M eye rs has called res toration ism.2 It hearkens back to the simp licit y, the civic dedication , the nob ility, the limited mate ri al a sp ira tions and high moral tone that were deemed to be characteristic of the old republic. In it the Cincinnatus-ideal, so integral in the public reputation of George Washington, is invoked once again. And restorationists were deeply concerned that the aggressive materialism o f th e country, its insatiable qu est for oppo rtunities and profits, for offices and emoluments, would lead not only to wealth and luxury but to decadence. Even in the 1830s, then, the young republic showed a distinct strain of nostalgia and a distinct sense o f uneasiness with its elf . These differences in expressed values were reflected in Jack sonian policy. On one hand, the general passion against monopoly and aristocracy was mobilized against the Bank of the United States. Jackson’s veto of the bill to recharter the Bank ensured its downfall. His removal of the government’s deposits from its con trol at first intensified the inflationary effect of the assault upon central banking. By putting the government funds at the disposal of state banks whose directors often incautiously geared them to the hec tic land speculation o f the t ime, the Jac ksoni ans set off a brief speculative spree. When it seemed to be gaining too much m om entum , they sh ra nk from what they ha d done, cl amped down
11
PO PU L IS M -IT
S NATIO
NAL
CH ARA CT ERI ST IC S
on the use of credit in land sales, and thus intensified the economic reaction that was bound to come. Their inconsistency in policy wa s, no doubt, att ributable t o several th ing s - no t least to t heir attempt to represent social interests that were to some degree in co mpat ib le an d t o their view s o f m oney and b anking - but i t reflected in good part their deep uncertainty as to what they stood for. Was it hard money and the old simplicities? Or was it open opportunities, brisk competition, speculation, slick dealings, and the main chance? The debt of later populism to the Jacksonian heritage is con siderable. Leaders of the Populist Party of the nineties were very often men of strikingly advanced age for reformers, born in the Jacksonian era and thoroughly familiar with its slogans. The old Ja ck so ni an cr y: ‘Equal R ights for A ll, Sp ecia l Priv ilege s for N on e’ , served them as it had served their predecessors. The same concern with opportunity as against monopoly, the same fear of the regu lation of financial affairs from a single, presumably sinister centre, un de rl ay bot h movements.
Senator B en ton ’s ‘ M on ster ’ - the Ba nk
- wa s re pl ac ed by Wall Stree t, Lo m bard Street, an d the H ou se of Rothschild. The political principles of Jefferson and Jackson, ar gu ed Gene ral James
B.
W eaver,
th e
P op u list p residential
candidate of 1892, were still in vital respects applicable. The rugged utterances of these statesmen ring out today like a start ling impeachment of our time. . . . There is enough in them to com pletely transform and re-invigorate our present suppliant and helpless state of public opinion. Those declarations were uttered in the purer days of the republic and before the various departments of Government had seriously felt the balefu l and sed ucti ve influ enc e o f corpora te wealth and power.3 ‘Th e ol d hero, ’ he s ai d of Jackso n, ‘und ersto od that a D em ocra tic gov ern ment ha d no use f or an arist ocratic or mo nar chic al system of finance.’4 The development of American agriculture in the decades after the Civil War superimposed upon this Jacksonian heritage stag ge ri ng pro bl ems an d gri evan ces . T h e Am erican com m erc ial far mer, his production organized in a multitude of small units operating with fixed costs, selling in an increasingly competitive world market, and victimized by tariff and taxation policies, was fighting
a losi ng b at tl e. It was his exports
that largely paid for th e im por ted 12
NORTH
AMERICA
capital needed to finance American industry and his labour that produced, at lower and lower prices, the food that nourished the industrial labour supply, but as time went on he saw that he was n ot pro fiting in prop ortion to the nati on's gr owt h. An i mport ant element here is the sheer magnitude of the growth of the agri cultural sector of the economy, especially in the West. Between 1860 and 1900 the number of farms increased from 2.0 million to 5.7 million, the land in farms from 407 million to 838 million acres. T h e u se o f m ach iner y m ade farming more di fficult to finance, and increased its productivity. By 1900 the farmer was eighty-six per ce n t m ore efficient than he had been in 1870. At the same ti me the international revolution in communications, marked especially by more rapid steam transportation, the opening of the Suez Canal, and the proliferation of the railroads in the American West, drew the farmer into an increasingly glutted and competitive inter nationa l market, w her e he had to compete, behi nd t he h andicap of the tariff, with the food of Argentina, Canada, and Australia, where new areas of land were rapidly being settled, and with the cotton of India and Egypt. Prices moved quite steadily downward, and then fell drastically in the depression of 1893. Farmers in basic staples, who were in no position to meet their situation either by cu ttin g b ack th eir pr od uc tion or by more eff ici ent marketing, f ound themselves with larger and larger crops on their hands, sold at lower and lower prices. From 1870 to 1895 corn production grew from 1. 1 m illion bu sh els to 2 .5 mill ion, wheat from 2 .5 mi llion bu sh els to 5 .4 m illion, cotto n from 4 .3 million ba les to 7 . 1 million. But in the same years the price of corn fell from 52 cents a bushel to 25 c en ts, w he at from $1 .04 per bushel to 5 0 ce nt s, cotton from 12 . 1 cents to 7 .6 cents a pound. T h e y ears from 1873 also marked the drast ic fall in t he p rice of silver, as successive demonetizations of the metal by various nations of the western world coincided with a great increase in its prod uction . W estern silver m ine owners coul d lo ok w ith sy mpat hy up on th e p ligh t o f the far mers, bu t they could al so s ee in th em t he mass basis of an inflationist bloc, ready to convert the old fiat money inflationism into silver inflationism and to go forth in a common battle for monetary inflation as a remedy for the depres sion. The strength of the silver forces was increased in 1889-90 wh en six new states o f the W est with str ong mini ng i nterests w ere admitted to the union. Inflationists could now look forward to a
13
POP
UL ISM
—ITS NA
TION
AL
CHARAC
TERI
STI CS
strong sil ver bloc in C ong ress. M oreo ver, the silver miners b ro ugh t to t he populis t mo vem ent som ething it needed very b ad l y - a source o f funds. Radical far mers w ere g ener ous w it h th ei r e nt hu si asm, but t hey had lit tle m on ey to give , and the m ovem ent ha d to work with pathetically insufficient funds. But in return for their contri butions the sil ver interest s exacted their ow n price . T he y we re not much interested in the more radical proposals of populism l i ke t he publi c ow ners hip o f m eans o f comm unicat ion - an d t he y were concerned to u se w hat leverage their d oll ars gave them to ge t the movement to concentrate more single-mindedly on the silver issue. To this end they did what they could to make silver infla tionism the dominant aim of the populist following, and in this they had the assistance of a number of homespun pamphleteers, bre d i n the old t raditi ons o f m onetary pan aceas. A m on g these, t he m ost i mportant was W . H . (‘ C oin’ ) H arvey, w ho se C oi n 's F i n an ci al S c h o o l bec ame the gre at docum ent o f t he p opu li st m ovem ent. 5 2
Many of the qualities of populist thought stem from the dual character of the American farmer. In the old ideal, shaped by the pastoral poets and infused with a warm glow by Jeffersonian wri te rs, t he f armer was the ind ep end en t ye o m a n : a hardy pioneer,
a
good citizen, close to the soil, energetic, hardworking, devoted to the family that worked with him, simple, reliable, and honest. H e car ed li ttl e f or mo ney , bu t was interested in
farm ing primari ly
as a way of life. His farm was his home, and if he lost one, he lost the other. In common with other men who did manual labour, he was a victi m o f exploitat ion by spe cial intere sts: h e carrie d an undue share of the tax burden; he paid too much for freight and for credit; he had a hard time claiming his share of the land, as agai nst the big land speculators and the railroads. T o the agraria n theorists there was bound to be something wrong with any social system in which agriculture did not get its full share: Whenever, in a populous Nation, agricultural pursuits become of seconda ry i mportance as a means o f acquiring wealth, it may be s et do wn as certain that the callings which have risen above it are operating under some artificial stimulus which is abnormal and unjust.6 O n every count this image o
f the farmer had solid
real it y beh ind
it. It is true, however, that the self-sufficient yeoman was always
NORTH
AMERICA
accompanied by the cash-hungry farmer eager to win his place in the markets of the nation and the world, and it is also true that after 1815, with the rapid development of the vast American hinterland and the rapid improvement of transportation facilities, the yeoman farmer receded into the by-ways of rural America and the commercial farmer was subject to all the vicissitudes of the climate and the economy, and he was frequently the victim of m en w ith mo re p ower and fewer scruples - land g rabbe rs, rai lroad tycoons, credit merchants, bankers, middlemen. The farmer himself also become deeply involved in the com mercial ethos of the American system, to which he belonged. He was a busin essm an as well as a cul tiva tor of the s oil . H e succumbed repeatedly to the temptation not merely to raise and sell crops but to profit from the one aspect of his situation that promised big and quick gains - fro m land specul ati on. T he dyn amic s of the economy pushed him into relatively large-scale enterprise for a family unit. It entrapped him with machinery and debts. And often he saw speculative gain as the one way to recoup on his hard labours and his big risks. In good times, with skilful management and a bit of luck, he might do well. But the periodic flip-flops of the economy frequently caught him out. In the long run, he was playing a losing g a m e: he had little to s usta in him thro ugh even a sho rt-ru n d isaster - a crop fail ure, a drought, the weevil, the locust , a damaging storm. Against a major social disaster even the most pr ovid ent farmer had n o secu rity. And two such major disas ters afflicted him after 1860. The first was the Civil War, which, it is true, provided a tremendous stimulus to the Northern farmer but which broke the social system of the South and left its farmers in bondage to the one-crop system, voracious short-term credit and the caprices of the international market. The second disaster was the great international price depression of the last third of the nineteenth century. By the end of the Civil War, the old agrarian hard-money view had disappeared, though it had left an inheri tance in the form of a rather categorical suspicion of banks and bankers. Civil War conditions had taught the farmers and many o f the businessm en of the M iddle W est to ass oci ate pro sper ity wi th high prices. The long deflationary freeze of the 1870s, ’8os and ’90s confirmed this view. The history of the populistic mind as it expressed itself during these years is increasingly the history of a concern with the monetary system, though there are also other
15
P O P U L IS M -IT
S
NATI
ONAL CH
AR A CT ER I S TI CS
concerns of considerable importance centering on the control of the railroads and the disposition of the public lands. The Green back movement of the late 1860s and early 1870s, inspired in part by the recollection of the prosperity that had come with high wartime prices, concentrated on currency issues. The Granger m ovem ent o f the 1870s and 1880s w as m ore centr all y c on ce rn ed with the regulation of the railroads by state legislatures. The plat form o f the P eop le’ s (Po pu lis t) Party o f 1892 em bod ied a broad programme of proposals for currency, credit (an endorsement of the sub-treasury scheme), income tax, government ownership of railroads, and the reclamation of excess lands owned by railroads and other private corporations and of all lands owned by aliens. These measures were supplemented by political reforms, among them th e dem and for the init iative and referendu m and the pop ul ar el ect ion of s ena to rs — dem ands that w ere to be ech oed in t he Progressive movement. Bu t in 189 2 the Pop ulist s learned that abl y the demand
for free si lver -
the c urrency issue -
had d eeper resona
nces in
not t he
public mind than any other; and by 1896, when the depression had struck and the currency issue had grown still more salient, the demand for free coinage of silver, to the despair of left-wing Populists like Henry Demarest Lloyd, overshadowed everything els e a nd pave d the way for the no m ination o f W il li am Jennings Bryan by the People’s Party. The most popular book produced by the Pop uli st mov em ent was n ot a work o f ge neral soci al theor y, nor even a programm ati c tr act analysing th e fu ll range o f propos als th at had bee n advanced t o rem edy the ill s o f the peo ple, b ut ‘Coin’ H arvey’ s popul ar t reati se on th e m on ey q uestion , C o i n ' s F i n a n c i a l S c h o o l . In this single-m inde d w ork al l t he social ev ils that af fl ic te d the United States were traced to the international conspiracy that was held to have resulted in the demonetization of silver in 1873, and it was implied that the free coinage of silver by the United Stat es a t the old rat io of si xteen to on e w ou ld by itself be suffi cient to rem edy the sit uation. In response to the oppressions and hardships brought about by the great international deflation of the late nineteenth century, populist thi nkers evolved their ow n co nce ption o f the wo rld. Q uite understandably, they thought that the state of America had
deteriorated lamentably since the days before the war. 16
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T h ir ty years ago, [wrote the Kansas Populist M rs Sara h E. V. Emery in 1892] the American laborer was a prospective lord. He saw within his reach a home of plenty for his family, and an old age of comfort for himself . T h e brig ht picture before him inspir ed ind ust ry, econ omy a nd sobriety, and the
labore r was a peacef ul, so ber, res pected cit ize n. . . .
But today what is the outlook for the wage-worker of this country? He sees before him only toil, unremitting, half-requited toil; hope dies out in his bosom, despondency takes possession of his heart; and unless sustained by a strong faith and a giant will he breaks beneath the weight of oppression, seeks relief in a suicide’s grave, or worse still attempts to drown his grief in the intoxicating cup and finally drifts into the great army of inebriates.7
‘The farmer,’ said Senator Peffer, ‘has been shorn of his power to help himself in a thousand and one ways that once were familiar to him. He is now at the mercy of combinations which are in effect conspiracies against the common rights of the people.’8 The basic scheme of populist thought resolved itself into a number of relatively simple propositions. First, the populist mind ten de d to pos it an essentiall y inno cent fol k, vi ctimized by e conomic catas trop hies for w h ich it shar ed no responsibility. For all practical political purposes, it was assumed that the people constituted a more or less homogeneous mass. This was not because the Populists could not see any difference between the farmer or the worker, and between these and, say, the honest small trader, but because they considered that occupational differences were not of consequence in politics and morals; what mattered was that society was divided between ‘the people’ who worked for a living and the vested interests who did not. In some populist literature the farmer, conceived as the honest yeoman, was considered to have a certain moral priority because of the ‘natural’ character of his labours, his closeness to the soil, and the fundamental character of agricultural production. But by and large, what is most impressive is the ecumenical character of populist thought, its willingness to grant the moral legitimacy and political acceptability of anyone wh o did any kind o f honest wor k. T h is common bon d wa s t houg ht to be more important than any differences. Moreover, the masses were susceptible to being united, the populists assumed, because of the basic harmony of their interests, their common stake in a fa ir , ho nest, and prosperous econo my. Opposed to t he people w er e the interests, a small but very powerful class of men, headed by
17
POPU
LIS M - I T S
NATIO
NAL
CHA RAC TE RI ST IC S
bankers and by monopolists in railroading and industry. The int eres ts exploited the p eop le - not, it is imp ortant to say, t hro ugh the no rma l mechanism o f capi tal is t prod uction (popu li sm , des pi te certain rhetorical similarities, was largely unaffected by Marxist ideas) but through their political privileges and through their power to cont rol t he mon etary system . Co ntrol o f the m on ey s yst em gave the interests immense unearned increment, as they could deflate the currency almost at will and increase the value of the debts owed to them. Their political power had also given them other unjust privil eges, a s land specu lators, m on op olists in produc ti on, transport ati on, or so m e are a o f t rade or p roce ssing , or t hrough protec ti ve ta ri ff s a nd throug h an u njust distr ibu tion o f tax burdens. (It seems hardl y necessary to say that th ere w as a great deal of re al ity i n thi s side o f the popu li st argu m ent. T h e b est pop ulist tr ac ts wer e heav il y docum ented and o n m any cou nts w ell reasoned.) There was also a widespread tendency among populist writers to att ri bute a cer tai n dem on ic qua lit y to their f o e s : their ene m ies, they believed, waxed more prosperous rather than less under de pres si ons, which enabl ed them to qu icken the p ace o f their exploit ation and to concentrate their power even further. They were frequently conceived in more naive populist writing to have planned and plotted economic disasters and to be gloating in a secret and fiendish way over the miseries they had brought about. In this sense populist thought has from time to time rather strong Manichaean overtones. These themes echoed through populist literature, with its powerful and repeated emphasis upon the dual character of the social order, the struggle between producing interests and exploiters. ‘It is a struggle,’ said Jerry Simpson, ‘between the robbers and the robbed.’ ‘It is a fight,’ said General Jame s B.W eaver, ‘ betw een l abor and capital.’ ‘T h e w orld has al ways cont aine d two cl asses o f p eo ple,’ wrote B. S. H eath, ‘on e that lived by honest labor and the other that lived off of honest labor.’9 T h is conc epti on promise d tha t once the people, overw helm ingly more numerous, could be effectively organized in an assault upon the ‘money power’, most of the other problems besetting them would yield rather easily. ‘With the destruction of the money pow er,’ sai d Senator W il li am . A . Pef fer , ‘t he death k nell o f ga m b ling in grain and other commodities will be sounded; for the
business of the worst men on earth will have been broken up, and 18
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the mainstay of the gamblers removed. It will be an easy matter, after the greater spoilsmen have been shorn of their power, to clip the wings of the little ones. Once get rid of the men who hold the cou ntry by th e throat, th e parasites can be easil y removed.’ 10 As the money power was the primary enemy, the money question was the central question. ‘When we have restored the money of the Constitution,’ said William Jennings Bryan, ‘all other necessary ref orms will be p oss ible; b u t . . . unti l thi s i s don e t he re is no o ther reform that can b e acco m plish ed.’11 Most of the deflationary measures that had been adopted in America were intended to hold prices down. Many populists con cluded that these measures had been the result of a design on the part of ruthless financial interests to rob and exploit the people. A widespread sense of the conspiratorial and demonic character of the money power was expressed by Mrs Emery in accounting for the downfall of the working classes of the country. The defla tionary pressure, she said, had srcinated among heartless men, ‘the money kings of Wall Street’. While others had responded with sadness or anxiety to the coming of the Civil War ‘the attentiv e listen er c ould hear from Wall S treet the echoes of jubi lant satisfaction and harmonious preparations for an onslaught upon the industry and prosperity of the country’. The money kings ‘rejoiced because they saw in the preparation for war their long-coveted opportunity for plunder’. Though foiled by Lincoln at first, the Shylocks emerged with a new ‘scheme of brigandage’, and in the end they won, securing a series of legislative victories climaxed by the demonetization of silver in the ‘crime of 1873’. T h es e legisla tive victories masked a se ries of ‘atro cio us con spir acie s against this government; conspiracies which for boldness of pur pose and cruelty of design, are without parallel in the annals of crime . . . a rec ord of the bl acke st a nd most hea rtless cri mes’ which have enabled the money power ‘to form trusts and syndi cates which have reduced the people to a wage-slavery more abject and heartless than any chattel slavery that ever cursed God’s ea rt h’. 12 If populist rhetoric, cited in isolation, sounds melodramatic, it is important to remember that an equally inflammatory rhetoric prevailed on the other side, in which the populists were portrayed as being at best deluded bumpkins and at worst primitives, dema gogues, anarchists, and socialists. It became important for them to
19
P O P U L IS M -IT
S
NATI
ONAL CH
AR AC TE RI ST I CS
as se rt their res pectabili ty. T h e m on ey pow er wou ld be dea lt wi t h, sai d the Pop ulist Senator W
il li am A . Peff er, but w it hin the r ules:
N ot that there is to be any d estructive m eth o d ; not tha t ther e is to be any anarchistic philosophy about it; not that there is any disposition on the part of the farmers or any considerable portion of the working masses to take away from any man his property, or to distribute the existing wealth of t he country a mo ng the p eo p le ; not that t here i s any disposition to repudiate debts, to get rid of honest obligations, to rashly change existing forms or customs, or to indulge in any sort of disloy alty.13 ‘W e a re Loyal C iticens,’ w rote one farmer t
ou ch ing ly from M inne
sot a, ‘and do N o t Inten d to Intr ud e on an y R.R . C orporation. . W e Love our w if e and children
..
jus t as D early as any o f you But
how can we protect them give them education as they should wen w e ar e driven from sea to sea. . . .’14 T h is cry fo r th e recog nition of the ir com m on h um anity and o f their basicall
y respec ta ble
bourgeois status was shrewdly echoed in Bryan’s Cross of Gold S pe ec h : T h e gold s ta ndard f orces, he said, cried that their business int eres ts had been disturbed,
b u t:
We reply that you have disturbed our business interests by your course. We say to you that you have made the definition of a business man too l imit ed in it s appl ica ti on. T h e man w ho is em ploye d for wag es is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the Board of Trade and bets upon the price of gra in. . . . W e c om e to speak o f t his broader class of business men. . . . We do not come as aggressors. Our war is not a war of conquest; we are fighting in the defense of our ho mes , o ur fa mil ie s, a nd pos te ri ty . . . . In this la nd o f the free you need not fear that a tyrant will spring up from among the people. T he populi st convi cti on t hat the for ces o f the ene m y w ere con cen tr at ed at a single s inis ter centre en gen der ed for a tim e, as the pop ul i st m ovement gai ned mom entum, a kind o f op ti m ism . I f t he true enemy consisted in the main of a relatively small class of f in anc ie rs , and if the m ovem ent rep resented th e real intere the vas tl y more numerous honest working pe
op le -
la bo ur er s, an d mercha nts - it should in ti m e be p ossible
sts o f
far m ers , to m ou n t
an effective assault on the money power. Once the money of the people had been restored and the money barons subordinated, other necessary reforms would follow, and in due course it would
be possible to restore the country to the same state of prosperity 20
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and virtue, even though by the use of new and enlarged instru ments of government, that it had enjoyed in the opening decades of th e c entury . So at least many p opulists, after year s of bitt er di s appointment in the cause of reform, were beginning to believe in the 1890s. They did not underestimate the formidable character of the foe they were pitted against, but now at last their own forces seemed to be on the move. And indeed, if one studies the momentum the protest movement gathered from about 1888 to 1894, it is quite impressive. One finds, then, in populist rhetoric an inner tension between the optimism, so indigenously American, engendered by the sense that th ey sto od for the great masses o f the people, and the cur iou sly co -ex isten t se nse o f nea r impotence in the fa ce of a rich , unsc rupu lous, almost omnicompetent enemy. ‘We are in the hands of a merciless power,’ wrote Senator Peffer. Again: ‘Money controls our legislature, it colors our judicial decisions, it manipulates parties, it controls policies.’ The American farmer had been ‘the vic tim o f a gigantic sch em e o f s poli ati on. Never befo re wa s su ch a vast aggregation of brains and money brought to bear to force men into labor for the benefit of a few.’ Again: ‘This dangerous power which money gives is fast undermining the liberties of the pe op le. It now has control o f ne arly half their homes, and is r eac h in g ou t i ts clu tch in g hand s for the rest.’ 15 T he modern wo rld , General Weaver thought, had become ‘inoculated with the virus which is now threatening the destruction of free government and ev en civ iliz ati on i ts e lf ’.16 An d in his generally rat her sober tract of th e ele ctio n year 1892 he ech oed the pop ulist p arty platform - ‘A vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two conti nents, and it is rapidly taking possession of the world. If not met and overthrown at once, it forebodes terrible social convulsions, the destruction of civilization, or the establishment of an absolute de sp otis m ’ - with his ow n view of the apo caly ptic str uggl e : W e mu st ex pe ct to be con fron ted b y a vast and splen didly equipped army of extortionists, usurers and oppressors marshalled from every nation u nder heaven. Ev ery instrumentality known to ma n the state wi th its civ il auth ority , learnin g with its lighted torch, armies with their commissions to take life, instruments of commerce essential to commercial intercourse, and the very soil upon which we live and move and have our b eing all these thing s and more, are being pervert ed and used to enslave and impoverish the people.17
21
PO PUL
ISM
ITS
NAT
IONA
L
CHA RAC TER IS TI CS
For all this h igh -pitch ed rhetoric, po pu list asser ti ons of u ltima te victory are the dominant note, although one populist leader, Ig natius Donnelly, in a moment of deepest discouragement, wrote one o f the m ore fri ghten ing ap ocalyptic no Colu m n, in wh ich civilization w
vels o f the er a,
Caesar's
as ind eed eng ulfed in a hideo us war
between the Haves and the Have-nots. Among the devices used to enslave the people were the old parti es - and their corrup
t state wa s th e b est grou nds fo r s tar ting
a new and independent party that would belong wholly to the people. The people were convinced, wrote the Nebraska populist paper,
T h e A lli an ce- I n depen den t , ‘that the old parties have both
passe d beyond the control o
f the p eop le into th e hand s of de si gni ng
capit ali sts and corp orations, w ho se e nd and aim in life is to co nt rol legi slat ion in th eir ow n selfish in tere sts.1 8 T h e party pl at for m of 1892 accused the major parties of engaging in ‘a sham battle over the tariff’ that only distracted the people from their real enemies: ‘capitalists, corporations, national banks, rings, trusts, watered st ock, the dem onetiz ati on o f s il ver, and the opp ressions
o f us ur er s .
T h ey w ould sac ri fi ce the h om es o f the m asses in order
to cont inue
to get ‘ corruption f und s* f rom th e m il li on aires. T h is th em e of the cor rupt io n of the old part i es and the com plete fail ure o f t he exi st ing par ty system w as a note str uck very often in po pu list li ter ature , and it made especially bitter for many party followers the ultimate capitulation of 1896 when after heated dispute a major-party candidate was en do rse d .19
3
The optimists among the dissenters failed to reckon with certain facts of the American political scene that it is easy for historians to unders tand in retr ospect. T h e fi rst is the extrem ely li m ited social base of the movement. The second is the inhibiting force of the Am eri can par ty system up on insurg ent third p art ie s. On the first count, the pattern of the votes in 1892 and 1896 made it painful ly cle ar that the Pop ulists - and af te r them Brya n himsel f, even wit h a maj or- part y endo rsem ent - did not succeed, despite their sympathetic gestures towards the labour movement, in mob il izi ng ver y mu ch o f the wo rking-cl ass vote; neither, ex cept in a few states and regions, did they persuade very large segments
of the middle class. What is even more striking, their appeal to 22
NORTH
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farmers was distinctly limited, as to both region and type of crop. Populism and Democratic free-silverism, with which it became allied, appealed pre-eminently to those who wanted to raise the prices of three commodities: cotton, wheat, and silver. Populist strength was confined to the South, a very narrow range of wheat growing states, and the mountain states in which silver mining was a powerful interest. In 1892, their candidate General Weaver had wo n o nly 8 .5 per cent o f t he vote. H e ha d been st ro ng in a few plains and m oun tain states and a half-dozen stat es of the So uth . But in the rest o f the country, inclu ding decisive fa rm states of the older Middle West, he had received a portion of the Vote ranging from the negligible to only five per cent. There were only nine states, several of them sparsely populated, in which he got the vote of more than one-third of the voters. It seems clear that the populists had enough strength to put effective pressure on the two major parties in several states, or to form a little bloc in the Senate, but that their party was not on the verge of becoming a contestant for nation-wide power. And it was control of the monetary policies of the nation that the populists wanted above all. The failure of the populists to break out of the wheat-raising states into the older Middle West is a fact of decisive significance here. Before 1892, states like Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin had passed out of the period of their most intense speculative develop ment, had reckoned more successfully with the railroads, and had developed a somewhat more diversified agriculture than the states of the cotton South or the wheat-growing plains. They had also developed their own cities and local markets. Moreover, their specialties, dairying and the corn-hog complex, had not suffered a price decline comparable to wheat or cotton, and were not so dependent upon the conditions of the world market. Accordingly, though the depression that began in 1893 affected these states too, they were not so desperate, nor so rebellious as the farmers to the West and South of them. Even Bryan, running under a majorparty label in 1896, lost the states of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and W isconsin, w hose support he needed for victory.2 0 Plainly, resources of this order were not sufficient to enable a realistic populist to hope that his party could take a place alongside the major parties. In the American party system, third parties have played a significant role in giving neglected interests a voice, in bringing new ideas and issues to attention, and in putting pressure
23
PO PU LIS
M
ITS
NA TIO
NA L
CH AR AC TE RI ST IC S
for cha ng e u p on th e m ajor parties. B u t the si ngl e- membe r- di st ri ct en bloc o f eac h sta te’ s vote in the system, and the disposition electoral c olle g e loa d th e sc ales
ag ain st th e prospect of
a third
party’ s b eco m ing a m ajor pa rty. M ore ov er, the tw o ma jor parties take care o f it in the ir ow n w ay. S in ce th ey are fr eque ntl y very closely c om pe titive for th
e b ig prize
o f the presidency,
th ey are
al er t to the appeal o f an y issu e w ith w h ich a t hird party mo veme n t identifies itself, and thus ready to strike a heavy blow at its chances o f m aking further
converts. T
h is w as prec isel y what the De mo
crats did in 1896 when, under pressure
f r o m Bryan and the silver
forc es, they co m m itted th em selv es to th e f ree coinage of
s ilv e r .
The nomination of Bryan put the populists in a quandary. To fail to support him would split the free silver forces, presumably with fatal consequences to the cause. To endorse him would be almo st ce rtai n to sacrifice th eir id en tity as a party and would surely mean th e aba ndo nm ent o f t heir broad p rogram m e for l and, c r ed its, tra nsport ati on, and
curren cy in favou r o f the sing le is sue of free
si lv er . T h e end orsem ent o f the D em oc ra tic cand idate wa s a parti cul arl y bitt er pil l f or tw o e lem en ts o f th e party.
T h e la rg es t o f
these consisted of Southerners who had had to build their party in the fac e of imp lacable hos
tility and so
m ent by t he S outhern D em ocrats. T num bers , con sist ed o f intellectuals
m etim es even crue l h a ra ss h e other, less
impor ta nt in
and social idea
li sts li ke th e
writer Henry Demarest Lloyd, who hoped to push the populists towards social democracy and who regarded the cry for free silver as a delusion. However, hungry for victory on what they regarded as the primary issue, after wandering so long in the wilderness, the majority of the party elected to go with Bryan. Although the party continued to exist for another dozen years, it split over this act, lost its impetus, and indeed lost its central issue (with Bryan him self and the sil ver D em ocrats) w he n prosp erity and hi gh prices returned after 1897. Populi sm in t he br oad sense, as a par t o f the stream o f Am eri can thought , st il l exis ts, but the pop ulist m ove m ent o f the late 18 80 s and the 1890s, taken as an organized political force, was dissipated with re mark ab le rapi dit y. W hat did it in was th e return o f ge nera l prosperity, in which commercial agriculture did not fail to share. T he fai lu re o f sil ver i nfl ati on w as, ironical ly, fo llow ed by the wholly unexpected gold inflation of the early twentieth century
Agricultural prices, along with others, rebounded smartly. At the 24
NORTH
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same t im e a mas sive and contin uing growth in Amer ican cities gave the farmer a fast-growing domestic market that compensated (for a time) for the loss of his overseas markets. It is hardly an exag geration to say that in the twenty years after McKinley defeated Bryan in 1896, American agriculture entered upon its golden age. Later, when exponents of the agricultural interest tried to fix upon a peacetime period which they regarded as optimal in defining a proper ‘parity’ between agricultural and industrial interests, they settled upon the years 1909-14. Along with economic gains came social gains that broke down much of the farmer’s isolation and alleviated the raw and starved character of farm life: the develop m ent o f the auto mo bile and the tru ck, go od roads, ru ral free deli very, the telephone and the radio. It is true that not all of the dis contents and grievances that were experienced in the 1890s evap orated, and that conditions within the agricultural class varied widely. But the remaining discontents were susceptible to being contained and expressed within the existing party system. Subsequent agrarian policies took a new tack. Commercial farmers were much less interested than the populists in trying to affect the general price level, much more interested in focusing on the prices of their own products by organizing (at first voluntarily) to control the volume of their production. They were also increas ingly interested in the techniques of marketing and distribution, in temporarily withholding surpluses from the market through storage schemes, and in the development of co-operatives (in which the producers of staples took their cues from dairy farmers). Up to 1890 there were only about one hundred marketing and purchasing organizations among American farmers; by 1925 there were over ten thousand. Scientific farming, long spurned by the American dirt farmer, now took on a new interest, as the facilities for agricultural education improved. In politics, outside of certain situations in a few states, farmers lost interest in third-party action, and tended increasingly to rely for their political gains upon their strong, cohesive minority bloc in the Senate and on their dis proportionate strength in many state legislatures. During the Progressive era, when the general tide of protest and reform con verged with the residual demands of commercial farm groups, farmers won protective legislation that had previously been denied them. Notable here was the assistance they received from the Federal Government in credit and marketing, embodied in the
25
PO PU LIS
M
ITS
NA TIO
NA L
CH AR AC TE RI ST IC S
Fed eral F arm L oa n A ct o f 1916 and the W arehouse (which was very similar to an old populist scheme).
Act of 1916
D es p ite certain cre d ulo u s an d d elu sive e leme nts in populist thou ght, th e p op u li st m ov em en t o f the 1890s seem s o n b alance to have been so m eth ing o f an ed uca ti on al forc e. I have s po ke n o f its place in th e A m erica n trad ition o f entre pren eur ial r ad i c al ism, and I tru st that I
h av e m ad e clear its
entre pr en eu rial side: i t aimed,
above all, to restore agrarian profits and to scale down agrarian deb ts by inflation,
and it assu m ed tha t genera l prosperi ty c o u ld be
restored without a thoroughgoing reconstruction of the economic or con stitutio na l order . I t is im po rta nt to sa y that in c er ta in respects the populists were indeed radical also, both in their intellectual and i de ological
ton e and in the ir p rogram m e. For many long
year s af ter th e C ivil W ar the d om ina nt ton e o f Am eri can p olitical li fe had been on e o f com placen cy, and the prevaili ng c on c e pt i o n o f govern m ent required tha
t (ex cep t at a few
po ints wh er e it
intervened on behalf of currency deflation or protected industries) it should follow a policy of
l a i s s ez - f a i r e . T h e p op ulists r es t o re d a
capaci ty f or effect ive pop ular ind ign ation , in sisted up on the r es po nsi bil i ty of governm
ent for the com m on welf are, and
experi m ental atti tude toward
its active role. T
demande d a n
h ey w aged a co n-
cer ted cr it ici sm o f the ve sted in terests w hich , de spite its t ende ncy to stray into the demonic and the conspiratorial, struck fairly at m any ta rge ts and antici pated the work o f the muckrakers . In i ts general dedication to the popular interest and to positive government, populism left an important legacy to later reformers, par ti cul ar l y to t hos e of the P rogressive era a
nd the N ew D eal.
Notes Monetary Experiments (Princeton, 1939), and Banks and Politics in Americafrom the Revolution to the
1 See Richard A . Lester, Bray Hammond, (Princeton, 1957), esp. Chapter 1.
Civil War
The Jacksoni an Pe rsuasi on
2 In his (Stanford, 1957). On the entrepre neur ial theme in Jacksoni an dem ocrac y, see m y o w n (1948), Chapter III, Hammond, op. cit., and Joseph Dorfman, Vol. II (1946),
Political Tradition The Economic Mind in Am ericanCivilization, passim. 3
(Des Moines , Iow a, 1892) , pp. 76 —7.
The American
A Call to Action
4 Ibid., p. 221.
26
NORTH
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5 See the John Harvard Library edition (1963), with my introduction ‘ and the Mind of “ Coin ” Harvey’ which is also available in my book, (1965). 6 Weaver, p. 345. 7 In her (Lansing, Michigan, 1892), as quoted by Irwin Unger, (Chicago, 1964), p. 13. 8 (New York, 1891), p. 196. 9 For this theme and these quotations, see my study, (New York, 1955), pp. 64-5. 10 Ibid., p. 65. 11 Ibid., p. 66. 12 Unger, op. cit., pp. 13-23 13 W. A.Peffer, (New York, 1891), p. 148. 14 A Minn esot a farmer in 1891, as quoted in Norman Pollack, (Indianapolis, 1967), pp. 33-4. 15 pp. 42, 54, 73, 123.
Coin's Financial Schoo l, TheParanoid yle St in Americanoli Ptics A Call to Action, Seven Financi al Consp iraciesWhich Have Ens lavedtheAmerican People Populism: Nostalgic or Progressive? The F armer’s Si de The Ag e of Reform passim. The F armer’s ide S
Populist Mind The Fa rmer’s Si de,
The
A Call to Action, ThePopulist Mind,
16 p. 229. 17 Ibid., p. 44. 18 Pollack, pp. 39-40. 19 For illustrations of this theme, see ibid., pp. 35, 40, 54, 61, 174, 179, 241, 266, 281-2, 285, 300, 363. 20 On regional differences see Benton H. Wilcox, ‘An Historical Definition of Northwestern Radicalism’, 26 (December, 1939), pp. 377 -9 4, and on the problem of thirdparty strength, Chapter III.
Review,
Mississippi Valley Historical
The Ag e of Reform ,
27
CHAPTER TWO
LATIN AMERICA A l i s t a i r H en n es s y
In any general discussion of populism, Latin America is the odd man out. Whatever variations there may be between the socialistic populism of nineteenth-century Russia, the land-value, money conscious populism of the United States or the communitarian tendencies of African populism, they share a common belief in rural values, asserting the superior virtues of the country against the town. UR BA N POPUL
ATIO
N
Although in Latin America there is no accepted definition of populism, its present current usage refers to predominantly urban movements. Indeed, one can go further by saying that these have turned their backs on the peasantry: they draw no spiritual sus tenance from visions of pastoral and rural innocence: they receive no more than fringe support from peasant organizations: they are rural only in so far as peasants exert pressure on towns by becom ing migrants and thus ceasing to be peasants. Furthermore, they are manipulative movements in which the genuine voice of the people finds little chance for expression. After discussing this particular type of populism, movements more akin to the usually acce pted concep t will be considered. Although on a broad level of generality there is some point in classifying as ‘populist’ those reformist parties which have risen in oppo sition to the narrowly based oligarchical parties, th e liberals and conservatives (which, until the 1920s and the untilbreadth today in Colombia have monopolized political power), of definition, requiring a wide range of ‘sub-populisms’, reduces the value of the srcinal concept. Latin American intellectuals have 28
LATIN AMERICA
created semantic confusion by turning the accepted notion on its head, although the phenomenon they are attempting to describe is one which is becoming common in other parts of the Third World. Their purpose is to escape from the tyranny of European concepts by finding one which can contain the paradoxes of Latin America’s history and social development, covering move ments which try to look forward at the same time as they depend on cultural patterns and social relationships which are a legacy of the past, movements which share respect for the authenticity of national tradition and a compulsive drive to modernity. In its widest sense populism in Latin America can be defined as an organizational weapon to synchronize divergent group inter ests and is applied to any movement not based in a specific social class . In the m ost soph isticate d attempt at cons tru cti ng a typolog y of populi sm it is de scri bed a s: a political movement which enjoys the support of the mass of the urban working class and/or peasantry but which does not result from the autonomous organizational power of either of these two sectors. It is also supported by non-working-class sectors upholding an anti-status quo ideology.1 The leadership of these movements is drawn from a discontented, der aci né middle/upper-middle class and is often embodied in a figure with charismatic elements as Perón in Argentina or Vargas in B razil . T h eir m ass su ppo rt consists of a ‘di sp osa ble mas s’, m ade u p m os tly o f rece ntly arrived rur al migrant s as well, p erhaps, as the organized urban working class. They tend to lack a clearly definable or consistent ideology beyond a fervent nationalism, the dynamic for which often comes from a violent anti-imperialist (anti-US) sentiment rather than from any more positive assess ment or deep comprehension of national traditions and needs. In general, they are neo-socialist but emphasizing redistribution of wealth rather than increasing productive capacity. Salvation can only come from the state, which must protect national industries against foreign competition by protective tariffs, by national izing strategic foreign-owned companies and by stringent profitremittance legislation. However, the state’s role as an employer rec eives g reater em ph asis than its func tion as a n ag ent for devel op m en t - an attitud e w hic h refl ects the desi re o f une nte rpri si ng mi dd le secto rs for jo b -se cu rit y in the bureaucracy.2 Th eir gen era l id eol ogy
29
PO PU LIS
M -IT S
NA TI ON AL CHAR
ACTE
RIS TIC S
postulates a united ‘ peo ple’ in wh ich class te n sio n s are overcom e in the eupho ri a of heightened nationalism wh
ere h os tility is direc ted
ag ai ns t the imp er ia li st outsi de a nd their lacke ys w ith in - th e
ven-
depatr i as . In the Manichaean confrontation of the post-colonial
era, evil is represented by a homogeneous ‘oligarchy’ financed by Wall Street and informing to the CIA, whilst good is represented by the undifferentiated but exploited ‘people’. A variety of factors have contributed to the emergence of this trans-class populism, and although at present we lack a detailed social history which might enable us to make qualitative distinc ti ons
bet ween
dif fe re nt
types
of
m ov em en t,
th e
following
conditioning elements can be isolated :1 1
T he i nabil ity of the m idd le cl asses to fu lfil a histo rical ro le
as the carriers of a bourgeois revolution generating its own values and stimulating economic development. 2
Th e ab il ity of lando wning elites to accomm odate themselves
to change, to admit nouv eaux r i che s into their ranks and to continue to provide a model of behaviour for a mimetic middle class. 3
Th e ina bil it y of the urba n working class
to de velo p inde
pendent autonomous organizations and the delayed emergence of an identifiable working-class culture. 4 An a cc el er ati ng fl ow of migr ants to th e b ig cities accumulation there of large unassimilated marginal groups. 5
and the
T he persi stence in ru ral ar ea s of a netw ork o f de pe nd en cy
relationships which has hindered the rise of independent peasant org ani zat ion s, a nd wh ich at the same tim e co nd ition s th e beh aviour of the ex- rura l marg ina l urban groups.
D ela ye d ind ustrialization ,
due to Latin America's peripheral position as an exporter of primary products, meant that the industrial bourgeoisie looked to the state for protection against foreign competition as well as against those commercial interests which had become netted into the import-export business. The general cosmopolitan orientation of both landowners and middle classes had the corollary that national traditions often remained unexplored whilst the pre dominance of literary and legal studies, embalmed in an outworn university system, produced graduates whose qualifications were ir rel evan t f or developmen t needs. T h e fail ure o f the fifty ye ars’ old university reform movement is the most striking evidence of the inabili ty of the midd le c lass es to creat e in stitutio ns c on son an t with
30
LATIN AMERICA
the needs of modernization or those of a self-confident and enterprising social group. The entrenched power of a landowning elite not only blocked the political advancement of the middle classes but helped to dilute any sense of class solidarity by profferring the image of social success and opportunities for nouveaux r iche s to enter its ranks.2 W here su ch e ntry was blocked (as in Arge ntina ) these new gro ups , enriched by import-substitution industrialization, were drawn into the populist movement and became Peronist supporters. But the ou tstan din g s ucce ss o f the landowning elite h as be en i ts s uc ce ssf ul resistance to agrarian reform. Except in the case of Mexico, Bolivia and Cuba (and with some minor exceptions in Venezuela, Peru and Chile), agrarian reform has been attenuated. Pre-empting of the best land by a small land-owning elite combined with their inability or reluctance to farm efficiently has created Latin America’s rural crisis. Push factors of land hunger, inequitable tenancies and demographic pressure combine with the pull of the city offering excitement, educational and economic opportunity to produce the phenomenon of a contracting frontier or what Profes sor Morse, in the case of Lima, has described as ‘colonization in reverse’ importing rural values into the city. Latin American urban populism has been conditioned by the premature emergence of a mass society, caused by accelerating immigration from the countryside into metropolitan centres where, under conditions of capital-intensive industrialization, jobs can no t be created fas t en ou gh to absorb the incre ase.3 Th us it is a bridge between town and country, providing a mechanism for incorporating migrants into urban life. In nineteenth-century Eu rope the slower processes o f change e nabl ed new mi gran ts to be assim ilated into urban soc iety, where the working classes gradually built up their own organizations which could eventually intervene in politics as an autonomous entity. In Latin America, the eco nomic demonstration effect combined with the communications revolution, feeding in the values of a consumer society, has created wants and expectations demanding swift satisfaction. New migrants are rarely absorbed into established working-class organizations: these often presuppose a higher educational level, literacy and political sophistication than is possessed by migrants. Furthermore, by flooding the labour market, migrants threaten to erode the gains made by the older working-class organizations.
3 1
POPULISM
—IT S NATIONAL
CHARACTERISTICS
There is thus a ‘disposable mass’ which is available for manipula tion by middle-class politicians. These politicians have, in fact, been more successful in harnessing mass support than established labour unions. Indeed, in Argentina, Perón organized rural mig rants as a way of overcoming the opposition of the older labour organizations. The populist politician’s task is to run these incomp atible forces in harne ss. While populism helps to narrow the gap between the atomiza tion and anonym ity of big-city life and tradit ional r ur al depen den ce, it also limits the recruiting possibilities of other secondary associations such as trade unions. ‘Latin America’s low-paced industrialization,’ comments Pro fes sor Morse4 ‘contri butes littl e to th e con solida tion o f a w orking cl ass or a working- cla ss culture. T h e scale o f the m igration in rel a tion t o indu str ial opportu nity mean s that the po pu list leader rat her tha n the la bour union becom es the agent for political orga niza tion.’ In so far as populist leaders have rivals among the marginal groups, these are to be found in Salvationist Protestant sects such as the Pentecostalists often staunchly apolitical and preaching a doctrine of personal salvation, rather than in parties of the secular rev olu ti onar y left.5 Orthodox com m un ist parties h ave c on ce n trated their proselytizing effort on the organized working class, esp ec ia ll y in mining cent res where there is often a h igh ly developed class-consciousness, and on the discontented lower middle/middle classes. They have tended to regard the marginal sectors as an unreliable lum penpr oletar i at. Lati n Americ an cities are characte rize d by ch ron ic und er empl oymen t. Almost eve ryone of working age ea rns som ethin g, h ow ever small. This is achieved by overstaffing in private and public ent erp ri ses , by a public investm ent policy by w hic h su rplu s manual la bo ur i s emp loyed in construction (this is aided by th e way in wh ich real estate is a favourite investment of the Latin American middle clas s) o r through vari ous types o f small meagrely p rod uc tive ind us tries, petty trading, services and domestic service and casual work, much of which is thinly disguised unemployment. Multiple jo b -h o ld in g is a ch ara cte ris tic w h ic h th e s e m ar gi n a l g r o u p s sh are with sect ions of the middle cla ss (fo r exam ple, un ivers ity professors holdi ng two or more jobs). For the rural migrant un der em ploy ment and multiple job-holding perpetuate the patronage rela
tionships of rural areas, and help to strengthen the institution of 32
LATIN AMERICA
comp adr azg o or god parenthood by which the
pa dr i no is morally
obliged to further the interests of his ahijado or god-son, in return for wh ich he ex pe cts su ppo rt.6 Social devices such as compadrazgo, kinship and the extended family give a sense of security to the ne w ly arrived m igran t a nd create a network of mut ual a id arrange ments which tends to make such groups impermeable to rational, depersonalized political appeals. Politics remain personalist, as in rural areas, with associations in shanty towns seeking to acquire basic services like sewage, lighting, and transport via populist leaders who, in an urban setting, fill the place of the rural patron. The strength of personalist relationships, the persistence of face-to-face contacts and the dislike of impersonalism are among the most striking traits of contemporary Latin American society: patterns of behaviour evolved during the last century are still pro vin g remarkab ly res ilient - in parti cul ar the su rvival of the e th o s.7 Ad m iration for th e strong m an an d an acceptance
caudillo
of violence as a legitimate means of effecting political change are features of any frontier society but many attitudes of rural caudil lismo have been carried over into an urban setting. For example, corruption is not condemned when its proceeds are used to provide for depen dan ts to w ho m on e is morall y ob li gat ed. Th e in te nsi ty of personalized loyalties which gave cohesion to rural caudillismo another surviving trait whilst in societies which are still largely
is
macho complex still flourishes. male-dominated the The success of the populist leader depends on the skill with which he can extend the patron relationship and build up a sense o f kinship be tw een him self and his depend ants; th is m ay be done
either by manipulating communications media as in the case of Peronism or by close personal contacts as with Castro. To some extent the task has been facilitated by the predominant Catholic ethos of Latin American societies, particularly through its popular expression in folk Catholicism where the relationship between believer and saint complements the patron-dependant relationship in sec ular society .8 So m e ob servers see po pu lism as the only vi abl e reforming move m en t i n L at in A m er ica .9 Oth ers are more c ritical and view it as essentially opportunist, concerned only with securing short-term social be ne fits and p riv ileg es for its supporters1 0 whilst in the specific case of Brazil it has been seen as constituting a major obstacle to any group wishing to engineer genuine structural
33
PO P U L IS M -I T S NAT ION AL CH AR AC TE RI ST IC S
reforms: the populist leaders’ heterogeneous support and their pressing demands for immediate social benefits force them into comp romises w hich vitiat e any long-t erm plan nin g.11 The fate of populist coalitions during the last few years and thei r replacement by military- dominated regimes in Brazi l, Ar gen tina a nd Bolivi a le ads me to support the latt er interpretation. T h es e failures can be attributed as much to their inadequacies in tackling outstanding political and economic problems as to their threat to est ablis hed int eres ts. T he la ck of a cl ear ideo logy and o f a firm su p port in any specifi c socia l group as we ll as the o pp ortu nism and cor ruption of much of their leadership resulted in vacillating policies once in power. Drawing much of their vigour from spontaneous enthusiasm in opposition, their organizational weakness and cor ruption, particularly in the middle ranks of the administration, is glaringly apparent when the movement comes to power and even more so once the leadership is overthrown. The failure to become institutionalized means that continuity can often only be preserved by the leader extending his term of office but in the contex t of f ie rce pe rso nali st fact ions and wh ere the po pu list leader has enormous patronage in his gift,
continuismo
can be fatal as in
the c as e of Paz Est enssor o in Bolivi a in 196 4. T h e w ider th e base of a populist coalition, especially in a poor country like Bolivia, the more difficult it is to assuage the appetites of the coalition’s constituent groups. The poorer the country the more difficult also it is to satisfy the military, which is always a potential threat and even a rival to populist coalitions. On the ot her han d, the more highly developed a
soc iety becom es,
the mo re li kel y i t is t hat elements w ithin the pop ulist coalition will develop their own autonomous organization, thus lessening its dependence on the rest of the coalition. The Peronist unions had become so strong by 1955 that they were reluctant to risk their gains in defending Perón. The major legacy of Peronism has in fact been an intransigent and highly articulate labour movement under its own independent leadership, whereas in Brazil, where unions had been organized by Vargas in 1937 under the Ministry of Labour, unions have since been dependent on the government and have thus lacked the autonomy of those in Argentina. To sum up urban populism in Latin America: it may be viewed as a manipul ati ve mechanism for controlling marginal pop ulatio ns, providi ng a means by which m igrant s can be integrated into urba n
34
LA TIN AMERIC
A
life. For th e m idd le classes it is a way to cope wit h the c onse quen ces of urbanization without the results of industrialization. As such, populism does not challenge the s tatu s q u o : work patterns are not disturbed; a literary and legally trained intelligentsia does not have to venture into new specialized fields; a premium is still put on the m anip ulation o f wo rds and peo ple rat her than of things.1 2 Popul ism is a transitional phenomenon; a balance of contradictory social forces which is only concerned, in a very limited sense, with changing the social structure by breaking the hold of importexport businesses and of any group socially too inflexible to adapt itself to the political elasticity of populist programmes. Provided they scent the wind of change, oligarchs can weather the storm by working within the framework of traditional dependency rela tionships.13 So far from being a response to industrialization or the nee d for it , it is a resp ons e to t he absence of it. Select ive indus trialization of the import-substitution type might occur under the auspices o f a pop ulist govern m ent - Peronis m is a ca se in po int but this should not deflect attention from the way in which urban populism is primarily concerned with urbanization, not industrial ization.
It is a de vic e to stave off the consequences of
a con st an t
influx of rural migrants which reflects the failure of governments to solve ru ra l pr oblem s. T h e m ost that populist gov ernmen ts ha ve been able to do is to redistribute wealth; they have not created it and, so far from removing the structural barriers impeding eco no m ic and s ocia l cha nge , th ey have mad e subs tant ial cont rib uti ons to them. The most striking feature of the populist movements under dis cussion has been their neglect of the peasantry and their failure to change the structure of rural society, to implement agrarian reform programmes or to increase substantially agricultural production. It should not be thought, however, that there have been no popu list movements more akin to the accepted usage of the term, although with the exception of Peru’s A cción Popular populism has not been used to describe them. The revolutions in Mexico, Bolivia and Cuba all contained strong elements of rural populism and derive much of their dynamic from a view that peasants enshrine, in a particular way, the authentic national virtues. These phenomena, in contrast to those which have been discussed, are in a real sense regenerative’ movements. We might expect to find in Latin America a classic Russian
35
POPULISM
- IT S NATIONAL
CHARA CTERISTIC
S
populist situation of an alienated intelligentsia drawn from the upper middle and middle cla ss seek ing in a depresse d rura l popu la tion the key to political salvation and national regeneration and yet, until the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and its repercussions in the 1920s, there is a curious ambivalence among the alienated élite towards rural society which betrays a fundamentally urban orientation. Nevertheless, in common with most new nations, there is the compulsive search for a unique identity. What has to be explained is why this search has been so protracted.
OL D RU RAL
PO PU LISM
For those who inhabi t the ex-colonial w orld, th e n eed to recapture an imagined sense of community which malevolent history in the ir view too k away from them is an impera tive difficult to evade. The quest for roots, authenticity and the symbolic reassurance whic h comes f rom an ideology of pristi ne srcins pro vides psy cho logical satisfaction, in national terms, for the country on the peri phery of international affairs. The pressures impelling such a quest have been particularly strong in Latin America where the time-scale of self-doubts and questionings has been longer than in the rest of the Third World. Although Spanish rule was over thrown 150 years ago Emancipation was the false light of the new Dawn and in the first confused years of independence idealism and self-confidence drained away. Even Bolívar despaired of the cont ine nt he ha d tri ed to save -
‘he wh o serves a R evo lution p loughs
the sea’. Political fragmentation and economic weakness ensured that Latin America remained on the fringes, a frontier society reproducing primary goods for the metropoli of the developed w orld : the c la ss ic cas e of neo-colonialism,
an ex am ple to be hel d
up by Frantz Fanon of what Africa must at all costs avoid. The cultural history of Latin America since independence has oscillated fitfully between self-disparagement and exaggerated self esteem. In ‘
A r i el i s m o ’,
the best example of the latter, the ethereal
spir it uali ty of Latin America is contrasted with
the brash m aterialism s
o f the ‘ Coloss us of the No rth ’.14 T h is intellectua l ov erco m pensation for political inferiority is not only confined to the intel lectual elite but has its counterpart in popular culture, as in those M exic an bal la ds which unfavourabl y contrast gringo
sex ua l prow ess
with that of the Mexicans. Once attitudes are stereotyped they 36
LATIN AMERICA
tend to become self-perpetuating, providing a model for future behaviou r, and fin ally end by bei ng enshrined a s virt ues i n order to make living with them bearable. Thus backwardness becomes a virtue and poverty an ennobling experience. Psychological com pensations provided by ideologies of sublimation were adequate so long as Latin America was in a backwater, enjoying a political freedom denied to those still under colonial rule. But when these achieved their freedom, the roles seemed reversed and Latin America, enmeshed more deeply than any other part of the Third World in the net of United States influence, now seemed more than ever a prisoner in its own past. T h e conspira cy theory of neo-colonia lism, whi ch has bec ome an integ ral part o f La tin A m eric an radicalism has roo ts going back to ; the nineteenth century. Latin American backwardness could only be explained in terms of a sinister alliance between an entrenched oligarchy and foreign interests. One of the clearest expressions of this anti-imperialism is to be found in the writing of Jose Martí the late nineteenth-century Cuban populist writer who has been the most important influence on Castro's thinking. Martí was primarily concerned with the war against Spain but he saw Cuba’s struggle as part of a wider one for the economic independence of Latin America. But Martí’s populism with its emphasis, rare in the nineteenth century, on the rural masses, racial equality and the need for class harmony, cut little ice with the cosmopolitan elite steeped in a derivative culture. The stronger the insistence on the threat from the United States, the stronger became the emphasis on Latin America’s European roots. The current development ideologies of Comtean and Spencerian positivism encouraged mas sive foreign investment and widened the gap between rulers and the masses by official scorn for the weak. The degradation of the Indian was attributed to inherent racial deficiencies rather than to structural shortcomings in the political and economic system. Long, slow evolution through education was seen as the solution to wha t was oth erw ise th ou gh t to be the ins oluble p ro blem of r ural m iser y.15 The rising middle classes were scarcely aware of the political potential of the rural masses and it was only under the influence of the Mexican Revolution that this came to be recognized. It was in the 1920s that the neo-colonialist critique of imperialism was brought together with the cult of
indigenismo
and the myth of
37
PO PU LI SM -IT S NAT
IO NAL
CHAR
ACTE
RIS TIC S
pre-Columbian innocence. This mingling of nationalism and populism can be traced in most subsequent radical and revolu tionary ideologies. It is the long delay in the fusion of the consti tuent p ar ts of the populi sti c nation ali sm o f the 1920s w hich needs to be explai ned. The linking of the newly independent republics in the early nineteenth century with the centres of international trade rein fo rc ed the ur ba n l ega cy of the Spani ards by dev elop ing the towns on the pe ri phe ry - Rio , Mo ntevideo, B uenos Aires, L im a, Gu aya quil and C aracas - where fina ncia l, cultural an d po litica l ins titu tions were conc ent rat ed. Inland , colonial trading
rou tes collap sed
and provincial towns decayed and came under the control of rural caudillos, one of whose aims was to prevent the extension of state power although some, like the Argentinian Rosas, were strong enough to capture the state. Unsettled political conditions in Spanish America until after the 1870s, and slavery in Brazil until the 1880s discouraged immigration on any scale. For the nine tee nth ce ntu ry, th eref ore, Latin Am erica was a frontier s oc iety both in relation to international trade and to the vast spaces of the in teri or . Where as i n t he U nited States the frontier ex pa nd ed u nder the impetus of massive immigration and elsewhere under the umbrella of imperialism, the Latin American frontier remained stat ic, expanded patchily o r even c on tra cted .16 T h e v alu es o f pastoral despotism even came to dominate the metropoli. The contrast, sharply drawn by the Argentinian writer and statesman Sarmiento in the 1840s, between a civilized, European-oriented Buenos Aires and a barbaric, anarchic interior can be multiplied thr ougho ut t he cont ine nt. D aunting geography, m alev olen t nature and barbarous caudillos dispelled any illusions urban intellectuals may have had about rural arcadia. The imagination and sensibility of wr it er s could not be nurtu red on vision s o f pastor al life and o f a n ordered rural civilization. Nor is it easy to find examples of a conscience-stricken landed é 1it e - most w ere abse nte e land lor ds, often living in Euro pe, content to leave their estates to be managed by mestizo bailiffs. T h e sur vi val of the col onial hacienda effect ively blocked the growth hacienda of an independent yeomanry. In Argentina, where the was not entrenched during the colonial period and where land was abundant, constant government efforts to encourage agricultural
coloni zation by a system o f e m phyteu tic tenure faile d. A vo racious
38
LAT IN
AM ERIC A
European market for hides and later for cattle and wheat argued in favour of size. In the 1820s, twenty-one million acres of public do m ain cam e int o th e han ds o f five hun dred indivi duals.17When th e pampas Indians were driven back in the 1870s, homesteading acts remained a dead letter as speculative land companies moved in, thu s p rev entin g th e de velo pm en t o f an a grarian populi st mov eme nt comparable to that of the United States. Migrants who did settle on th e pa m pa s far m ed on precarious tenures.1 8 Vast distanc es and the isolation of farms were accentuated by a communications network which connected the interior with the capital but ignored lateral links and inhibited the development of a cohesive rural society. It was from this atomized background that the migrants to Buenos Aires in the 1930s and 1940s were to come to provide the leaven for Peronism. Urban consciousness of the pampa took the form o f a wistful, n osta lgi c g a u ch i s m o , lame nting the passing of the free ran ging cow bo y - a sur rog ate f or a ct io n whi ch mig ht have ch an ged th e structure o f that rur al soci ety on whi ch Arg entina’ s en orm ous wea lth was based.1 9 At this stage it is worth noting that like Peronism in the 1940s ' and ’50s Argentina’s other main contribution to Latin American radical ism - the U nive rsity Refor m movem ent - al so had an urban orientation. The significance of this movement, which began in 1918, did no t lie m erely in the deman d for univer sit y r efor m bu t in the assertion of a new continental nationalism under the leader ship of a regenerating student elite. It postulated the idea of a ‘political university’ which would become the revolutionary focus from which student youth would regenerate decadent societies. At the core of this student populism was the myth of the incor rup tibility o f you th wh ich has b ecom e incr eas ingl y po te nt a s L at in America’s population becomes younger.20 But the significant feat ure of the movement, which in the 1920s had repercussions in nearly every Latin American country, was its divorce from the rural masses. The ‘popular universities’, for example, were con fined to teaching the rudiments of reading, writing and politics to urban workers and only in Mexico in the early 1920s (where Reform influence was weak) did students go into rural areas in any numbers. However, with the Cuban Revolution the emphasis chan ged from urb an-b ased stu de n ts’ acti vity , demo nst ra ti ons , workers’ education, terrorism and the like, to the countryside. Subsequently, the guerrilla mystique has put teeth into the verbal
39
PO PU LI SM -IT
S
NA TI ONA L CHA
RA CT ER IS TI CS
rural populism which had sprung up as part of the nationalist revival of the 1920s. The most pronounced expression of the new nationalism of the 1920s was to be found in those countries which had large Indian populations and visible monuments of a flourishing preSpanish past. The survival of pre-conquest methods of social organization as in the ay llu of Andean Indians as well as preSpanish modes o f thou ght were used as a theoretical basis for soci al reconst ructi on (thus providing au thentic instead o f borrowed solutions to nat ion al problems), irrespect ive o f wh ether the se social institutions had lost their functional usefulness or not. As Indians were overwhelmingly peasants, Indianism and agrarianism were inextricably linked. In Mexico particularly, but also in Peru and to a lesser extent in Bolivia, this stimulated a wide range of in dig eni sta literature. Indians, uncorrupted by contact with West ernized urban culture, would be the instrument by which Latin Ameri ca could be rel ease d from s piri tual serfdom to Euro pe. In di genism sometimes appear ed to be raci ali sm i n re verse - th e vision s of Indians sweeping down from the Sierra to purge the decadent coastal cities of Peru reflects the S ch a d en fr eu d e of a cultural elite which under Spengleri an infl uence, w as losing its social co nfidence. I ndig e ni sm o was also an answer to the crisis of identity which has plagued Latin American intellectuals. What was a Peruvian or a Bolivian when perhaps sixty per cent of the population was out side the national economy and probably did not even speak Spanish? By upgrading the Indian and downgrading the Spanish heritage, the shame which a mestizo might feel at his Indian blood coul d be exorc ize d. Th is, of c ourse, could be overdon e. In M exico , Vasconcelos’s dislike of Indianism was due to his recognition of the value of the Spanish contribution to Mexican culture as well as to his mystical belief in the superiority of a fusion of races.21 Ultimately, the sincerity of back-to-the-land movements is the Tolstoyan test of actually participating in the life of the oppressed and downtrodden, and very few in dig e ni stas outside Mexico did this.2 2 Ne verth eless it wo uld b e unfair to be to o crit ical. H o w else could the upper-class intellectual contribute but by writing and making the problem one of public debate? How could a cultural gap, widened by centuries of distrust and fear, be sparked? And in any case the skills needed for raising the Indians’ standards were
40
LAT IN AMERI
CA
no t th ose acq uire d b y a liter ary trained intelli gentsi a.23 T he indig en i s ta s main contribution was therefore literary, and impressive novels like C iro A legr ía’ s B r oad and A l ien is the W or ld or Argued as’ s Y a w ar F ie st a roused public awareness and concern. In Peru, few parties took the Indian problem and that of rural A cci on poverty seriously until the emergence of the Belaúnde’s Popular Party. In the 1930s the communists adopted an Indianist átegui’s equation of agrarian line under the influence of Mari Ind ianism and socialism - bu t f or this the aut hor was da mned by
the R ussia ns as a ‘p op u list’. 24 A contributory fact or i n this c om m un ist influence , how ever, m ay w ell have been the ir f ai lu re to we an the urban workers away from A P R A wh ich in t he 19 20 s a nd 19 3 0 s was th e le ad ing urb an radical party and n ot, as is so ofte n as sume d a part y w ith stron g rural roots.
It is true that
A P R A ha d a fol low
ing am ong peasan ts in th e north o f Peru and among t he w or ke rs of the big coastal plantations, but in spite of the fact that the party’s leader, Haya de la Torre, coined the phrase Indo-America, A P R A ’s Ind ianism has al ways been luke -wa rm, r a re ly pa ss ing beyond w ind ow dressing. A ized unionism of the
P R A ’s st rengt h is ba se d o n the o r g an
mestizo
workers on the cotton and sugar
plantati ons and the lowe r m idd le/m idd le clas ses of the c oastal cit ies and is m inim al a m on g Indian s of the Sie rr a. 25 indigenismo The academic dialectics of Peruvian reflect the dil emma of writers in the crises of a pre-revolutionary society. In Mexico, by contrast, intellectuals had had no choice after the over
throw of Porfirio Diaz in 1911; they were catapulted into a revolu tionary situation in the making of which they had had little part. ‘We were like leaves swept on the winds of the Revolution’, wrote the novelist Azuela who served as a doctor in Villa’s army. Atti tudes therefore were formed under very different conditions in the two countries. In contrast too, the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 was preceded by a long gestation of proto-revolutionary regimes in t he 1930s and 1940s. O ut o f the experience o f civi l w ar and wit h no foreign models to guide or confuse them, the Mexicans, like the Tu rks at the sam e tim e had to fi nd thei r ow n solut io n an d these were determined by pragmatic rather than ideological considerations. Un der th e lo ng and suc cess ful dicta torshi p of P or fi ri o Diaz f ro m 18 76 to 1911, M ex ico had be en admired as a development mo del , much as it is today, but then progress had been achieved at the
41
POPULISM
- IT S NATIONA
L
CHARAC
TERIS
TICS
expense of the Indian peasant whose subjection had been sancti fied by positivist ideology. Revolution against this system was primarily a political revolt against co ntin ui sm o , rigged elections and a gerontocracy which blocked the circulation of elites. Revo lution did not release the energies of a dynamic middle class, because this was too small and divid
ed. Instead , removal of th e caudillos ,
j e f e m áx i m o released a violent conflict between rival
each operating from a regional base to seize control of the central government. In view of the later concern of Mexican intellectuals with the land and the redemption of the Indians it is curious to find so few antece dents before 1910 - one looks in va in for a back-to-t he-land movement. It was only after the breakdown of the social controls of Porfirianism that agrarian revolt could find active expression and force itself on the attention of revolutionary leaders. It is not surprising therefore that there was very little ideological content in t he fi rst ag ra ri an legislation in
1915 -
this was primarily a
political move by Carranza to drain off Zapata’s and Villa’s peasant supp ort.26 H ow ever , rad ical intellec tuals , in flu en ce d b y za p a ti s m o , succeeded in getting agrarian reform written into the 1917 consti tution; agra ri ani sm thus becam e a n integral part of the re
vo lutio n’ s
ideology although it was not until Cardenas in the 1930s that it was giv en priori ty. Un der the pat ro nag e of the M inist er o f Educ ation, Vasconcelos, the re wa s a genuine back-to-t
he-people m ovem ent p art ly by those
wh om the war had br ought into cont act, fo r the firs t time , w ith the actual condition of the countryside. Students went into remote regions to set up rural schools, Indian protection centres, and agricultural schools, and they conducted illiteracy campaigns. There can be no doubt of the sincerity of much of this ruralism although the impetus was soon to flag until briefly revived by Cardenas. But even if Vasconcelos’s own messianic visions about the new race to emerge in the New World under Mexican leader ship lost touch with reality and rationality, those he patronized gave to the Revolution an utopia n content which not ev savage political in-fighting could totally obscure.
en the m ost
The ejido was o f course t he main pra ct ic al express ion o f M exican rural populism. Although at first the revolutionary leaders reluc tantly accepted it as a transitional solution, the radicals saw it as ca lp u lli
som ething more -
a ret urn t o the pre-Spanish 42
with its
LAT IN AMERIC
A
communal organization. As a ‘Mexican’ solution it has since ac quired a san ctity w hich defies th e critici sm of econom ic r atio na lity . By returning land to v illages and vesting control in the communit y both were to be given a source of sustenance and independence. This aspect of the revolution’s ideology is well summed up in Ta nn en ba um ’s phrase a ‘ph ilosop hy o f lit tle things’ and he r ecalls a conversation with Calles in the 1920s in which he questioned the presiden t abou t th e future2 7 - ‘W e w ill make a vil lage o ut of the haciend a’ ; ‘A nd w ha t abou t the city ?’ ‘It does not count’ - an odd reply perhaps from the caudillo whose power base was the corrupt unionism of urban labour but, sincere or not, it expresses the vision of numberless small communities each with its own school, owning its own land enjoyed in usufruct by the villagers, and free d from hacienda d om ination. Bu t t he Revolution di d not c reate a nation of self-governing villages as this vision would imply. There was no wholesale redistribution of land; not even Zapata envisaged th is - he w anted th e retu rn of vi ll age l an ds a nd the dist ributi on o f unexploited hacienda land. Much of what was dis tributed went to private owners to form the basis of a capitalist agricultural sector. Although by the ejidal law of 1927 every village was eligible to receive an ejido, the se were only cre ate d in respo nse to pressure from below. Land distribution therefore becomes sub j e c t to t h e d em a n d s o f th e ec o n o m y, o f p op u la tio n pre ssu re, o f rural disturbance and countless other interests working through an increasingly complex web of pressure groups. Ostensibly the state did not participate directly in ejido affairs but in practice it is omnipresent both in the decision to create new ejidos and in the control of the vital Ejidal Bank which, by channelling or withholding credit, can determine an ejido’s success or failure. The ejido has become the touchstone for judgements on the Revolution. The Left’s major criticism is that opportunities to create a collectivized agriculture have been lost and that, by creat ing ejidos worked individually, governments have played into the hands of peasantism or, as it has been put, ‘In the absence of ene rgetic ou tside intervention, peas ants i n the ejidos often resemble the individual small landowners who live for their land rather than by their lan d.28 T h e few collectiv e ejidos , largely established under communist influence in the 1930s, are an isolated exception. There is truth in the assertion that opportunities have been missed for co-operative development and that the poor showing of ejidos in
43
POPU
LISM
— IT S
NA TIONA
L
CHA RAC TER IS TI CS
agricultural production is due to the government deliberately ch an nelling fun ds for ov erh ead s etc. - to ben efit the larg e-scale
roads, electrici
ca pita list sector
ty, i rr igation ,
w hich ha s b een
resp onsib le f or M ex ico ’s spec tacu lar grow th o f agr ic ul tu ral pro du ction .29 B ut m uc h o f the
am biv alen ce ab ou t ag ra ri an po licy
stems from its being the product of an institutionalizing revolu ti on and so subject to com pr om ises. C ontra st this with, f or e xa mpl e, the B olivi an case wh ere in 1953, as a resu lt o f pressu re f rom be low , the government was stampeded into a more complete but less control led a nd m ore chao tic a grar ia n reform. ness o f the B oli vian reform
T h e very comple
te
bec am e a hand icap as l and h un ge r,
once sat is fi ed, red uces th e social m ob ilit y n ecessary for ec
ono mic
progress.30 Althoug h agrari ani sm has be en th e m ost striking feat M exican R evoluti on, it s co m pu lsive attraction as a
ure of t he source fo r
nationalist doctrine has tended to obscure other aspects. Revolu tionary ideology was a synthesis between an idealized rural past and a bou ndless i ndu stri al future —
w ell sym bo lized
in Riv er a’s
murals. Since Cardenas nationalized oil in the late 1930s, a greater emphasis on industrialization has led to a fall in the amount of la nd di st ri buted.
A s urban
op po rtun iti es exp an de d and dem o
gra phic pressures increased, th e im pe tus o f agrari anism has pro ve d impossible to sustain. During the process of industrialization the function of the
ej i d o has been to satisfy the telluric urges of the
less efficient peasants whilst a dynamic agriculture, capable of fee ding one of the fas tes t grow ing p op ulation s in th e w orld,
ha s
been favoured. Thus both pressures on scarce good land have increased and government assistance to
ej i d o s has been reduced
on the assumption that only the less enterprising will stay in the eji dos . So acute is land pressure that many
t ak e jobs in fac to ri es and let ou
ej i d a ta r i o s are able to
t their p lots on a sha re-crop ping
b as is: even ej i d o peasants can become exploiters. However im perfe ct t he ej i d o may be, it provides some measure of prote cti on fo r the peas ant d uring
bo th the
ind ustr ial
and
ag ri cu ltu ra l revolut ion through w hich M ex ico is p ass ing a nd, by reducing social tensions, has been a crucial factor in making this pol it ic al ly the m ost stabl e coun try in La tin A m erica. It w ou ld nev ert hel es s be wrong to assume that b ecause o f the over tl y urban
empha s of P R I poli ti cs, M exico sti cs the ur ban sipopulism discussed ear shar li er. es Mthe ex ch icanaracteri pea san ts o fha ve 44
LATIN AMERICA
powerful o rganizati ons, both in the C N C and in the p easant sector o f th e P R I, and are th us able to exert a cer tain pres sure on the government. Nevertheless where there are high concentrations of landless labourers or blatant examples of administrative corruption, rural disco nten t can be exploited by th e Le ft to att ack the gov ernme nt’s bet raya l o f its r ev olu tion ary id eals 31 or, alternatively, rural protest may take the form of an actual counter-revolutionary movement, as in th e cristeros of the 1920 s or the sinarquistas of the later 1930s, in which the Revolution was identified with a corrupt urban poli tical class. The cristero rising was a blind peasant reaction backed by the higher clergy against the violent anti-clerical policies of Calles. Sinarquismo began as a more coherent, non-violent move men t overl apping some o f the old cristero areas but led by secular intellectuals who were nevertheless trying to build up a rural Catho lic m ove m ent - a quasi-pop ulist phenomenon with a Cat hol ic counter-revolutionary base. The leadership was provided by pro fessional men and students who gave up their jobs to live with peasants. The support came from areas which had been scarcely tou ch ed b y t h e agrari an reform.3 2 Rapid expansion o f the move ment, which claimed 900,000 followers in the 1940s, can be ex plained by the way in which its middle-class leaders physically identified themselves with peasants, canalizing resentment against the corrupt godless politicians of the big cities: You will not find in sinarchism, my friend, the go-between lawyer, the professional politician, the pedantic intellectual, the ideologist; you will find the warmth of the people, the sap of the people, the spirit of the popular mind. The peasants, the best men of my country, live in contact with the sweet, rough, fertile land of Mexico: those who live in contact with the rain, under the clear skies, these give impulse and life to sinarchism.33 As the area of sinarquista support was not predominantly Indian the cultural barriers were comparatively easy for the sinarquista leade rs to overcom e - the more so as they we re themsel ves Cat hol ics, working within the same cultural ethos, even as they were prepared to share the poverty of their followers. Not that sinarquista leaders were prepared to share power with their followers; it was the unquestioning discipline expected of the latter which prevented sinarquismo from being a genuine populist movement.
45
POP
UL ISM
- I T S
NATIONAL
CH AR AC TE RI ST I CS
It m ay b e that the secu larist, an ti-cl erica l, soc ialist ic i deol ogy of the R evoluti on has been cou nter-pro du ctive in ter ms o f wi n n in g the confidence of the rural population by raising up yet another ba rr i er betw een tow n and cou ntry in ad dition to those al r ea dy e x isting between Indians and m estizos . Where Indian and mestizo ar e cult urally defined ter m s (as in M ex ico and L atin Am e r ic a generally), an Indian who is educated in the city and then returns to his village, perhaps as a schoolmaster, is often isolated and this makes him reluctant to do so (thus defeating one of the purposes o f tr aini ng them as scho olteach ers). A ltho ug h the cul tur al b arriers may now be l essening as the co nsciou sness o f M exico as a mestizo nati on gains wider acceptance , th e ec on om ic p ull o f the cit y i s an additional barrier. It is a cliche, too often expressed by alienated int ell ectual s, that vill ag e life is e m otion ally m ore sati sf ying t h an life in the city and these intellectuals are often the least psycho logicall y suit able to act as ‘ cultura l b rok ers’ , m ed iating community-oriented and nation-oriented groups. In considering
bet ween
the Mexican Revolution the immense complexity of social rela tionships must never be underestimated and it is this complexity which has restricted the active expression of that populism which is an i nte gral part o f the R ev olu tion ’s id eo log y .34 A s Latin Am eric a’ s three successful social re vo luti on s in M exi co, Bolivia and Cuba have been largely rural in character and in view o f the f ai l ure s of urban po pu li sm it m igh t appear t hat the key t o future change must be sought in the countryside and will come fr om an awakened peasant ry. T h is, o f cou rse, is the
Cuban
the si s. Latin A m erican r ur al revo lts take m an y form s - m essi anic m ovements, s oci al bandi tr y, land invasions and a no m ic violence but it ha s proved d if fi cult to direct the se in to c oh ere nt revolutionary m ovements. 35 For a peas ant m ov em ent to influen ce th e course o f poli ti cal developm ent there m ust fi rst be a rev olu tion at the p oli ti cal centre such as the Madero revolt against Porfirio Diaz or the suc cessful p u ts c h of t he M N R i n L a Paz i n 195 2, or a m assi ve ali ena ti on of the urb an popul ati on as in C uba in the 1950s. Se con dly, there must be a predisposition among peasants to revolt which, eve n i n spi te of e xtremely poor cond it ions, is not so en de m ic as one wou ld expect . T he rôle o f f ol k mem ory i n Lati n A m eri can rur al m ovem ents has not been adequately explored and yet this would seem to
provide one clue. A fundamental contrast can perhaps be drawn 46
LATI N AMERIC
A
between folk memories of societies where communal lands have been pillaged by expanded haciendas , as happened among the Andean Ind ians a nd in M exic o, and of ex-slave pla nta tio n soci eti es such as Brazil and Cuba.39 In the latter, manual labour carries a stigma and the telluric bond is tenuous, whereas in the former land is seen as an extension of personality and there is secret virtue in tilling the age-old tnilpa : without land a peasant is m aim ed.37 M ov em en ts ba sed on revindication of anc ient righ ts as in Mexico and Bolivia have a self-sustaining momentum. Else where, the dyna mic m ust be sustained by an outsid e ag ent - in Cuba the guerrillas fulfilled this role although the weakness of the rural drive had to be compensated by an active urban revolution ary movement.38 In Brazil the difficulty of organizing the Peasant Leagues may be partially explained by the density of the rural dependency relationship which was not offset by any sense of g en er a li zed feelings of injustice.39 In addi tion, where the telluric bond is weak, there is a greater likelihood of migration to the towns especially by the younger generation (increasingly, even in Mexico). Thus in Latin America it is the city which acts as a safety valve for rural discontent and not the frontier as a safety valve for the city.
s peci fi c as distinct from
NEW
RURA
L POPULISM
The difficulties faced by peasant movements in achieving a self generating momentum, the failures of urban populism to mobilize the peasantry and the political quiescence of the urban working class underlines the importance of the Cuban Revolution and the guerrilla mystique, as well as those forms of populism associated with radical Catholicism in Chile and Brazil and Peru’s indigenist A cci o n P op u la r .
Although Cuba is highly urbanized, Castro has succeeded in giving the Revolution a rural imprint, exemplified in the National Institu te o f Agrari an Reform (I N R A) w hich was the str onge st institution and a virtual state within the state during the early ’sixties. What Cuba lacked in the way of indigenous communal traditions with pre-Spanish roots, telluric myths and a sense of specific grievance comparable to the case of Mexico, was compen sated for by a revolutionary tradition stretching back to the out break of the war against Spain in 1868 and by the writings of Jose 47
POPULISM
- I T S
NATIONAL
C H AR AC TE RI ST IC S
M arti f rom w hich stem the m oral im pera tives of Castr o’ s thi nk ing , the messianic notion of Cuba’s role as the liberator of Latin Am eri ca fr om the yok e o f U S eco no m ic do m inati on and the ruralism implicit in his populist assumptions of a united, racially har monious nation deriving its strength from those who live close to the soil.40 The breaking down of psychological barriers dividing town from country has been a constant threat running through official poli cy. T h e i ll it eracy cam paign o f 196 1 bo th i dentif ied the yo un g with the Revolution and brought them into contact with rural conditions, and the educational system has been reorientated to m eet r ur al needs. T h e cr iti cism s o f ec on om ic inef fi ciency br ou gh t against the an nual m igration o f stu de nts, offi ce work ers and bu re au crats to cut cane during the sugar harvest, miss the point that it contributes towards breaking down the stigma attached to manual la bour in an ex-slave plantation so ciety. T h e contras t betw een an un corru pted p easantry and a c or ru pt ed metropolis which is implicit in many of Castro’s early speeches and w hich is sti ll refl ected in his con stan t att acks on bure aucr ati sm, se rve d to dist inguish the 26th Ju ly M ov em en t from the ol d com m unis ts w hose str ength had b een drawn from organiz ed ur b an labour. A rural following gave him support which the communists could not challenge. It underlined the break with the discredited urban populism of Batista in the 1930s (from which the Com m unists had benefi ted) and f rom G rau San M artin and Pr i o Socor ras in the 1940s, a l l o f w hich regim es shared som e o f th e char act eri st ic s o f the urban p opu li sm pre viously described. In Castro’s early activities there is little awareness of the revo lutionary potential of a suppressed peasantry, but once involved in guerrilla activity and dependent on peasants for survival he experi enced a conversion t he essence o f w hich is caug ht in a le tt er w rit ten af te r eight m on ths in th e Sierr a M aestra.4 1 . . . the re nov at in g s pir it , t he longing fo r collect ive excellence, the awar ene ss o f the higher destiny are in full flower and can develop con siderably further. We had heard of these things, which had a flavour of verbal abstraction, and we accepted their beautiful meaning, but now we are living it, we are experimenting in every sense, and it is truly unique. We have seen its incredible development in this Sierra, which is our small universe. Here the word ‘people’ which is so often utilized
in a vague and confused sense, becomes a living wonderful and dazzling 48
LATIN AMERICA
reality. N ow I know who the people are: I see them in that invincible force that surrounds u s everywhe re . . . who has organized them so wonderfully? Where did they acquire so much ability, astuteness, cour age, self-sacrifice? No one knows! it is almost a mystery. They organize themselves alone spontaneously. Living among them this sense of discovery and awareness of the peasants as an almost mystical force is markedly different from the verbal pop ulism of th e 1920s as well as f rom the att itu des of ortho dox communists who regarded him at the time as a bourgeois putschist. Castro constantly reiterates how revolutionaries can only be formed by experience, not by theoretical works or by mechani cally apply ing dogm as w hich have no rel evanc e to Cub an a nd L atin American conditions. Part of the attack on traditional Latin Ameri can communist parties, which reaches its most sophisticated ex pression in Regis Debray, lies in the assumption that they have bee n corrupted by the urban m ilie u. In this vi ew g uerrilla act ivi ty is the forge of revolutionary consciousness. The der acine intellec tual who must be the link between the formless protest of rural revolt and the organized workers of the cities can only become fully ‘proletarianized’ by living with and being dependent on the peasantry. The peasants, for their part, cannot be won over with ou t a program me o f practic al measu res - agrarian refo rm, educa tion, m edical help, etc. - in th e revolut ionary foc i of gu errilla act i vity. Political salvation can only be attained by working with and through peasants. But behind the facade of this grass-roots popu lism there is the more compelling rationale that peasants are most easily organized under war conditions. Guerrilla activity is thus a method of political mobilization. As in Fanon’s African populism, Sorel’s myth of violence is transmuted from the urban proletariat and the general strike to a neglected peasantry and guerrilla warfare. T h e contrast which is often drawn between the ea rly, ana rchical, ‘humanist’ or populist phase of the Revolution and the post-1961 ‘totalitarian’ phase tends to ov erlook th e contin uities underlying the two. Undoubtedly, social controls have become more all-embrac ing ; a siege menta lity and the d ema nds o f a large mili tary establish ment have brought organizational rigidity, but Castro’s reluctance to institutionalize the Revolution, as revealed in the slow building up of the official party (begun in 1961 but it still has not held a national congress), reflects the tension between the need to have an
49
POPULISM
- I T S
NATIONAL
CH AR AC TE RI ST IC S
eff ici ent p olitico-adm inistrative sys tem and Castro’ s ow n li ki ng for a person alist style o f p olitic s in w h ich th e ‘ p eo p le’ ar e co ns ta nt ly invoked against the bureaucracy. T h e m ethod too o f co nstructing t he par ty w it h emph as i s on election from below was an attempt to give it a legitimacy rooted in the people’s will, and so crush the sectarianism of the PSP w hich th e Escalante af fa ir o f 19 62 h ad b rou gh t ou t into the op en. 42 T h e natur e o f Castro’ s relationship to h is sup porters may a ppear si milar in kind to that o f th e urban po pu list le aders - he w orks within the high ly persona li st framew ork o f La tin A m eri can r adical politics but there i s an im po rtant differen ce o f degree. Perhaps thi s is most vividly seen in his appeal to, and the sustenance he derives fro m, the you nge r gen eration .43 One consequence of the Cuban Revolution has been the debilitation of the democratic Left throughout Latin America. Parties such as A c t i o n D em o c r d t i c a in Venez uel a, A P R A i n Pe ru an d the P R D in the D om inican R epub li c have be e n forced into competition with the heady doctrines of Castroism. Under this challenge the youth movements of these parties have m oved left wh ilst the old guard leadership (hango vers fr om the militant years of the democratic Left in the 1930s) became more conservative. Once this bifurcation occurred in 1961 after the brief honeymoon period with Cuba ended, these parties have been increasingly forced to rely on manipulative politics to keep in power or, if in opposition, to prevent further losses. Thus in Vene zue l a, the governi ng A D part y is i ncreasingly dep end ent on its control of government patronage and the manipulation of its peas ant syndicates on wh ich its votin g sup po rt n ow rests,4 4 w hilst A P R A re so rt s t o stro ng-ar m m ethod s to hold its ow n in the unions and in the universities where inroads have been made into their traditional preserve.45 The decline of these parties is paralleled by the rise of radical Catholicism, partly in response to the challenge of the Cuban Revolution, partly as a consequence of developments within the Catho li c Church . Ch il e, the only coun try w here a Christ ian D em o cr at government is i n power, is t he m ost striki ng case; in V ene zu ela the Christian Democrats are the main opposition party; in Peru they were i n al li ance w ith the r uling A c t i o n P o p u la r and in Brazil there is a small but active radical Catholic student movement
which has now been forced underground. These new radical 50
LA TIN
AME RIC A
Catholic groups are distinguished by their strong populist strains, particularly among their younger supporters who are in rebellion against many of the paternalist presuppositions of their party leaders, and whose concept of revolution is one of change brought about by the people on behalf of themselves. This concept is much closer to what I understand as the spirit of populism than those movements described at the beginning of this chapter. In Chile populist ideas find expression in Promocidn Popular which is designed to incorporate marginal sectors of the popula tion, particularly urban slum dwellers, into national life, both in the physical and social sense. A government agency is responsible for pr ovid ing the phy sical means - lighting, wa ter, t ranspor t, whilst the promotion of self-awareness, and of increasing social and political consciousness is the role of small groups whose relationship to the government is more tenuous. The dilemma between the paternalistic pretensions of a development-conscious government and a populist ideology concerned with promoting a self-awareness among the masses, so that they can then formulate their demands, is particularly acute once a populist party gets into po we r.46 U ltim ate ly, this is an insoluble dilemma. It is doubtful if the populistic impulse which might be sustained in a particular slum district or in a highland community or even in a co-operative can be transferred to the national level. As the area of conflicting interests widens so the populist dream fades as manipulative techniques become necessary to mobilize the masses in co un tering op position. Governments then hide the l oss of t heir po pu list mo tivation by a fa£ ade of a gen era l will theor y of poli tic s. Marxist methods come to be used by those who condemn them. Any party with populist overtones must face this dilemma once it comes to power. It is a problem common to Castroism in Cuba and Peru’s A cci o n P op u la r as well as to Chile’s Christian Demo crats. P erhaps all a popu list party can do once in power is to prov ide the conditions within which a whole range of intermediate communitarian organizations can flourish. In Peru, the populism of A cci on P op u la r had a different empha sis. Although Peru too has the problem of marginal slum dwellers these are not so much the government’s main concern as the Indians of the Sierra. Between 1963 and 1968, when he was over thrown by the military, Belaunde tried to apply populist ideas which were inspired by the Inca forms of social organization. He
5i
PO PU LIS
M — IT S N AT ION
believes that through
AL
CH AR AC TE RI ST IC S
Coope r at ion P opular
the creative energy
(w hich bu il t t h e great m on u m en ts o f Inca civil izat ion) , d ormant since the Sp an ish co nq ue st can be rel eased. B y de ve l opi ng the tradition of free collective work and communal forms of organiza ti on existing in Sierra,
the five tho
usa nd or so Indian
comm unit ie s i n the
A c t i o n P o p u l a r believes the Indians can be given a new
sense of purpose. This type of work is seen to have a moral and social value apar t f rom its eco n om ic im plication s. Belaunde’ s b e lie f in state planning is also Inca-inspired but he contends that real, as distinct f rom arti fi cial , d ev elo p m en t co m es from self -hel p a nd mutual aid. Thus the state does not compel communities to action but provides technicians and material when the initiative comes f rom t he com m un it ies them selves. M
an y o f the
dec i si ons
and
planning at grass- roots level sho uld co m e from the communi t ie s i n w hich al l adu lt s, m en and wo m en , parti cipat e. T her e is a ls o a st rong anti -bank current in
B elau nd e’ s th ou gh t w hich ti es i n wi t h
his emphasis on decentralization, for the Lima banks have drained the provi nces of w ealt h m uc h as t he capit al has drained t
hem of
talent.47 Wherever patron-dependent relationships have been firmly en trenched there is a likelihood that populist activity may be selfdefeating. Deprived of a patron, marginal groups tend to seek a patron substitute and until the dependency syndrome is broken it may be necessary to con tinue p atrimo nial or authori tari an m ethods o f cont rol , albei t in a m odifi ed form , u n til self-con sciou sn ess ha s been aroused.
48 In this proc ess, Peru
m ay b e m ore fortuna
te t han
Chile in that although there is perhaps little to choose between the strength of the dependency relationship in the two countries, in P er u Indian com m uniti es sti ll have a coh esion and a fol k m emo ry wh ic h makes them recept ive to po pu list appeals. In C hile, where th er e i s no comparabl e comm unal str ucture, the dilem m a b etween paternalism and populism would seem to be more pronounced. Where one may question the premises of Coope r at ion P opular is when it is applied to m estizo s or an Indi an com m unity where thi s cohesion has been lost. Social mobility and the drive for self adva nce ment , as exemplif ie d in m igrati on to the tow ns, m us t tend to destroy the traditional patterns of an essentially static rural society.
Only when p opuli st s a re in op positi on and are not co m pro m ised by the support of a governmental apparatus can they retain the 52
LATIN AMERICA
essence o f their beliefs. T h e purest ex ample is p erhaps to be f ound in Brazil’s A f a o P op u la r , a largely student radical Catholic organization, which flourished between 1962 and 1964 and which was the n driven undergro und. M ost of their a cti vit y was with p easants in rural areas where they tried to conduct literacy campaigns, to make in peasants aware of their own capabilities and to organize them rural syndicates. In the context of the paternal society bequeathed by the Spaniards, populist ideas have found a barren soil. The dense network of personalist relationships, the interlocking of private interests with public, and the resilience of Hispanic behaviour patterns, have strengthened those structural barriers which impede modernization, rationalization and the integration of unassimilated groups into the national life. A cosmopolitan elite and retarded industrialization through economic dependence on the industrial powers, have heightened the frustrations of countries whose independence, now some hundred years old, still seems fictitiou s. In th e search for authentic i nstead o f deri vat ive solutions to the problems of development and national identity, there is a revival of interest in the ‘people’. This now has a reality which was absent in the past: the frontiers of imaginative comprehension are expanding. Both in Cuba and among the new radical Catholic groups throughout Latin America the dynamic comes from the younger generation. What might be termed student populism is perhaps the most significant factor in the continent’s uneven development. In a world, increasingly younger, Latin America is no longer out of step. It may even be in the vanguard.
N ot e s 1 T .d i Te li a, ‘Pop
ulis m and Reform
stacles to Change in Latin America, grou ps in di T
e lla ’s typ olo gy o f pop uli sm
pa r t i es ( M exi can PR
P L N );
pure form
Nasseri
in L atin A
Accion Dem ocratica,
the Dom
Aprista
m erica a
the re gi m es of
O dr ia in Peru ist parties); Pero A m erican
lt ho ugh
had
N asserist f
nist parti
eatures);
i nteg rat iv e parti es (P eru ’s
ini can P R D
orm ing pa rt i es ( not
C olom bia and
ivi du al L atin
B );
st , or m il it ary ref
parties (Castro on ind
erica’, p. 47 i n ObO U P 1 96 5. Th e f i v e
are : m ult i- class
I , Bra z i l i an P S D a nd PT
A P R A ,, V e n e z u e la n R ican
i n Latin Am ed . C .Veliz,
and Cost
a
fo und in a
Roja s Pi nil la i n
soc i al revol uti onary
es. V er y lit tl e work has been done
polit ical parti
es; typologi
es ar e t here fo re
53
POPULISM
- IT S NATIONAL
CHARAC
TERI
STI CS
suspect. Nevertheless, there is a compulsion to produce them if only in an attempt to try to bring some order out of chaotic diversity. But both the comparative and aggregative methods in Latin America are full of snares, particularly if historical conditioning factors and the crucial qualitative aspects (e.g. varying types of personalist leadership) are ignored as they tend to be in such allembracing typologies. The concept of t he ' disposa ble mass’ i s discu ssed in G . Ge rm ani, ‘Hacia unade mo cracia de masas’ in , Buenos Aires, 1965. The concept of urban populism is most widely used for Brazil; see the articles b y F .C .W e f fo r t, ‘ Es ta do y mas as en el B ra si l’ in I, 1965, and ‘Le populisme’ in October 1967 and al so T . E. Skidmore, 193064, New York, 1967. 2 For Brazil this is well brought out in Sugiyama Iutaka, ‘Social mobility and differential occupational opportunity in Brazil’, in Vol. 25, No. 2, 1966, and in A. Leeds, ‘Brazilian careers and social structure: an evolutionary model and case history’ in
Argentina sociedadde masas,
Revista Latinoamericana Les Temps Modernes, Politics inBrazil,
de Soc iologia,
Human
Organization,
American
66, and 1964.1954 3 Between 1947 Anthropologist,
the population of Buenos Aires increased from 4 6 to 56 million, an increase caused by massive migration from the interior J.R.Scobie, Oxford (New Yo rk) , p. 226. U rb an gr ow th rates in Br az il are e ve n m or e sp ect ac ula r. Between 1950 and i960, the population of the ten largest cities increased b y se ve nt y per cen t, th at o f R io b y 57^5 pe r ce n t (f ro m 2,2 08 ,36 1 to 3,815 ,06 2), R .E . Chardon, ‘C han ges in the geograp hic distribution o f population in Brazil’ in ed. E. N . Bakl anof f, V an de rb ilt U n iv er si ty Pres s, 196 6, p. 166 . Se e also P . M . H au se r, Unesco, 1961, for detailed analyses. 4 R.M.Morse, ‘Recent Research in Latin American Urbanization: a selective survey with commentary’ in I, No. 1, Fall, 1965. There are stimulating insights in two other articles by the same a ut hor ‘Some cha ra cte ri st ic s o f Latin Am erican Ur ba n H istory’ in LX V II , J anu ary 19 62 , a nd ‘Latin Am er ic an Ci tie s, asp ects o f fu nc tio n an d st ru ct u re ’ in 1961, No . 4 . D i T elia disc usse s t he influence of rural migration on Argentinian working class politics in Buenos Aires, 196 4. A useful discussion of various models of the working class in Latin America is
Argentina: a city and a nation,
New Perspectives of Brazil,
Urbani-
zation in Latin America,
Latin American Research Review
American Historical Review,
Comparative
Studies in Society and History,
El
sistema politico argentina y la close ob rera ,
I.Davies and Shakuntala de Miranda, ‘The Working Class in Latin A m er ic a: som e the ore tica l p ro bl em s’ in London, 1967. See a lso E. J.Ho bsb aw m, ‘Peasant s and Rural Mig ran ts in P olitics ’ in ed. C . Veliz, Oxfo rd, 1967. 5 The extraordinary expansion of Protestant sects, particularly among poorer urban groups in Brazil and Chile, is one of the most interesting sociological phenomena of contemporary Latin America. One has the suspicion that the Catholic Church may be worried more about this development than about the threat from communism. It is certainly curious how in Cuba the Catholics seem to have come to a wi th th e regim e (the prie sts ex pe lle d in ear ly da ys o f th e re vo lut io n wer e
The Sociali st Reg ister,
ThePoliticsof Conformity inLatin America,
modus vivendi
54
LATIN AMERICA
expelled as muc h for nat ionalist as for religious reasons by far the majority were Spaniards) whereas Baptists and especially Jehovah’s Witnesses are actively persecuted largely because Protestant individualism is still seen as one of the United States’ major exports to Latin America. For Braz il see E . Wil lem s, ‘ Religious mass movements and social change’ in op. cit., and for Chile, C. Lalive d’Epinay, ‘Changements sociaux et developpement d’une secte: Le Pentecotisme au Chili’ in 23, JanuaryJune 1967. Developments within Catholicism are analysed in I.Vallier, ‘Religious elites: differentiations and developments in Roman Catholicism’ in ed. S.L ips et and A . Solari, O U P , New Yor k, 1967. 6 See E. W o lf and S .M in tz , ‘ An analysis of ritual coparenthood (Com padrazgo)’ in VI, No. 4, Winter,
NewPerspectives of Brazil
Archives de Sociologie des Religions,
Elites
in La tin America,
South Western Journal of Anthrop ology,
I95° ‘ 7 The concept of has not received the attention its crucial importance deserves. The most suggestive analysis is E.Wolf and E.C. Hanson, ‘Caudillo politics: a structural analysis’ in
caudillismo
Comparative St udies
IX , 2, January 1967. See also F. Chevalier, in Societ y andHistory, ‘Caudillos et caciques en Amerique: contribution a l’etude des liens personnels’ in Melanges offerts a Marcel Bataillon par les hispanistes franpais, Bordeaux. An interesting, historical analysis is the article by R.M.Haigh, ‘The creation and control of a caudillo’ in Hispanic American Historical Review, XL I V , 1964, on the Argent inian caudillo Giiemes, 181521. The macho complex has encouraged a number of rather fanciful psychological analyses. There is a large Mexican literature on it, as indeed there needs to be. 8 See E.de Kadt, ‘Religion, the Church and Social Change in Brazil’,
The Politics Anthropological ofConformity, Quarterly,
op. cit. Cf. C. M. Kenny,i960. ‘Patterns of patronage in Spain’ in January Perhaps the most interesting example of this type of relationship in an urban setting is that of Eva Peron and the quasireligious cult which grew up round her. Surprisingly no detailed analysis of this has yet been attempted. 9 di Te lia in op. cit., p. 74. 10 O.Sunkel, op. cit., pp. 1312. 11 C . Furtado, op. cit., pp. 15 6 7, and his California UP , 1965, chap. 6, and H.Jaguaribe, Rio, 1967, pp. 16772. 12 Military dominated regimes, such as those in Brazil or Argentina,
Obstacles,
Crisis, Desenvolvimento Latino Americano,
Diagnosis of the Brazilian Probl emas do
place great emphasis on technocracy and try to inculcate new attitudes towards it but, as so often with military politics, the means betray the end. 13 Alan Angell discusses the Colombian case in ‘Populism and Political change: the Colombian case’ in No. 11, February 1967, University of Keele. See also his discussion of populism in 37, 1966. 14 After the book by the Uruguyan writer Rodo, published in 1900. 15 M.S.Stabb, ‘Indigenism and Racism in Mexican thought, 1857 1911’, I, 1959. The Mexican writer
Soci ological Rev iew Monog raph
Political Quarterl y,
Journal of Inter-American Studies,
Ariel,
55
POPU
LISM
— IT S
NAT
IONA
L
CHAR
ACT ERI STI CS
Bulnes attributed Indian inferiority to a maize diet, contrasting it with the wheat diet of ‘superior’ races. There is perhaps more in this view than a crude materiali sm w ou ld seem to im p ly if maize is placed in its total cult ural context see note 29 below . 16 The Amazonian rubber boom of the early years of the century is the most striking modem example of a frontier collapsing. Earlier, the decline of Potosi from over 100,000 inhabitants in 1600 to a bare 15,000 in the early nineteenth century reflects the contraction of the mining front ier. A t present th e m ajor frontiers o f settlem en t ar e in east ern B olivia, the transAndean region of Peru and the states of Goias and Matto Grosso in Brazil. 17 J.R .Sco bie, op. cit ., p. 79, 12 1 2 . See al so hi s University of
Revolution on the Pampas: a so cial history of Argent ine wheat, 1860-1910, Texas, 1964. 18 There were revolts, taking the form of strikes, particularly among Italian colonists in Santa Fe, but no autonomous political emerged from them; see P. Grela, Rosario, de 1912,
El Grito de Alcorta: historia de la rebelion campesina
1958. 19 There were two aspects of the myth. One was its appeal to urban intellectuals, reacting against the cosmopolitanism of Buenos Aires in order to emphasize hence the be co m es a nat iona l-
gaucho
Argentinidad',
gaucho
ist symbol; second, its appeal to migrants who, by identifying with val ue s, co ul d fe el th em se lv es to b e A r g e n ti n ia n — th u s th e po pu larity, among Italian immigrants, of the societies and clubs in
gaucho
gaucho
Buenos Aires early in this century. 20 More than fifty per cent of the populations of fourteen out of the twenty Latin Ame rican republics a re nineteen or under. T h e hi ghes t percentages are in Central America (Honduras and Nicaragua fiftyeight per cent, Costa Rica fiftyseven per cent, Mexico fiftyfour per cent). The two countries which have appreciably the smallest percentages under nineteen are Argentina and Uruguay with 391 per cent and 362 per cent. See J.M .S ty co s and J. Arias , ed. Wa sh ing ton 1966, T a b le 10, p . 19. 21 Not all the great muralists (who probably did more than anyone else to create impelling images of a great Indian past) were Indianists. Orozco, for example, disliked the way in which Indianism was exploited for nationalistic reasons. Perhaps the most genuine case of identification
Population Dilemma in Lat in Ameri ca,
w ith the masses b y a pa int er w as F ra nc is co G o it ia , a la nd ow ne r wh o renounced his wealth to be nearer the people. Totally selfeffacing, he li ved a n asce ti c life painti ng in a oneroomed Indian hut. T h e clas sic statement of Indianism as a cardinal element in the new Mexican nationalism was the anthr opolo gist M .G a m io 's first published in 1916. Vasconcelos’s curious mystical racialist ideas are in his published in 1925; see also his autobiography, Indiana, 1963. 22 The only case I can find of a conscious Tolstoyan experiment was in Chile where two writers started an agricultural settlement although tot all y ignorant of agri cult ure. S ome o f the m ost suc cessful colonies h ave
ForjandoPatria,
Cdsmica, Ulysses,
Raza A Mexican
56
LATIN AMERICA b e e n th o s e o f r e lig io u s c o m m u n itie s s u c h a s th e M e n n o n ite s in P a r a g u a y , or Japanese colonist
s in the A
m azo n re gi on.
23 Lawyers could, and some did, defend Indians in the interminable law suits they brought against landowners who had seized community lands. 24 A . Posadas, ‘A proposito del articulo ’ in 1946, No. 17. Mari&tegui’s, first published in 1928, is the most impressive Latin American example of intellectual populism. 25 T w o recent works, F. Bourricaud, Paris, 1967, and F.B.Pike, London, 1967, provide a useful antidote to H.Kantor, Unive rsity of California Press, 1953. A P R A ’s streng th lies in its organization (which owes more to German inspiration than its founder would care to admit). The party’s ideology, wh ich is superficial and pretentious, nevertheless is functional in the sense that it gives its followers the feeling that they are participating in a wider
Mirochevsky Dialectica, interpretacion de la real idad perua na, contemporain,
gramme ofthe P eruvian Aprista party,
El populismo en el Peru de V. Siete ensa yos de
Pouvoi r et soc iete dans el Perou The M odern Historyof Peru, Ideology andPro-
intellectual world than that of Peru. For an unsure lowermiddle class, in a peripheral political situation, this can help to provide a sense of solidarity. Whether the dominating position of Haya de la Torre is a source of strength or of weakness is one of the many puzzling questions of this, the most ‘successful unsuccessful’ party in Latin American politics. 26 The social base of the two movements differed widely. Zapata’s followers were largely Indians from the state of Morelos, where village lands had been absorbed by the sugar estates which had expanded in response to market demands when Cuban sugar was in short supply during the war against Spain in the 1890s. Villa’s support came from the of the big cattle ranches of the state of Chihuahua in the north. They were rootless and lacked the ’ attachment to the soil of their forefathers. Zapata’s agrarian programme in the Plan of Ayala became the inspiration for subsequent agrarian policies while Zapata himself became an official hero in a way which Villa with his ways and bandit ethics never did although recent attempts to rehabilitate him have led to lively polemics. The most accessible accounts of are F. Chevalier, in Janu aryFebruary 1961, and an interesting article by J.H.McNeely, ‘The srcins of the Zapata revolt in Morelos’ in
peons
zapatistas
macho
zapatismo
Le soulevement de Zapata
Annales,
Hispanic American Historical
1967. The social introductory roots of Villa’s support not been adequate ly, May analysed. A useful paper is F.have Cheval ier, ‘S urvi Review vances seigneuriales et presages de la Revolution agraire dans le nord du Mexique’, JulySeptemb er 1959. M .L . Guzm an, Unive rsity o f Te xas, 1965, are of limited value. 27 F.Tannenbaum, ‘Spontaneity and adaption in the Mexican Revolution’, IX, i, 1965. 28 F. Chevalier , ‘T he and political stability in Mexico’ in op. cit., p. 186. T h is is an excellent short treatment. See also T . Schwarz, ‘L ’usage de la terre dans un village a du
Revue historique, Memoirs of Pancho Villa,
The
Journal of World History, ejido politics of Conformity,
The
Ejido
57
POPU
LISM -
IT S
NAT
ION
AL
CH AR AC TE RI STI
Etudes Rurales, The Ejido: M exico's way out,
CS
Mexique’ in io, 1963. The classic work, now outdated, is E. Simpson New York, 1937. Collective declined from 6 6 per cent of the total number of in 1940 to 3 3 per cent i n 1950 (M . Gonz&Iez Nav arro , ‘M ex ic o : the lopsided revolution’ in op. cit., p. 218).
ejidos
ejidos
Obstacles,
29 One difficulty facing any reformer is the extraordinary traditionalism of the Mexican peasant and this is nowhere more clearly seen than in the ‘maiz e blocka ge’ . Ed m un do Flores, one o f M ex ico ’s leadi ng a gronomists, wr ite s, ‘M a iz e is th e m o s t im p o rt a n t si n g le it em in M e x i c o ’s die t, cuisine, m yth olo gy and politics. It is a basic need, a m oth er image, a phallic symbo l, a dietary obsession and a nightmare for the minister of agriculture . . . w he re ve r p o ss ib le su b m a rg in al la n d s ar e c u lt iv a te d w it h m ai ze in continuat ion of the sa me ar chaic “ m ilpa ” system that upsets c on se rv atio nis ts and int rigues social anthrop ologists’ (‘T h e signif icance of l an dus e chan ges in the ec onom ic developm ent of M ex ico ’ i n
Land Economics,
M ay, 1 95 7, X X X V , No. 2 ). 30 It is too early, and not enough work has been done on the results of the Bolivian agrarian reform, to make any firm judgements but it does seem that hopes that cooperatives could be formed on the basis of older communal types of social organization have not been fulfilled. The multipli cati on o f very small subsistence plots ( ) has nevertheless had one salutary effect in that it has helped to stimulate migration down into the ri ch valle ys and savannah o f east ern B olivia w here the co un try’s f ut ur e
minifundios
Civilizations de s Andes,Paris, 1963. Movimiento de LiberacionNacional(M L N ) fo un de d i n 1 961,
lies. See J.Vellard, 31 The
w h ic h co n ti n u al ly co nt ra st s th e C u b a n w it h th e M e x ic a n R ev o lu ti o n to the detriment of the latter, provides the best example of this type of criticism. It is a movement largely of intellectuals, schoolteachers and students, and regards Cdrdenas, the hero of the revolutionary agrarian Left, as its patron. Its weakness is shown by its inability to make any but the mos t sup er fi ci al contact with the C C I the independent peasant organization which sprang up to represent the interests of landless peasants whose condition had wo rse ne d w it h th e sl o w in g d o w n o f th e fl o w o f migratory labour to the Californian fruit farms. The government has recently been forced to spe e d up lan d d is tri bu ti on . For th e M L N see D .T .G a rz a , ‘Fac ti on-
Independientes),
{Confeder acion deCampesin os braceros,
alism on the Mexican Left: the frustration of the M L N ’ in The Western Polit ical Q uarterl y, 17 (3) Sept. 1964. 32 Whetten, Rural Mexico, Chicag o U niv ers ity Press , 1964, p. 4 88 . T h e states in which the sinarquistas were strong were Guanajuato, Queretaro, Michoacdn, Jalisco and Guerrero which had 216 per cent of the nation’s in 1941 but had received only 119 per cent of loans. The illiteracy rate of these states was tenfifteen per cent higher than the national average of sixtyone per cent. wa s a re vo lt ag ain st be tra yed rev ol ut ion ar y ideals , a n ti C h u rc h leg is la tio n, so ci al is tic i de ol og ie s an d the An gloAm erican subve rsi on o f trad iti onal Hispan ic value s. Its leaders were influenced by the Spanish fascist doctrine of
ejidatarios
ejido
Sinarquismo
Hispanidad.
See also A.L.Michaels, ‘Fascism and Sinarquismo: popular nationalisms 58
LATIN AMERICA agai nst t he M exica
n revoluti
A Journal of Church and State, V I I I ,
on ’ i n
N o . 2, 1966. 33
El Sinarquista, 26 O
34 T h er e is a l arge li A
u se fu l
d is c u s s io n o f
revi ew arti
cl e ‘M exica
cal Revi ew,32, 19
cto be r 1939, quoted in W
n co m m un it y s tudies
o f t he local poli Cacicazgo’,
‘cultural bro
ker s’ i s discussed
societ
35 B razil i s the m M .I. P .Q u eiro
H o w a rd C lin e ’s
ure is
i n M ann ing
tur al a nd economic 1, M arch
1965 . T h e
bro ugh t out i n P. Friedr
ic h,
and t he problem of
i n E. W olf, ‘G ro u p rel at i ons i n a c om plex
American Anthropologist, 58, 1956.
y: M ex ico ’ i n
T h er e
ss of cul
Ethnology, IV , Ap ril 1965,
‘ A M exi can
is
HispanicAmerican Histori-
’ in
n the proce
ti cal struct
contr overs y.
i s briefl y di scussed
Social andEconomic Studies,14,
on ’ i n
co m p lexity
o f R e d fie ld
52. T h e school problem
ci t . , p. 491.
continuum
L e w i s ’s c r itiq u e
N ash , ‘T h e rol e o f vil lage schools i m od ernizati
hetten, op.
ter ature on the folkurban
z, ‘M
ost fert
il e grou
nd
ess i ahs i n Braz
i s no L atin
A m erican
for
m essi anic
m ovem ents
31, July Past and rPesent,
i l ’,
equivalent
se e 1965.
t o t he agr ar i an ana rc hi sm of
A n d a l u s i a o r t o p e a s a n t m ig r a n t s c a r r y in g o v e r th e ir c h ilia s t ic e x p e c t a ti on s into an u rba n s etti ng as in Barcelona from the 18 90s onwards. 36 In M ex ico th e L ibera ls’ bi as agai nst com m unal propert y l ed t o t he sal e o f Ch u rch the
C h u rch
com m un al l ands in t
m ana ged to recoup
co n ti n ue d to suffer aft er dictato
ians cam
exam ple, som
new
the b asic soci teenth
cam e r ural
al u nit du
the
ring the
fessor M
attribu
ted to th
in
ed to
the i nfluen
the siti
M ex ico i s lar gely
ri de o f the cen Indian sea. T
ng o f the po
the vil lage
sen C u zco
l l age, wh
set tl ers during the col
b y peasants in nati
onal
ity
being w
m ight have been very dif
it hin
onial polit ics
i n H . Klein, ‘Pea
a d ay’s
sl and i n a n
f ere nt ha d the
as thei r capi t al . T h e i m port ance of
epu bli c o f 17 12 ’ i n
ic h is
re. T h u s Za pa ta’ s i nfl uence
t o M exico C
m ented
was
eus o f toda y’s rur al
s sup po rt si m il arl y L a P az was an i
m un it y has been well docu revol t : t he T zeltal R
au X X si ecl e’ i n
od an d w ell i nto t he ninethe nucl
w er cent
187 6 and
F. Chevalier
ra t her t han the vi
ce exerted
att ri butable
tre of hi
iat ion
o f Puno, for
w een
rat her than
col onial peri
h e hist ory o f Peru
Span iar ds cho
e H autPerou
plantation
rhoo d
m ent
and banditry. (
e cen trif ug al t en den cies of
. O f cou rse,
i s al so relat
revolt
ors e argues that
com m un it y is t he ne ighbou
period
ri buted by the
st abl i shed bet
et e dans l
In Brazil,
cen tury. Pro
In Bolivia haciendas.
was dist
the depart
haci endas were e
e l a grande propri 6.
ans
started to expand in response haciendas
In the case of
19 15 in t he w ake o f w hich
Annales, 21 , 196
Indians
s t he Indi
e 600 to 7 00 o f his foll ow ers. In Peru, spol
for wool.
e 2,516
‘L ’expansion d
e 75 , 000
e la t er , wh en
ng dem and
rf i ri an pe ri od
f t hese l oss es wherea
se o f expansionist
pp orting som
r M elg ar ejo to som
o f the Ind to risi
some o
at the expen
1868 land su
he 18 60s . D u ring the Po
sant
t he com
comm
Pacific Historical Review ,A u g u s t
1966. 37 In t he Peruvian ‘poor orph
an’ i s used
land is equ
ival ent
38 In ter can not com
si er ra t he to descri
m s of the involvem pare w
it h the M
Q uech ua
be peo
to ph ysical m
word
ple who
‘ wak cha’
have no l
wh ic h m eans
and
having no
uti li ati on.
en t of the peasa ex ican
ntr y, t he C ub an Revo lut ion
R evo luti on and it
59
-
unit i es i n
i s possi ble t hat the
P O P U L IS M -I T S N ATIONAL
CHARACTERISTICS
urban resistance against Batista played a more important part than the official view admits. Land hunger may have been a spur for the squatters of the Sierra Maestra but about twothirds of rural dwellers before the R ev olu tio n w ere n o t str ict ly pea san ts at all bu t landl ess la bourers on the b i g s u g a r e st a te s. W i t h o u t a m a s s iv e d e m a n d fo r la nd fro m below, Castro w a s a b le to k e e p th e p la n ta t io n e c o n o m y in ta c t (in com paris on, for example, w ith H aiti wh ere, after ind epen den ce at t he beg in ni ng of the nineteen th cen tury, a sm allh old ing peasan try was cre at ed ou t of the suga r p lanta tions w ith the disastro us con sequ ences of la nd subdivision and soil erosion). Peasants who received land titles from the first agrarian ref orm i n C ub a in 1959 were organized in A N A P (As oci ac io n Nacional de Ag ricultores Pequ enos) w hic h m igh t ha ve devel oped int o a focus of opposition had it not been for the second agrarian reform of 1963 which effectively destroyed a nascent class. T h e few peasants in the new
kulak
of fi ci al party on ly four p er ce nt w ere class if ie d as s uch in m id do not have later figures) are evidence of the difficulty in politicizing
1964
(I
them. The coinciding of the introduction of conscription with the second agrari an reform in 1963 wa s no t for tuito us, as arm y service is on e of the most effective ways of indoctrinating peasants. One of the most revealing of fi ci al accounts of the peasan
try in C u b a is C . R. Ro driguez,
Cuba Sociali sta,
‘L a Rev ol u-
tion Cubana y el campesinado’ in 53, January 1966. 39 Anthony Leeds has expressed the view that the Peasant Leagues are merely another example of manipulation of the rural peasants for the b en ef it o f th e o li g a r c h y — ‘ t h e u s e o f t h e m a s se s . . . ag ai n s t th e great coastal sugar interests and the older class of ’ (local political
coroneis
t he m yth o f Francisco Juli ao’, p. 19 9 i n caudillos), Polit ics Change in‘Brazi Lat inl and Ameri ca,N e w Yo rk , 1964. Le ss strident and mor e co n- of v in c in g , b u t al so cr it ic a l o f J u li a o , is B e n n o G a l j a r t ‘ C la s s an d “ Fo ll o w -
America Latina
ing” in Rural Brazil’, , 7/3, 1964. 40 T h e relat ions hip betw een M a rti and Cas tro is disc ussed br ie fl y in my article ‘The Roots of Cuban Nationalism’ in
International Affairs,
July 196 3. Castro, more like M a rt i t han M ar x, th inks in moral r at he r tha n economic categories; thus in the debate over moral versus material incenti ves Castro and G ue var a were in favo ur o f the form er against the o rt hodo x communists’ favouring the latter. 41 From a letter to Frank Pais, 21 July 1957, quoted in R. Debray, ‘Revolution in the Revolution?’ JulyAugust 1967, pp. 11213. 42 The main source for the party was the official theoretical journal until i t cea sed publicati on, b ut see al so A . An ge ll, ‘ Cast ro and the Cuban Communist party’ in II, No. 2, 1967. and A . Suarez, 1 9 5 9 6 6 , M I T 1967.
Monthly Review,
CubaSocialista
Government danOpposition, Cuba: Castr oism and C ommunism,
43 Cubans, like Spaniards and under Ortega y Gasset’s influence, often interpret their history in generational terms. One of the most significant points of the Cuban Revolution seems to me that it was the first
example where the postwar generational conflict took a politically revolutionary form. The concept of generations has been applied by M* 60
LATIN AMERICA
Zeitlin in ‘Political generations and the Cuban working class’, The Ameri can Jo ur na l of Sociology, Vo l. 7 1, 19656 . 44 Neither A D nor A P R A have been able to recruit much support from the ‘disposable mass’ in Caracas or Lima. This is a qualitative difference from Brazil and Argentina which makes it unsatisfactory to try to subsume them all under the urban populist label as di Telia does. A D ’s peasant support as with the M N R ’s came after the political revolutions. In Venez uel a this support is now being challenged by Christian Democrat peasant unions. 45 I discuss the problem o f students and youth affiliates in ‘University Students in National Politics’ in The Politics of Conformity in Latin America, op. cit. 46 This dilemma is discussed in a very illuminating paper by E. de Kadt, ‘Paternalists and Populists: views on Catholicism in Latin America’ in The Journal of Contemporary History, 2, No. 4, 1967. 47 Belaunde’s ideas are expressed inLaconquistadelPeruporlosperuanos (1958). Considerable scepticism has been expressed about the viability of communal traditions as a basis for social reconstruction and moral regeneration, e.g. H. F.Dobyns, The Socia l M at rix of Peruvian Ind igenous Communities, Cor nell U ni ver sit y Press, 1964. An interesting account of a pilot scheme o f social change at Vicos in Peru is A.R .Ho lm ber g, ‘ Changing community attitudes and values in Peru: a case study in guided change’ in Social Change in Latin America today, ed. L. Bryson, New York, i960. There are undoubtedly strong paternalistic elements in Accion Popular and whatever Belaunde may feel himself to be, to many Indians he is ‘ Viracocha’ the patron. 48 T h is seems to have been the case in Bolivia where the M N R was often able to control peasant syndicates and the militia by party members
-
acting as patron substitutes. I suspect that the degree of autonomy of the peasant militia attributed to it by Anibal Quijano Obregon (‘Contemporary Peasant Movements’ in Elites in Latin America, OUP, New York, 1967, p. 321) is exaggerated. Certainly in the Cliza valley the manipulativ e element exercised by the M N R (and various factions within it) was very strong and Barrientos since 1964 has been able to get peasants’ support by an old style caudillo appeal. However, we need more evidence.
61
CHA PTER
TH RE E
RUSSIA A n d r z e j W a li c k i
I do n ot att em pt to give in th
is paper a c om prehensive
st udy o f
Russian populism, its historical genesis, development and decay. I coniine myself to the
classical
‘narodnichestvo’ and even within
these limits I shall not approach it from the strictly historical po int of view . Instead , in accordance w
ith th e gener al a i m of the
conferen ce, I shall try to p resen t tho se ideo logical aspect
s of the
classical Russian populism which seem to me to be of particular importance for finding a proper definition of it and for placing it in an appr opri ate com parative se
tting .1
I T HE
N OF ‘
MARXI
ST
D EF INITIO
NARO
DNICHESTVO’
The term ‘narodnichestvo’ has become associated with so many di ff ere nt and, som eti m es, conflict ing m eaning s that it seem s neces sa ry to b egin w it h th e sem antic q uestion. T h e need for a se manti c inquiry into the history of the term has been realized both in the Soviet U nio n and i n the W est . It i s si gnifi cant t hat K oz ’m in - t he scholar whose works have played the leading part in the recent r e vi va l of the st udie s of populi sm i n the U S S R - thoug ht it necessary to dwell upon the semantic problem (although he had confined his inquiry to the word ‘populism’ as used in the works of Lenin.I 2 In the W est this prob lem h as been tackl ed by R. Pipes who has given a systematic and useful study of the history of the word ‘ naro dn ichestvo’ and w ho h as derived from it an i nteresting, though disputable, conclusion concerning the proper usage of this ter m.3 T h is conclusion says, in shor t, that the con cept o f pop ulis m , as presented, amo ng others, by K o z’ m in, is in f act ‘ a po lem ical 62
RUSSIA
device created and popularized by Marxist publicists in the early nineties’ and, as such, has ‘no historical justification’. It is Pipes’s merit that he called in question the current con ception which defines ‘narodnichestvo’ as Russian agrarian social ism of the second half of the nineteenth century, sees its zenith in the terror of the People’s Will, and implies that soon after it ‘quick ly lo st g rou nd to M arx ism ’.4 H e has est ablished t hat the w ord ‘narodnichestvo’ has had two distinct and to some extent contra dict ory mean ings - the nar ro w hi stor ical meaning and the broad M a r x i s t one. The first of them he accepts, the second he, appar ently, wants to eliminate as having been historically unjustified and ‘rejected by th os e on w ho m it wa s pin ned ’.5 I di sagr ee wit h this conclusion but I accept the distinction and I think that a con scious choice between the two meanings of the word is a precondi tion of a consistent conception of populism. In the first sense the term populism denotes ‘a theory advocating the hegemony of the m asse s o ver th e ed ucate d elit e’,6 in the second sens e it denotes a theory of the non-capitalist development of Russia. In the first case it was opposed to the ‘abstract intellectualism’ of those revo lutionaries who tried to teach the peasants, to impose on them the ideals of Western socialism, instead of learning what were their real needs and acting in the name of such interests and ideals of which the peasants had already become aware; in the second case it wa s op po sed to sociolo gical and economic theo rie s which c laime d that capitalism was an unavoidable stage of development and that Russia was no exception to this general law of evolution. In the first sense, populism, strictly speaking, was only a short episode in the Russian revolutionary movement: it emerged in the middle of the seventies and soon either gave way to new attitudes, represented by the revolutionary terrorists, or, having undergone an appropriate transformation, adopted the theoretical standpoint of Marxism. We may add to this that later, in the eighties and nine ties, the view that the ideas of the intelligentsia should give way to the opinions of the people was upheld, and brought to dangerous extremes, by the followers of J. Kablits (Juzov) who, in his fervent anti-intellectualism, came very close to reactionary obscurantism. W e m ay also - aban don ing the strictly ‘ historical ’ point of vi ew look for the ‘populist’ attitude towards the peasant masses in the earlier years and find it among the Bakuninists of the beginning of the seventies. It would be wholly unjustified, however, to apply
63
POPU
LISM
- I T S
NATIONAL
CH AR AC TE RI S TI CS
th e na m e ‘ p o p u lists ’ (in its first sens e) to the follow ers of La vrov , to the Ru ssi an J acobins or to th e m em bers o f t he ‘W il l of t he P e op l e ’; if w e w ish to u se th e w ord ‘p o p u lism ’ in its narrow, hist ori cal sense! w e m ust agre e w ith Plekh an ov that ‘ W il l of the Peopl e’ was a 'com plete an d un iversal rejection o f P op u lism ’.7 It i s e v ident, therefore, that the current conception of populism, as described by Pipes and as presented in Venturi’s otherwise excellent book is, f rom this p oin t o f view , too broad, sin ce it comp ri ses all the currents of the Russian revolutionary movement of the sixties and seven ties, inc lud ing th e ‘W il l o f t h e P eo ple’ in whi ch, q uite rightly, it sees the culmination of the populist revolutionary movement. In the second sense, populism was not an organized movement but an i de olog y, a b road cu rrent o f tho u gh t, d if fere ntiat ed wi t hi n itsel f, havin g i ts represen tatives no t on ly am on g revol uti onarie s b ut also among non-revolutionary publicists who advocated legal re forms in the interests o f the peasantry. A ll the R ussian rev ol ut i on aries of the seventies, irrespective of the differences in their views on revolutionary strategy and on the proper relation between the intelligentsia and the people, represented, in this sense, different variants of populism. In this respect the current conception of po pu li sm is m ore justified, b ut oth erw ise it is too narro w. It s hi ft s the emphasis from populist ideology to the populist revolutionary m ovem ent a nd es peciall y t end s t o n eglect n on-revolutionary popu li st t hinke rs , w hose contribution to the po pu li st ide ology was of t en gre at er than that of the r evo lution ar ies; M ikhailovsky, for i nst ance , who was in many respects the most representative and influential theoretician of populism, is hardly mentioned in Venturi’s book and his theories ar e no t discu ssed in it at all.8 In a w o r d : the con ception of populism which assumes that populism ‘reached its zenith w it h the ter ro r o f the P eo p le’ s W ill’ m akes no cl ear disti nc tion between populism as such (i.e. populism as a current of thought) and the popu li st revol uti onary m ovem ent - a d is ti ncti on which s h o u ld be made if we wish to avoid confusion. T h e arg ument, put f or ward by P ipes agains t the second concept of populism, consists in indicating that it was a relatively new usage of the word, i ntroduced and p opu lari zed b y M arxist pu bli cist s in the ear ly nineties; its m ain cre ato r, w e are tol d, wa s Struv e who, obviously disregarding the differences among the various
adversaries of capitalist development in Russia, arbitrarily put 64
RUSSIA
them together under one label and modelled their controversies with Russian Marxists on the disputes between the Slavophiles and the Westernizers of the forties. This argument, however, is not convincing. Firstly, even in Struve’s usage, the new concept of populism was not so abstract and arbitrary as to be applied ‘to anyone who believ ed in th e abilit y of Russia t o by-pass cap itali sm’; 9 it was never applied, for instance, to Constantine Leontyev, al though he was certainly a most resolute adversary of the bourgeois development of Russia. People to whom the label was applied represented different, sometimes mutually exclusive, variants of a really existing, though unnamed, broad current of thought; most of them were, at least partially, aware of it, and the name ‘narodnichestvo’ was not badly chosen since the belief in the ‘principles of the people’ (narodnye nachala ) as opposed to capitalism was bound up with almost all historically registered meanings of this word, even the m ost loose a nd imprecise one s. Secondly, though t he role of Struve should not be overlooked, the new concept of populism owes incomparably more to Lenin. It was Lenin who gave it a more concrete historical and sociological connotation by pointing out that populism was a protest against capitalism from the point of view of the small immediate producers who, being ruined by capitalist development, saw in it only a regression but, at the same time, demanded the abolition of the older, feudal forms of exploitation. It was Lenin, and not Stru ve, who la id the founda tion of the Soviet scholarly achievements in this field; the preju diced, unfair treatment of populism and the scarcity, if not virtual absence, of works on it, so characteristic, unfortunately, of a long pe ri od in the deve lo pment of s oc ia l s ci en ce s i n t he U S S R , was conn ected with an obvious deviation f rom the positi on of Lenin.1 0 Koz’min, therefore, was quite right in calling for a return to Lenin in order to eliminate these prejudices and to undo the harm which had been brought about by them. This does not mean, of course, that it is either possible or desirable to look at Russian populism from the perspective of the 1890s. Too many things have changed since that time. Plekhanov’s schema of the development of Russia has been invalidated by the fact that the Russian socialist revolution almost coincided in time with the overthrow o f abs olutism and that soc iali st produc tion has been organized there despite the relative backwardness and isolation of the country. The very applicability of universal 65
POPULISM
- I T S
NAT IONA
L CH AR AC TE RI ST I CS
patte rns of develop m ent m us t h ave been cal le d in quest io n in view o f the new prob lem s w hich hav e been po sed by the new, ex -co lo n ia l nations; the idea of the non-capitalist development of backward peasant coun tries has b eco m e a reality - althou gh a ha rd and dif fi cult real it y - in m an y parts o f ou r w orld. A ll the se fact ors s erious ly undermined the position of classical evolutionism in the social sciences against which Russian populists had so strongly protested al re ady a t t he tim e o f i ts ind ispu tab le d om ination o f soc i ol ogy. I ts theory o f unili near social d
ev elop m en t has been
at t ac ke d f rom
many quarters: by the functionalists, by the diffusionists who advanced th e thesis that a m ent because o
civilization
m igh t skip a s tage of de ve lo p
f the bo rrow ing and diffusion
o f c ult ural i te ms, an d,
finally and most radically, by the cultural relativists. The Marxist the ory of econom ic dev elopm ent has also u nd ergon e a c on si de ra bl e change, and different schools have emerged within it. I am con vinced that these new historical data and corresponding shifts in theoretical thinking should be taken into account and utilized as a new van ta ge point fo r t he stud y o f Ru ssi an po pu li sm . Never the l es s Lenin’s conception of populism seems to me to be still the best point of departure. His position in relation to populism recalls in some res pect s the p ositi on o f M arx in relati on to the Left-Hegelians. And although Marx was often too severe, or even unjust, in his criticism of ‘the German ideology’, there can be little doubt that he knew it perfectly and that his view of it should not be disregarded by the students of the German thought. Koz’min has rightly noticed that Lenin, like everybody in his time, used the word nar o dni che stvo in many senses, including the narrow historical sense. But the most characteristic and the most important of these different usages of the term was certainly the br oa de st o n e | In this sense popu li sm w as, a s L en in p ut it, ‘ a whole vi si on o f the wor ld whose h i story begins w it h H erzen and end s wit h D an ielso n ’ j11 it w as ‘ a th eore tical d oc trin e th at g iv es a p articular soluti on t o highly i m portant sociological and eco n om ic p rob lem s’ ,12 ‘a major trend ’ in Ru ssian social th ou gh t,1 3 ‘an im m en se are a of soc ia l thinki ng^1 4 It was th e c om m on term for all d em ocratic ideol ogi es i n R uss i a - both revolut ionary and n on-revo lutionary which expressed the standpoint of small producers (particularly peasants) and looked for ways of non-capitalist economic develop
ment; a term which could be applied not only to the revolution ar ies o f the seventies and to the so-ca lled ‘li beral p op u lists ’ o f the 66
RUSSIA
eighties-nineties, but also to Chernyshevsky and, to some extent, to the peasant parties of the beginning of the twentieth century. We agree with Koz’min that this broad meaning of the word ‘populism’ is of crucial importance for the correct understanding of Lenin’s views on the subject. It seems worthwhile to notice that inain som e o f L en in’ s artory icl es- the is app lie d - as a cert typological categ toterm some‘populism’ non- Russi an i deologies: thus, for instance, in the article ‘Democracy and Populism in China’ (1912) the ideology of Sun Yat-sen has been classified as ‘pop ulist’ : the Ch inese democr at - writ es Lenin - ‘argues ex actly like a Russian. His similarity to a Russian populist is so great that it goes as far as a complete identity of fundamental ideas and of many individual expressions.’15 This broad comparative perspec tive seems to me very attractive and valuable. It enables us to see Russian populism as a particular variant of an ideological pattern which emerges in different backward societies in periods of transi tion and reflects the characteristic class position of the peasantry. It does not mean, of course, that populism can be regarded as a di r ect expression of peasant ideology; it is an ideology formulated by a democratic intelligentsia who in backward countries, lacking a strong bourgeois class structure, enjoy as a rule greater social authority and play a more important part in national life than intellectuals in th e econom ically more devel oped sta tes. In the Soviet Union Koz’min’s reconstruction of Lenin's con ception of populism amounted to a revision and rejection of the prevailing canon of interpretation: a canon which artificially op posed the ‘revolutionary democrats’ of the sixties to the populists of the seventies, separated Chernyshevsky from the later ideolo gists of populism, in whom only a ‘lowering of thought* was seen, and d epreciated th e historical significance o f both populist t hought and the populist revolutionary movement. To reject this canon meant to remove a great obstacle which had for a long time stood in the way of an unprejudiced and sympathetic approach to the subject. The recognition that Herzen and Chernyshevsky must not be separated from, let alone opposed to, populism, should not lead, however, to the obliteration of differences which distinguished these thinkers from the full-fledged populism of the seventies. I think that K oz ’min wen t too far in his attempt to put t he emphasis on Chernyshevsky’s populism, and that he was wrong in rejecting 67
POPULIS
M - I T S
NATION
AL
CH AR AC TE RI S TI CS
the long-established view that populism in its
classical
form had
em erged on ly at the end o f the six ties.1 6 H is recons tr uct io n of Lenin’s conception of populism is one-sided, since it obviously tends to neglect L en in ’s d istinction be tw een the her it age of the sixties (i.e. the heritage of Chernyshevsky) and the populist ‘addition’ to it. L et us dw ell fi rs t on the ‘ p o p u lism ’ o f H erzen . T her e is no d ou b t that populist socialism can and should be traced back to the ‘Ru ssi an socialism ’ o f H erzen , but, nev erthe less, it wou ld be an oversimplif ic ati on to call H erz en sim p ly a ‘ p op u list’ : he bel on ge d to a dif ferent gen eration, w as th e p ro d u ct o f a different i nt el le ct ual for m ati on and deserves a separate ch ap ter in the history o f R us s ian social thought. Certainly, he opposed the bourgeois development of Russia and, like the populists, hoped for a direct transition to socialism through the present commune. It is striking, however, how different was his image of capitalism, how different was the w hole f ramewor k o f hi s thinking. H e did no t think o f ca pi t al i sm in te rms o f poli ti cal econo m y; the view po int o f the sm all p ro du ce r, bei ng di vorc ed f rom his mea ns o f pro du ction b y the d evel opment o f the lar ge-s cale capital is t i nd ustry, w as c om plete ly ab sent in h is cri ti ci sm o f capit ali st Eu rope. Fo r the po pu list s, w ho , as w e s ha l l see, were in this respect disciples of Marx, capitalism was tanta m ount to the expropri ati on, proletari anizati on and u tt er m is ery of the masse s, with the grow ing divorce betw een ‘national w ealth’ a nd the ‘ welf are of t he p eo ple’ . For H erze n cap itali sm w as n ot a s ta ge of permanent cri si s but a st age of fi nal stabil izati on and eq uilibriu m ; he did not hesi tat e to st ate that ‘eve n the pro blem o f prol et ari at had subsided ’, that the worker in all Eur op ean co un tries is a f uture bourgeoi s. In cont rast w ith the p op u lists’ (and M ar x’ s) concern about the growing pauperization of the people, he saw capitalism as an epoch o f the soci al advance o f t he m asses, an d a tt ributed thi s adv an ce to t he b ou rge oisie: ‘W it h the com ing o f bourge oisi e ind i vidual characters are effaced, but these effaced persons are better fe d ... the bea uty of the rac e is e ff aced, b ut its prosperit y i ncr eas es . . . It is f or this reas on t hat bour geoisie is trium ph ing and is bound to tr i umph. It is usel ess to tell a hungry m an: “ It suits you better to be hungry, don’t look for food.” ’ (‘Beginnings and Ends.') T h is is , ce rt ain ly, the op posite o f the pop ulist view o f c apital ism.
H erzen c rit ici zed capit ali sm n ot from the po pu list but rather f 68
rom
RUSSIA
the aristocratic standpoint. He looked at it not from the point of view of the high price of industrialization (the atrocities of the primitive accumulation) but from the point of view of its major po sitive re su lt: th e cheap and standardize d consumption. A nd in this respect some of his views (like the views of Tocqueville) were sometimes very far-sighted, anticipating the criticism of what we call now ‘mass society’ and ‘mass culture’. ( C f : ‘Everything - the theatr e, holiday-m aking, books, pictur es, clothes - ever ythi ng has gone down in quality and gone up terribly in numbers. The crowd of w hic h I was speaking is the best proof of success , of st ren gth, of growth; it is bursting through all the dams, overflowing and flooding every thing; it is co ntent w ith anything an d ca n neve r hav e enough’.) But there is nothing, absolutely nothing, populist in this kind of criticism of the bourgeois society. To sum up. I think that, in contrast with populists, Herzen did not reflect in his ideology the ‘standpoint of the small producer’. H e has formulated the ma in tenet of populist do ct ri ne - the idea of a direct transition to socialism through the peasant commune and in this sense can be called ‘the father of populism’. This does not mean, however, that he himself was a populist, let alone a classic of populism. He was a gentry revolutionary and a gentry socialist; a disappointed aristocratic liberal, a disillusioned Westernizer, who, having despaired about the West, looked for consola tion in the thought that his own country has not yet reached its ‘final form’. There is nothing accidental in the fact that he had great d ifficulties in find ing a comm on language with the de mocr ati c ‘raznochintsy’ of the sixties; that he sharply polemicized with Chernyshevsky and Dubroliubov, defending the spiritual heritage of the ‘superflous men’ from the gentry; that the revolutionaries from the so-called ‘young emigration’ saw in him a representative of a bygone generation, accused him of lordliness and liberalism and finally, broke off even their personal relations with him. Chernyshevsky’s case is different from Herzen’s, but he too cannot be called a full-fledged populist. In many respects he w as a pop ulist b ut his significance in R ussian intel lect ual his tory s hould not be reduced to his populism: among his disciples are found not only populists but also Pisarev, whose ideology was decidedly anti-populist. In terms of Lenin’s conception of populism he was first of all an ‘enlightener’, and his populism was, as it were, a populism in statu nascendi , emerging with the ideological 69
POP ULI SM — IT S NA TIO NA L CHAR ACT ERI STI CS
framework of the Russian ‘Enlightenment' ( sixties.
p r os v et i tel s t v o) of the
The category of ‘Enlightenment’ (in its specific Russian m eaning ) was defined by L en in in his arti cle ‘T h e Heri ta ge We Renounce’. He enumerated the following characteristic features of a ll its Ru ssi an ‘ en lighten ers’ : ( i) ‘violen t ho stility to serfdom and econ om ic, social and legal p ro d u cts ’ ; (2) ‘ arden t advocacy of edu cation, li berty, E uro pea nization o f R uss ia gene rally’ ; (3) ‘de fe nce of the interests of the masses, chiefly of the peasants [who, in the days of the enlighteners, were not yet fully emancipated or only in the process of being emancipated], the sincere belief that abolition of serfdom and its survivals would be followed by uni versal w ell-b ein g, and a sincer e d esire to h elp brin g this ab out’ .17
‘T h ese three f eatures ,’ con clud ed L en in, ‘co ns titute t he e sse nce of what in our country is called “the heritage of the sixties”, and there is nothing whatsoever of it is important to emphasize that Po pu lism, in this h er i tag e'1 * For an example of what he meant by ‘Russian enlighten er’ L en in ch ose Ska ldin, w ho had b een a rat he r mediocre and second-class writer. One of the reasons for this de cision was simply Russian censorship, which would not permit an open reference to the heritage of Chernyshevsky. There can be no doubt, however, that according to Lenin not Skaldin but Ch ernyshevsky was t he central figure am on g the ‘ en lighte ne rs’ of the si xti es. T h e art ic le ‘T h e H eri tage W e R en ou nc e’ is t hus a ser io us arg ument f or t he thesis that in L en in’ s co nce ption Cherny shevsky and the populists represented two different currents of thought. K oz’ m in, w ho w as, o f c ourse, awar e o f i t, se t against t his argu ment a thesis that in Lenin’s conception the opposition between ‘enlighteners' and populists was not absolute: an ‘enlightener’ could be at the same time a populist. This is perfectly true, and there is no doubt that it was so in the case of Chernyshevsky. Koz’min had rightly noticed that Lenin’s characterization of Skaldin as a typical ‘enlightener’ could be applied to Chernyshev sky only pa rt ia ll y. L et us try to dev elop th is t ho ug ht. L ike Skaldin, Chernyshevsky was an ardent Westernizer, a propagator of the ‘all-round Europeanization of Russia’; at the same time, however, in co ntr ast w ith Skaldin, he d efended w ith great energy th e peasant commune in which the liberal economists saw the greatest drag
on the European developm
ent of R ussi a. Skaldin sharply cri 70
tici zed
RUSSIA
Russian serfdom but (in contradistinction to the populists) was not aware of the painful contradictions of capitalist progress; this could not be said about Chernyshevsky, who wanted to protect the Russian peasantry from the sufferings bound up with the classical English type of capitalist development. Skaldin propagated the ideas of cri Adam Smith and ideas of thefrom liberal Cherny shevsky ticized these the political point ofeconomy; view of an ‘eco nomy o f the working m asses’ (alt hough - it shoul d be st res sed - he d id not share the view that capitalism as such was but ‘a deterioration, a retrogression’). It is justifiable to conclude from this that Russian censorship was not the only reason for Lenin’s decision to choose Skaldin, and not Chernyshevsky, as an example of a typical ‘en lightener’ : he wished to present an ‘enlightener’ who had not been a populist, who could exemplify the pu r e fo r m of the anti-feudal ideology of the radical bourgeois democracy. The democratism of Skaldin could not stand the comparison with the democratism of Chernyshevsky, but it had, from this point of view, the impor tant advantage of being free from any populist ‘addition’. Lenin himself wrote: ‘We have taken Skaldin as an example precisely because, while he was undoubtedly a representative of the “heri tage”, he was at the same time a confirmed enemy of those ancient institutions which the populists have taken under their protection.’19 The difference between the ‘heritage’ and classical populism will be even clearer if we confront the category of ‘Enlightenment’ with the category of ‘ econo mic romanticism’ - a categor y which has been applied by Le nin in his analyse s o f the economic and social con ten t o f pop ul ism .20 It will not be a great simplification to say that the representatives of the ‘heritage’ were seen by Lenin predominantly as ‘enlighteners’, whereas the populists were seen by h im pred om inan tly as ‘rom anticists ’. ‘Roma nticism’ means i n this context a criticism of capitalism from the point of view of a backward-looking petty-bourgeois utopia, an idealization of a pre-capitalist type of econom ic an d so cial rel ations. Th e ‘en lighteners’, in Lenin’s view, were the ideologists of radical bourgeois democracy, fighting against the remnants of feudalism, with confidence in capitalist progress but not seeing or under estimating its negative sides (Chernyshevsky, who saw them clearly, was in this respect not a typical ‘enlightener’). The popu lists, as opposed to the ‘enlighteners’, were the ideologists of 7i
PO PU L IS M -IT S NATI
ONAL C
HAR AC TE RI ST IC S
democracy who, having realized the tragic contradictions inherent in capi ta li st devel opm ent, m ade a step forw ard in com parison wi t h the ‘enli ghteners': ‘ Po pu lis m ’ - w rote L en in - ‘m ade a big step f o r w a r d compar ed with the “ heritage” by posing for the attent ion of society problems which the guardians of the heritage were partly (in their time) not able to pose,t or did not, dook not, pose because o f yet their inheren na partly rrow ness o f and ou tlo .’21 A t t he same time, however, it was a step backward since the populists, having lost all confidence in the bourgeois, ‘European’, progress, adopt ed the standpoi nt o f ‘eco no m ic ro m an ticism ’. T h e ideology of ‘Enlightenment’ was dominant in the Russian democratic movement in the sixties, i.e. when the attention of all progressive Rus si an s was f ocus ed on the struggle f or th e abo lit ion o f serfdo m ; Populism was an ideological reflection of the new problems which emerge d in Russi a a ft er the reform. B oth th e ‘en ligh ten er s’ and the populists defended the interests of ‘the people’ (i.e, first of all, the int eres ts o f peasant ry); the po pu lists, ho w ev er, in contra distinction to the ‘enlighteners’, combined in their ideology an anti-feudal bourgeois democratism with a petty-bourgeois con servative reaction against bourgeois progress. That is why the ‘heritage of the sixties’ was unequivocally progressive while the her it age o f populism was i n t his respec t rathe r am b igu ou s. In L enin ’s words: ‘ Th at is w hy the po pulist, i n m atters o f theo ry, is j u s t as m u c h a J a n u s, lo o k in g w i t h o n e fa c e t o t h e p a s t a n d t h e othe r to th e fu tur e.’ 22 The ‘reactionary* face of the populist Janus was seen by Lenin in populist socialism. In the ‘general democratic points’ of their programmes the populists were progressive, but their socialist t heo ri es were - acc or di ng to Len in - petty- bourg eois, utopian and bound up with reactionary ‘economic romanticism’. T o many of us t his judgem ent may appe ar too severe . Bu t w e m ust not f orge t the sense in w hich L enin applied to po pu lism the term ‘reactionary*. ‘This term’, he explained, ‘is employed in its historico-philosophical sense, describing only the er r or of the theoreticians who take models for their theories from obsolete forms of society. I t does not apply at a ll to the personal qu aliti es o f these theoreticians or to their programmes. Everybody knows that neither Sismondi nor Proudhon were reactionaries in the ordinary sense o f the term .’23 I think that two other qualifications should be added to this.
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Fi rs tl y, it seem s to m e that in approaching p opulist so ci ali sm fr om the perspective of our times, it is difficult to deny that not only the ‘ back wa rd-look ing’ b u t also th e ‘forwa rd-looking’ face of J anu s can be discovered in it. Secondly, I think that some ‘reactionary* ideologies should not be easily dismissed, that a ‘reactionary’ standpoint in social theory (‘reactionary’ in the ‘historico-philosophic al’ sense) can s om etim es be not only an obstacl e but a va nt age point. It was th e ‘reactionary ’ charact er o f their soci al ideal s which enabled the Western petty-bourgeois socialists to discover aspects of capitalism which remained unnoticed by the liberal apologists of bourgeois progress. Russian populists had the same vantage point in comparison with the Russian apologists of the ‘classical’ W est -European patte rn o f development. To sum up. I agree with Pipes that the ‘broad and objective’ definit ion o f ‘ na rod nich estvo ’ was introduced by M arx is ts. I thi nk, however, that it is by no means as ‘broad’ as to be applied ‘to anyone w ho believe d in the abili ty o f Russia to by-pass ca pit ali sm’ .24 It is i n fact - in any cas e in L en in’ s usage - much more p re ci se , and cannot be dismissed as a mere ‘polemical device’. It was rather a methodological device , and a very good o n e : it has enabl ed us to select an important set of problems, to ask right questions and to establish their mu tual relat ionshi p. T h is does not mean th at one can find in Lenin’s works a ready-made and final solution of these problems. I think, however, that as a definition of ‘narod nichestvo’, as an attempt at classification , Lenin’s conception of Russian populism is still the best and, certainly, the most elaborated and precise one. It remains to delineate the chronological frame of the classical Russian populism. As a conventional date marking the end of the formative years and the beginning of classical populism, I propose the year 1869 . T h ree cl assi cal d ocum ents of populis t ide ology w er e pu blished th e n : Lav rov’ s H isto r ical Le tt er s , M ikha ilovsk y’s treatise W hat is Pr og r ess ? and Flerovsky’s book T he Si tua tio n of t he W or king C la ss in R ussia . The first two called into question the optimistic be lief in progress, so characteri stic o f the ‘ enlighteners’ , emphasize d the painful contradictoriness of historical processes and, finally, undermined and rejected naturalistic evolutionism with its con ception of a unili near dev elopmen tal p ath ; by the same t oken they removed the theoretical foundation for the view that Russia had to follow the general pattern of the capitalist development of the
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- IT S NAT IONA
L CH ARA CTE RIS TI CS
West. Flerovsky, in his turn, made these historico-philosophical questions cruelly concrete and down-to-earth. His vivid descrip ti on o f t he growing destitution o f the Ru ssi an peasant ry a nd of the new capitalist forms of exploitation emerging in Russian villages was followed by the conclusion that everything should be done to pr event further travelling along capitalist paths and to utilize, instead, the possibilities of development inherent in the peasant
commune. In the same years when Lavrov, Mikhailovsky and Tkachev disputed over progress, the distinctively populist revolutionary movement was born. The distinction between the pre-populist revolutionary movement of the sixties and the fully-fledged revo lutionary populism of the seventies consisted in a characteristic shif t of emphasis - in the shift from
anti-feud al d em ocratic ra di ca l
is m to anti-c apit ali st a gr ar ia n sociali sm . T h e con tinu ity o f th e rev ol uti onar y t radit ion could be preser ved, since som e elemen ts of ag ra ri an sociali sm were par t and parcel o f th e revo lutionar y ideology already in the sixties. Nevertheless, the shift was clear and signi fi can t. In contradisti nction to the revo
lutionar ies o f th e f irst ‘ Land
and Freed om ’, who se aims w ere dem ocra tic rather than sociali the revol uti onar ie s o f the seventies th
ou gh t it necessary
st,
to cut
themselves off from ‘ bou rgeois’ dem ocratism in order to em ph asize the socialist character of the movement and to make sure that it would not pave the way for capitalist development. This new att it ude found
expres si on in the theory
‘social ’ revoluti on over
a m erely
of th e top
‘po litical’
on e -
priori ty of a theory
which became a hallmark of classical revolutionary populism. T h e ‘soci al’ revolut ion economic
basi s of society
a revol utionary transformation - was
o f the
identif ied w ith th e ‘ soc ialist’
revolution; the ‘political’ revolution, i.e. a revolutionary trans formation of the existing political structure, was conceived as being merely a ‘bourgeois’ revolution from which true socialists should keep themselves away. In a word, Russian revolutionaries, having realized that political democracy could not solve the most painful social problems, took care to ensure that they were not ‘bourgeois revolutionaries’, that their revolution, in contrast with political revolutions in the West, would not further the interests of the bourgeoisie. Their preoccupation with manifesting the anti bourgeois character of their movement became for them a real obsession. This is what accounts for the curious fact that the
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re vol uti onar ie s in R ussia - a coun try w hich had s uff ere d so much fro m it s autocra ti c p olitical stru cture - becam e so int ransi gent a nd stubborn in depreciating the ‘bourgeois’, ‘fraudulent’ political fr ee dom of the W est. It i s widely b elieved that for R ussian pop ulis m the eight ies wer e a period of crisis and that in the nineties only the ‘^epigones’ of populism existed. This is a misunderstanding, stemming from the ide nti fi cat ion o f class ical po pu lism w ith the r evolu ti onar y populism. In fact, however, there existed also a s oc i al-r efor m i s t current of classical populism, and for this current the eighties and nineties were not a period of crisis but, on the contrary, the period of its fullest bloom. The Russian students of populism used, and still use, to call this current ‘the liberal populism’. This name, however, is inappropriate both from the political and the economic point of view ; it see m s m u ch be tter to d efine it as a ‘legal’ popu lism.2 5 Equally inappropriate and unjustified is to treat its representatives as ‘epigones’. In fact ‘legal populism’ of the eighties and nineties represented the most ambitious populist attempt to analyse the specific features of Russian capitalism and the most elaborated and srcinal theoretical argumentation for the possibility and necessity of a non-capitalist development of Russia; at the same tim e the ideo logical stand poin t o f the sm all pro ducer s wa s r ef le ct ed in it most clearly and distinctly. A Soviet scholar wrote about it: ‘Nowhere, in no other country, has the ideology of petty-bour geois democracy found such a broad popularity and such an acute theoretical expression as it was in the case of Russian liberal po pu lism o f the n in eties .’26 I f so, and if the Marxist a nal ys is of t he social content of populism is to be taken seriously, we must con cede that Vorontsov and Danielson should be placed among the most ‘classical’ representatives of Russian populism. Thus, the ‘classical’ period in the history of Russian populism lasted in fact from the lat e sixti es till t he end of the centur y - si nce t he comple tion o f th e ‘liberal’ reforms, w hich had mar ked t he beginning of the capitalist develop m ent in the Russian countrys ide, unti l Witte’ s rapid industrialization of the nineties. In order to avoid misunderstanding it is necessary to stress that different rep resentatives o f th e classi cal p opu lism were ‘cla ssic al’ in a different way. Populism was an ideological structure within which many positions were possible, sometimes complementary and sometimes symmetrically opposed to each other. It is clear,
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S NATIONAL C
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theref ore, that it is hard ly p os sib le to fi nd in an ind ivid ua l th in ke r all the aspects and all the constitutive elements of such a structurein each individual case the proportions are different and in some cases the complete lack of an important element can even be established. Thus, for instance, Lavrov was hardly an ‘economic romantici st' ; ‘econom ic rom an ticism ’ was u nd ou bted ly a n impo r tant fea tur e of pop ulism ; Lav rov, how ever, represented w ithi n the populist ideology the rationalistic and individualistic tradition of the ‘enlighteners’, and this tradition was also a constituent part o f populism.
Tk achev , taken separate
atypical figure but, nev erth eless,
ly, w as a qu ite unique a nd
it is jus tifiable
to int erpret h is
ideas as the most extreme expression of a particular aspect of cl ass ic al populism.
Both L avro v and T ka ch ev thu s gave a cl as si ca l
expression of some aspects of populism, and not a faithful reflec tion of the whole structure of populism. The difference between them and Chemyshevsky, whose ideology, after all, also contained some important elements of populism, consisted in the fact that they opposed each other within the thought.
cl assic al populist
fr amew or k of
And it is this general framework, together with the
characteristic pattern of possible standpoints within it, that con st it ut es t he dist inct ivenes s and the u nity -
the st ructure -
of
populist thought.
2
POPU LISM
A S
A
REA CTI ON
TO
I have tri ed to show that t he fi rst , and still the
MA RXIS M
best, de finition o f
Russian populism was provided by Marxists; now I shall try to show that populism as an ideology was, in fact, not only defined but, in a sense, called into being by Marxism, that without Marx it would have been diff ere nt from wh at it was . M arxism sho uld be recognized as the main frame of reference for the proper under standing of the social philosophy of classical Russian classical populism, in its turn, should be recognized aspopulism; one of the most important chapters in the history of a broadly conceived recept ion o f marxi sm. Th is, however, points to a cer tai n li m itati on o f the m arxist defi nition of Russian populism. It defined populism in terms of its in R us sia , but it failed to relation to the development of capitalism define it as a reaction of Russian intellectuals to the capitalist econo my and s oci ali st thought o f t he W est . T h e ideology of Russi an
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populism reflected not only the problems of small producers in confrontation with large-scale capitalist production; it reflected also specific pro blem s o f a backward peasant count ry in conf ron ta tion with the high ly develop ed capit ali st s tat es. From this poi nt of view it becomes highly important to establish what was the populist imag e o f W estern capital ism, o f it s histo ry an d its p re se nt state. And it is no exaggeration to say that this image was formed under the overwhelming influence of Marx. It is by no means an accident that the beginning of classical populism almost coincided in time with the publication of the first volume of C ap i tal (the Ru ssian translatio n o f it - the fi rst transl ation of it into a ny languag e - cam e ou t in 1872, i.e. a short five yea rs af te r the publica tion o f th e G erm an srcinal . It was tra nsl ate d by a populis t, Nicolai Danielson). The ideas of C ap i ta l acted as a catalyst in the emergence and development of populist thought, and it was the po pu lists w h o started th e propagation of M arxism i n Russi a.27 Of course, the rank-and-file populists possessed but a second-hand knowledge of C a p i ta l. I think, however, that the influence of Marx reached even those populists who never read any of his books; that Marx's description of the atrocities of the primitive accumulation and of the industrial revolution in England, his the ory o f surp lus-v alu e and h is criticism o f the ‘f ormal’ ch ar ac te r of bourgeois ‘political democracy’ were immediately adapted to populist thought and made part and parcel of it. A n instru ctive examp le of the infl uence of C ap i ta l upon populi st thinking was provided by two articles of the early seventies (both pu blish ed in 1872 ). O ne of t hem - Eliseev’ s p ap er ent it le d ‘Plutocracy and its Social Base’ 28 - show s us that t he popu li st image of capitalist development was shaped entirely and wholly by Marx. Eliseev quoted widely from Marx and, moreover, many pages in his article were simply and solely paraphrases or sum maries of the respective pages in C ap i ta l. The general conclusion was, of course, that everything should have been done to prevent th e capitalist dev elopm ent o f Russia . Strangel y enough , Elise ev seem ed to have thou ght that t his con clusion was in ac cor danc e wit h Marx’s saying that in the process of begetting a new social order th e fu nction o f midw ife is perf ormed b y forc e and t hat f orc e itsel f is also an economic power. If force is the midwife, reasoned Eliseev, it means that the role of the state is active, that the state can interfere with the process of social transformation in order to
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prevent undesirable results. In this manner Marx’s C a p i ta l was used by the populist publicist to persuade the Tsarist government that it was its duty to prevent capitalist development in Russia. The second article, entitled ‘On the Occasion of the Russian Translation o f “ Ca pital” ’,29 w as w ritten by N . Mikhai lo vsky. Marx’s C a p i t a l was used in it a s a po w erful argu m ent for the po pu li st conception o f the abso lute p rim acy o f ‘socia l’ over ‘ me re ly political’ questions. The populist grudge against political liberals was justi fie d by reference to th e v ery fou nd ation s o f hi st or ic al mater ial is m - by indicating that po liti cal sys tem s are m ere r ef le c tions of economic relations and, therefore, that the changes in the economic (i.e. ‘social’) sphere are the only things which really mat te r. Moreover, the M arxian critici sm o f ‘th e illuso ry and for mal character’ of bourgeois democracy supported the populist convic ti on that ‘poli ti cal freed om ’ was b ou n d up w ith ca pitalism and devoid of any autonomous value of its own; that, therefore, a const it uti onal governmen t in R ussia cou ld on ly s erve th e inte res ts of t he bourgeoi si e and make the situation o f the p eo p le eve n wors e. W e may sa fe ly say that i n the seven ties suc h an interpret ation o f marxism was very widespread, even prevalent among the Russian popul is ts . T h e fact that Marx h im self never n eglec ted the so-cal led ‘poli ti cal struggle’ was considered as a shee r inc on siste n cy deriving from his political opportunism; such was the view of Balkunin, and he undoubtedly succeeded in diffusing among the Russian revolutionaries the opinion that Marx, as the leader of the Inter national, was an advocate of moderation and a spokesman of the semi-bourgeois workers’ aristocracy.30 But it should be remem bered that Balkunin also highly appreciated the scholarly produc tion of his great adversary, subscribed in a sense to historical materialism and offered even to translate Marx’s C a p i t a l into Russian. As we see, the populists’ reception of marxism was a very peculiar one: their image of capitalism was on the whole nonmar xi st , since they saw capital ist dev elopm ent as an esse ntia lly retrogressive process, but, none the less, this image would have been i mp ossi ble wit hout the m esmerizing infl uence o f M ar x; t heir practical conclusions were often incompatible with marxism, but, none the less, they were supported by theoretical argumentation which had been either borrowed from Marx or derived from a particular interpretation of his views.
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A particularly striking example of the ‘hidden’ influence of Marx may be found even in Mikhailovsky’s theory of progress, that is in the most articulate expression of the populist economic (sociological) ‘romanticism’. ‘Progress’, wrote Mikhailovsky, ‘is the gradual approach to the integral individual, to the fullest possible and the m ost d iversified div ision o f labour among man ’s or gan s and the least poss ible div ision o f labour among m en.’ 31 T h is fo rm ul a of ‘progress’ expressed the very essence of the backward-looking populist utopia, a utopia which idealized the primitive peasant econom y by settin g a hig h value o n its a utar ky , on its i ndependence from the capitalist market. Mikhailovsky constantly repeated that the interests of individuality coincided with the interests of ‘undi vided’, non-specialized labour, i.e. with the interests of the Russian peasantry. The Russian peasant, like primitive man, lives a life which is poor but full; being economically self-sufficient he is, therefore, an independent, ‘all-round’ and ‘total’ man. He satis fie s all his nee ds b y his ow n work, m aking use of a ll his capa ci ti es he is a tiller and an artisa n, a shepherd and an ar tist in one perso n. The peasant community is egalitarian, homogeneous, but its members have differentiated, many-sided individualities. The lack of development of the division of labour (complex co-opera tion) enables them to preserve their independence and simple co-operation (i.e. co-operation not involving the social division of labour), unites them in mutual sympathy and understanding. (Sim ilar features were seen b y Mikhail ovsky in the medi eval handi craft trades and guilds.) S o c i a l (‘organic’) progress, consisting in the development of the division of labour, is being achieved at the cost of the individual, whose freedom and ‘wholeness’ is being sacrificed for the benefit of a supra-human social organism. Capi tali sm - the culminati on o f t he divis ion of la bo ur - is t he ful le st victory of the supra-individual society over the individual man. ‘Society’, however, is but an abstract ‘phantom’, the S p u k of Stirn er;32 for the true prog ressive the only th ing w hich mat ter s is the freedom and welfare of really existing individual men, and from this point of view capitalist development (and s oci al progress as such) is a retrogressive process. True progressives, therefore, should look to the past, to the Middle Ages or to the archaic ‘Golden Age’. The non-Marxian, even anti-Marxian, character of this conclu sion is obvious. I think, however, that it is worth while to point
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S NATI
ONAL
CH AR AC TE RI S TI CS
out the unno ticed fact that ev en this part o f M ikhail ovsky’ s vi ews the ver y cor e of his thou ght - was d eeply permeate d by t he i n fluence o f M arx. A lready i n 1869, in h is articl e ‘ T h e Th eory of Darwin and the Social Sciences’, Mikhailovsky referred to Marx’s views on the division of labour, putting the emphasis, naturally, on its negat ive eff ects which, as he adm itted, had been fully u nd er stood and theoretically explained by the author of C a p i t a l ; he re fe rr ed a ls o t o the view s of A. S m ith, Fe rgu son and others , whom Marx had quoted in this connection. And, indeed, it is not difficult to find in
C a p i t a l many passages which Mikhailovsky could have
quoted in support of his views, such as: The one-sidedness and the deficiencies of the detail labourer become perfections when he is a part of collective labour. The habit of doing only one thing converts him into a never-failing instrument, while his connection with the whole mechanism compels him to work with the regul ari ty of the par ts o f a machine. . . . In m anufacture, in o rde r to make the collective labourer and, through him, capital, rich in social productive power, each labourer must be made poor in individual pro ducti ve powe rs. . . . S o i e crippling o f bod y and mind is in sep ara ble even fro m divi sion o f labo ur in society a s a wh ole. Sin ce, howev er, manufacture carries this social separation of branches of labour much further, and also, by its peculiar division, attacks the individual at the very roots of his life, it is the first to afford materials for, and to give a start to, industrial pathology. After this Marx quoted w ith appr oval from th e ‘Fam il iar W ords' o f D . U rquh art: ‘T o subdivide a man is to execute him
, i f he deserves
the sente nce, to as sas si nat e him i f he does n o t . . . T h e su bd ivision o f l abour is the assassination o f a pe op le.’ 33 It seems to me that Mikhailovsky not only found in these utt er anc es of Marx strong s uppo rt for his ow n, alre ady established, views; it is much more probable that they were the real starting point for his own conceptions, that he not only took from Marx what fitted his own theory but, in fact, that the general framework of his views was formed under the strong influence of C a p i t a l. It seems certain that he first read Marx, and only afterwards found the problem of the division of labour and its destructive effect on individual wholeness in earlier writers, such as Rousseau and Schi ll er . It se ems very l ike ly t hat his fundamental co ncep tion - the assertion of the incompatibility between the progress of society and the progre ss of indivi duals - was derive d from M arx’ s
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conception of the perfection of the ‘collective labourer’ as being achieved at the cost of, and in inverse ratio to, the development of the individual labourer. It is really amazing how deeply Mik hailovsky had assimilated this aspect of Marx’s thought and how little attention was paid to it by his marxist opponents in Russia, suc h as Plekhan ov and , e spec ially, th e ‘legal Marxists’ wh o almos t completely overlooked the painful contradictions and the tragic aspect of industrial progress. The conclusions of Mikhailovsky and Marx were, of course, quite different. For the author of C a pi tal the division of labour, culminating in modern capitalism, was a tremendous progress, since it had enabled the labourer to ‘strip off the fetters of his indiv idu ality’ and to ‘deve lop the capacities of his spe cies’ .34 From Mikhailovsky’s point of view the reverse was true. Having found in Marx the corroboration of Chernyshevsky’s view that ‘national wealth’ is identical with the poverty of the people,35 he proclaimed that only the welfare of the people, i.e. the welfare of individual labourers, s ho ul d ha ve be en t reated as a measur e of prog res s. Having learned from Marx about the high price of capitalist development, he refused to pay this price, and set his hopes on the alleged possibility of restoring the archaic forms of social life and adapting them to fit the new conditions. Thus, from the marxist point of view, he became a ‘sociological romanticist’, i.e. a react ionary in the ‘historico -philo soph ical’ sense of the wor d. Mikhailovsky, of course, would have protested against such a classification of his views. At the beginning of the seventies he seemed even to have thought that his views were, essentially, in accordance with the view s o f Mar x. In C api tal he found a dramatic story of the ‘forcible driving of the peasantry from the land’, of divorcing the producer from the means of production, of depriv ing him of his economic ‘self-sufficiency’ and, by the same token, of his individual ‘wholeness’. According to Marx’s scheme, capi talism has for its fundam ental condition the anni hil ati on of self-earned private property, i.e. the expropriation of the labourer; socialism, in turn, being ‘the negation of a negation’, will expro priate the expropri ators , making the means of produ cti on the property of producers (although it will not be a restoration of their p r i v a t e property). M ikhailov sky, like other p opulists, deduced fr om this that Russia, in order to avoid the atrocities of primitive accu mulation, should do everything possible to skip ‘the capitalist 81
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AR AC TE RI ST IC S
phase*, to prevent industrialization on the English model. More over, Marx’s scheme was used by him as the main argument for the view that socialism and the ‘medieval forms of production’, especially the common ownership of the land as preserved in the Russian peasant commune, were but different ‘levels’ of the same type,toand, therefore, that the shortest wayrelations’ to socialism in already Russia was develop ‘the labour and property which existed, although in a crude form, in the Russian villages and in the ar tels of the R uss ian artisan s.36 , N o wonder that the ‘econ om ic rom an ticism ’ o f th e populi sts ! fi tt ed so well the M arxist categories i n w hic h it was interpreted by i Lenin. It ref le cte d, cert ainl y, the pe tty-b ou rge ois reaction t o capitalist progress, but it expressed also the reaction of the Russian intellectuals to the marxian de scr i pti on of the tragic contradictori ness of capi tal is t developm ent. It was based up on an absolutiz ation of the ‘negative side’ of this development, as described by Marx. It was non-marxist in its conclusions but, nevertheless, bound up with the cla ss ica l marxi st descript ion o f the de velop m en t o f cap it al ism. Very often it was even formulated in marxist language: in the nineties not only Lenin but also the populists themselves (Vorontsov, Danielson) defined their view as an ideological ex pres si on o f t he int ere sts o f ‘imm ediate prod ucers’ be ing endangered by t he developm ent of capit ali sm and trying to avoid proletarizat ion. Nevertheless, it was very difficult for the populists to call them sel ves ‘ marxis ts’ - the case of D an ielson was rat her exceptiona l. The main obstacle, the hardest nut to crack, was for them marxian determinism and naturalistic evolutionism, as expressed in the preface to the first German edition of C a pi tal. According to Marx, the evolution of every economic formation is a process of natural history, objective and independent of human will: a society ‘can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal develop ment’. The laws of social development are pushing their way with ‘iron necessity’, and the underdeveloped countries have to pass through the same phases of economic development which the developed ones have already completed: ‘The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the imag e o f it s o w n fut ur e.’ 37 The incompatibility between these generalizations of Marx and the hopes of socialists in a backward country was pointed out and
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dramatized in Mikhailovsky’s article ‘Karl Marx before the tri bunal of Mr Zhukovsky’ (1877).38 As for himself, Mikhailovsky opposed to marxian determinism his so-called ‘subjective socio logy’, denying the possibility of the ‘objective’ approach in the social sciences, claiming that ideals and values can be neither eli minated nor derived from facts and emphasizing that the ‘sub je ct iv e fa ct o r’ - h u m a n t h o u g h t an d w il l - ca n ef fe ct iv el y op po se the impersonal, ‘objective’ laws of development. Marxism, how ever, was interpreted by him as a variant of ‘objectivism’, demand ing from man to bow before ‘the inevitable’. At the beginning of the seventies he did no t pay m uch attent ion to this fea tur e of ma rx ism ; in th e nin eties, how ever, the wh ole meaning o f m ar xi sm wa s reduced in his eyes to an ‘inverted Hegelianism’, cruelly subordi nating the individual to the allegedly ‘objective’ and unalterable laws of history. This significant change in his attitude towards marxism is intelligible as a reaction to Plekhanov’s interpretation of marxism, with its characteristic Hegelian and ‘necessitarian’ flavour, and, above all, to the ‘legal marxism’ of Struve, with its almost openly apologetic view of the capitalist industrialization of Russia.39 T h e full story o f the changing atti tudes to ward s mar xi sm i n th e populist milieu is long and truly fascinating. However, for the sake of conciseness, I shall confine myself to a brief discussion of those populist reinterpretations of the marxian theory of social development which seem to me to be most relevant to the specific problems of economic backwardness, as seen from the vantage point of our times. All of them centred round the problem of the so-called ‘privilege of backwardness’.40 A classic formula of this peculiar ‘privilege’ was given by Vorontsov: The countries which are latecomers to the arena of history have a great priv ilege in com parison w ith old er countries, a privilege consisting in the fact that the accumulated historical experience of their countries enables them to work out a relatively true image of their own next step and to strive for what the others have already achieved not instinc tively but consciously, not groping in the dark but knowing what should be avoided on the way.41 The idea that backwardness can be a kind of privilege was pro claimed in Russia already by Herzen, himself inspired by Chaadayev, and, also, by Chernyshevsky who expressed it in the aphoristic
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saying about history resembling ‘an old grandmother who loves the most her youngest grandchildren’.42 It was given an extreme formulat ion in the p roclamati on ‘T o th e y ou n g gen eration’ (186 1) , written by Shelgunov and Mikhailov and being one of the earliest documents of revolutionary populism: ‘We are a belated nation and precisely in this consists our salvation.’43 From among the classical populists it was taken up by Tkachev, Lavrov and young Plekhanov, who (especially the latter)44 tried to combine it with the Marxian theory of social and economic development. Each of them gave his own inte rpretat ion o f it, bu t all o f them agr ee d t ha t the social development of the ‘latecomers’ could be different from the classical pattern. This possibility, they argued, was created by the fact that the knowledge of what should have been avoided and the technological means enabling a telescoping of industrial development were available to the ‘latecomers’ at the time when their old feudal economy was in the process of dissolution and the new capit ali st rel ati ons were not, as yet, firm ly establish ed . Special emphasis was put on the fact that Russian primitive communism (i.e. peasant communes) had survived until the time when the econo mic, tec hnical and inte ll ectual precon ditions o f mod ern social ism appeared in the West. Similar argumentation, although with out reference to marxism, was evolved by Chernyshevsky in his ‘Criticism of Philosophical Prejudices against the Communal Ownership of the Land’. It should be added that Marx himself, under the impact of Russian populism, reproduced this line of reasoning in the famous drafts of his letter to Zasulich. These drafts, sharply contrasting with the preface to the first edition of C a p i t a l and utterly incompatible with Plekhanov’s interpretation o f marxi sm, contained an interesting formu lation o f a set o f i m por tant problems, such as the problem of an ‘asynchronic’ develop ment, th e peculi ar advant ages of backwardness, the role o f cul tural contact and diffusion of cultural items in a telescoped, shortened evolution, in a word, the problem of the non-capitalist way of overcoming economic and social backwardness. The fact that the Russian populists raised these problems and brought them to the attention of the author of C a p i t a l is, I think, a sufficient justifica tion for recognizing their ideas as one of the most interesting cha pte rs in the histor y o f nineteenth-century social though t. The most ambitious populist theories of a non-capitalist indus trial development of Russia were worked out in the eighties, by
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the main represen tatives of ‘legal pop ulism ’ - V. Voront sov and N. Dan iel son. Voron tsov, the au th or of T he F or tune s o f Ca pital ism in Russia (1882), was the first populist thinker who claimed that non-capitalist development in Russia was not only possible, but even necessary, and who tried to ground this conviction on an entirely ‘objective’ general theory of economic backwardness. He w ro te: ‘T h e mor e belated the process of ind ustr ial iza tio n, the mo re difficult it is to carry it on a long th e capitalist line s.’45 Capitalism in Russia, argued Vorontsov, is an artificial capital ism, a parody of capitalism. It cannot develop without being heavily subsidized by the government. Its productive potentialities are very limited because it cannot successfully compete with the capital of the more advanced industrialized countries; foreign markets are already divided up, the home market cannot be exten ded because of the growing poverty of the masses, which is an unavoidable concomitant of the early stage of capitalist develop ment. In the West capitalism has performed a great progressive mission (consisting in the ‘socialization of labour’); in Russia, however, and in all countries which are ‘latecomers to the arena of history’, it is only a form of exploitation of the masses for the benefit of a small group of the population. The successful indus trialization of Russia can be achieved only by means of socialist planning through the agencies of the government. It was expected of course, that socialist industrialization would be less painful, more humane than the capitalist variety, that it would save the Ru ssian peasan ts and artisans from the atrociti es o f ‘primiti ve ac cu mulation’. It would be erroneous, however, to conclude from this that he wished to eternalize the existence of the small independent producers as such - he w ished on ly to gi ve them the po ssi bil ity of a smooth and painless transition to the ‘socialized form of labour’. H e was on ly partial ly a disciple of Mikhailov sky - he c ould no t espouse the ideal of non-divided, non-socialized labour since he had learned a great deal from Marx, whom he often quoted in his book. T h e ‘socialization o f labour’ was for hi m - in co ntrast wi th Mikh ailovsky - a mar k of progress and a necessi ty of economic development. In the historical development of economic relation ships he saw the following three stages: (1) the pre-industrial ‘popu lar pr od uc tion ’; (2) the ‘socialization o f labour’ in the proce ss of industrialization, and, finally, (3) the socialized ‘popular produc tion’, i.e. socialism (the word ‘socialism’ was avoided for the sake
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of Tsarist censorship). Non-capitalist industrialization under the auspices of the state was presented in this conception as the only means of overcoming economic backwardness and, at the same time, as the shortest and, in a sense, ‘privileged’, way to the hig hes t st age of econom ic d evelopm ent. Simi lar conclusions were drawn by N . D an ielson , th e tr an sla tor o f Capital , who since 1868 had corresponded with Marx and Engels, providing them with first-hand information about econo mic development in Russia. He considered himself a Marxist, although he stoutly opposed the views of the Russian ‘disciples of Marx’ . His main book - Outlines o f our S oci al E co nomy aft er the E nfr anc hise me nt o f t he P easan ts (1893) - was w ritt en at the s ug gestion of Marx; it should be added that Marx had read and highly appreciated its first and most important chapter (published in 1880).46 Marx’ s appre ci ati on of D an ielson ’s a nalyses sho uld not sur pri se us. Danielson’ s i mage o f capit alis m w as m ou lde d u nde r the deci sive infl uence of Marx; the author of Capital , for his part, wa s delighted to see that the growth of Russian capitalism, as described by Danielson, gave the lie to petty-bourgeois illusions of a smooth and mild economic development. Not without a certain satisfac tion did he predict that things would go from bad to worse, that the economic processes, analysed by his Russian correspondent, were paving the way for a f a m i n e y ea r in Russia.47 Danielson, who was, of course, deeply impressed by this diag nosis, used it as an argument against the flat optimism of Russian liberals who saw capitalist progress as a panacea for all the social mal adi es of t hei r coun tr y. In the n ineties he felt h im se lf confirmed in his views by the fact that Marx’s gloomy prediction had materialized in Russia in 1891. The ‘legal marxists’ interpreted the gre at f amine o f t his year as a resul t o f R ussian eco no m ic back wardness, against which the only remedy was seen by them to be rapid capitalist progress; Danielson saw it as a result of Russia’s embarking on the capitalist road and believed that all the thinking Russians should have learned from this was that it was necessary to combat capitalism and to find for their country another way of economic develop ment. Feeling himself a marxist, Danielson tried to cut himself off from the publicists who represented in their economic views ‘a narrowly-peasant point of view’. He deliberately avoided quoting
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Vorontsov (although in fact he had borrowed a great deal from him), trying instead to utilize every occasion to support his views by reference to the au thority o f Marx a nd En ge ls; his Outlines . . . are full of quotations not only from Capital (on such topics as the destruction of peasant industries, proletarianization, centraliza tion of capital, the role of public credit and of the development of railways, and so on), but also from his private correspondence with his teachers. In spite of this, however, there can be no possible doubt that he belonged to the ‘legal populists’. On basic issues he was in agreement with Vorontsov. What distinguished them from each other could be reduced to the difference in emphasis: the translator of Capital was sceptical about such half-measures as reductions in peasant taxation, cheap credit, promoting associa tions of artisans and so on, and put more emphasis on the necessity of a global economic reform, initiated and carried into effect by the state. Like Vorontsov, however, he was a spokesman of the small produ cers, tryin g to save them from paying the cos t of indus trialization and believing that the ‘socialization of labour’ could be accomplished in Russia without passing through ‘the capitalist stage’. He wrote: It fel
l to o ur lot to solve a t
h ow to raise our in preven
h av ing
d u stry to the
t R ussia f
and, at the
ask w
rom
be com
sacri fi ce o u r p op ular E n gli sh i nd ustry
de ath
ing a tr
the w estern i
ulat ed a s foll ow s: nd ustry,
i n or der t o
he w el fa re o f the wh indu
stry with i
unt ri es ,
ol e peopl
e. But,
t s capi t al i st i c f orm,
t o t h e f o l lo w i n g d i l e m m a : to w h a t s h o u ld w e
indu stri es -
? W h en the prob
n thi s m ann er -
an d w e be ga n to
uld be form
i bu tar y o f m ore a dvanced co
le m od ern
w e r e d u c e d th is p r o b le m
set precisely i
level of
sam e ti m e,t o i ncrease t
i de n ti fi ed large-sca
h ich co
l em was se
our
spread
to our ow
pop ular i
n capit al i st i nd ustry t i n such a ndustr
ou r ow n lar ge-scal
way -
i es got a e capit
or t o
an d i t was sent ence of
al i st industr
y. 48
The readers of Danielson’s Outlines . . . did not know that this dilemma, presented by him as false and deserving only ironical treatment, was formulated in fact by Engels. In the letter to Danielson of 22 September 1892, Engels wrote: A n o t h e r t h i n g is c e r t a i n : i f R u s s i a r e q u i r e d a f t e r t h e C r i m e a n W a r a
grande Industrie o f her ow n, capitali stic form . A n d along w
she
al l the con
sequ
acco
al l other co
u n tries
f ho m e ind
ences w
ustry an
...
hich
it h that f
. A s far as t d the
cou l d have it
branch
i n one f
orm , she was obl
m pan y capi
his side o
t al i st i c
orm o
he
i ged t o t ake ove r
grande Industrie
f the qu esti on : the dest ruct i on
es o f agr i cult ure subservi
8?
nly: t
ent t o i t , a s
in
P O P U L IS M -IT
S NATIONAL C
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far as this is con cerned, the real q uesti on for you seem s to me this : that the Russians had to decide whether their own grande industrie was to destroy their domestic manufacture, or whether the i mpo r t o f English g oods was to accomplish this. With protection, the Russians effected it without protection, the English * 9 As we see, the above quotation from Danielson contained in fact a direct, although hidden, polemic with Engels. This was not a unique case: although Danielson considered himself to be a marxist, he was by no means inclined to give up his own, long established, views of the economic development of his country; he did everything possible to convince Engels of the validity of his ideas but, having failed to achieve this, he stuck even more resolutely to his own opinions. And he was never shaken in his Capital allegiance to Marx. He knew that the author of planned to devote more attention to the specific problems of the economic
development
o f Russia and he
bel ie ved , tha t M arx’ s co nclusions
always suspec
ted,
had an d
conc ernin g these prob lem s woul d
have been different from the harsh judgements of Engels. It is obvious that the views of Vorontsov and Danielson were hardly consistent, both theoretically and ideologically. They were in fa ct a c uri ous blend o f heteroge neou s e lem en ts: the ideal iza ti on of t he peas ant comm une and o f the archai c ‘popular
ind ustry ’ wa s
combined in their ideology with a programme for industrializa tion; a high appreciation of the ‘independence* of small producers went a long with the p ostul ate o f ‘socialization’ o f labour. heterogeneity and incongruity of constituent elements was noted
T h is
by Engels, who in a letter to Plekhanov made the following comment on Danielson’s views: . . . in a co un tr y lik e y ours , where m odern large-s cale industry ha s been grafted on to the primitive peasant commune and where, at the same time, all the intermediate stages of civilization coexist with each other, in a country which, in addition to this, has been enclosed by despotism with an intellectual Chinese wall, in the case of such a country one sho uld not wonde r at the emergence o f the m ost incred ible and bizarre combinations of ideas.60 Th is ob se rv at io n seems very m uch to the poin t; I sho uld add only that we are more conscious today of the relativity of such notions as ‘bizarreness’ in the domain of economic and, respec tively, ideological development. What was ‘bizarre’ from the point
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of view of the classical, Western, model of economic development, is seen today as a typical feature of the development of backward countries in con ditio ns o f a rapi d b ut uneven gr owth of the economy of the world. The historical heterogeneity of the constitutive ele m ents o f Vo ron tso v’s and D an ielso n’s ideology was in fa ct a faithful reflection of the peculiar ‘coexistence of asynchronisms’, typifying all the backward countries in the process of modernization. And in this sense , ‘legal populism’ was a really representative ideology not in spi te of the heterogeneity of its elements but because of it. The conceptions of the populist economists are, perhaps, the best exemplification of it. Flerovsky, Vorontsov and Danielson po inted out a do ub le cap italist threat: the int ernal dang er thr eaten ing the Russian people, and the external danger threatening the Russian nation as a whole. They were concerned not only with the problem how to the prevent the proletarianization Russian peas ants, but of also with problem of how to avoid theofproletarianiza tion of Russia as a nation, how to prevent her from being exploited by more advanced countries and how to secure her an honourable place among the nations of the world. The idea that backward countries in general were closer to socialism than the developed ones could be traced back at least to Bakunin, and the problem of external factors (diffusion of modern ideas and technology, neces sity of keeping pace with more advanced neighbours, etc.) was giv en a th oro ug h treatmen t alrea dy in the work s of Cher nyshevsky. N everth eless, on ly the ‘legal populists’ of the eig htie s an d nine tie s broug ht matters to a head b y p osing the prob lem o f non -ca pital ist industrialization as a means of ‘outstripping and overtaking’ economically more advanced nations. From the perspective of our times we see in the theories of Vorontsov and Danielson not only their ‘eco no m ic ro ma nticism ’ but also the f irst att empt to pose an d to solve some problems of economic backwardness which are still topical in the backward or unevenly developed countries of the world. To avoid misunderstanding, I must make it quite clear that this thesis is by no means bound up with a conviction that their strictly econo mic views were essential ly ri ght - 1 claim only th at t hey as ked the right questions and posed for the first time some new and important problems. There is no doubt that they were interested first o f all in the fate o f the small producers; it seems without doubt that they grossly underestimated the possibilities of Russia’s 89
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capitalist development, that they were too optimistic about non capitalist industrialization, and at the same time too uncritical in thei r be lief t hat under the auspices o f the state it wo uld be ea sy to combine industrialization with a steady increase of the welfare of the people; there is little doubt that they also committed many errors, misinterpreting facts and tendentiously interpreting stati stical data, presenting false pictures of trends in the Russian economy, and so on. I n the present contex t, how ever, m ore impo r tant is the consideration that they were painfully conscious of the fac t that econo m ic backwardness creates its ow n sp ecific probl ems, and that the backward countries not only should not but also cannot repeat in their development the classical English pattern. Vorontsov’s assertion that Russian capitalist industry would never be abl e to win foreign mar ket s m ight have been erroneous, but t he very problem of the influence of international conditions on the industrialization of the backward countries was, certainly, not a pseudo -prob lem; his hope that the Tsa rist go vern m ent wou ld c arry out a non-capitalist industrialization in the interests of the people was , undoubtedly, a react ionar y illusion , bu t this illusio n stemmed from correctly grasping the connection between economic back wardness and the role of the state in initiating and planning economic development. Today, nobody is shocked by the thesis that backward countries cannot develop along the lines of classical Western capitalism; no marxist claims today, as Plekhanov did, th at soc ial is m is possible only in tho se co untries w hic h have pass ed through the whole cycle of capitalist development. And there is nothing surpri sing in the fac t t hat it wa s the R ussian p op ulis ts w ho were the first to postulate the non-capitalist industrialization of the b ac kwa rd count ries - af te r al l, Russia had embarked on ind us tri ali zat ion much lat er and was more backward than any other o f the great European countries and, thus, had to carry it out in conditions strikingly different from the classical pattern.
3 CONC LUSI ON
' There is no definition of Russian populism as a movement (except the narrow historical definition of it). When we say: ‘the populist revolutionary movement’, we mean the revolutionary movement which has espoused the populist ideology ; the word ‘populist’ therefore, defines not the movement but only some aspects of the 90
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ideology of the movement. This is, I think, an important distinc
tion, and we must realize that it would be very difficult, if not im possible, to define Russian populism (in the accepted broad usage of this term) as a type of social, let alone political, movement. T h e ‘movement to the people’ and revolutionary terrorism represented very different, if not opposite, of revolutionary movements: Tkachev and Vorontsov had types nothing in common in terms of p oli ti ca l attitudes. What united these very different movements and ver y differe nt m en wa s a cert ain bod y of ideas, ce rta in attitude s towards capitalism, as opp osed to th e archai c st ruc ture s of Russ ian social life. The definition of this body of ideas and of their social content was given by Lenin. This definition, as I have tried to show, is by no means an artificial one; it delineates an important set of prob lems; it enables us to prescind from mere political or doctrinal divisions and to see the essential unity of a socially determined W eltanschauu ng ; it is precise enough as a means of classification and it can be made even more precise, since it gives reasons for making a useful distinction between ‘classical populism’ of the post-reform period and ‘early populism’, or ‘pre-populism’, of the sixties. There are, of course, some aspects of Russian populism which were not seen, or not sufficiently taken into account, by Lenin. Three of them seem to be of particular importance. First, Russian populism was not only a reaction to the develop ment of capitalism inside Russia - it was al so a reaction to capit al ism outside Russia, and in this sense it fell within the framework of the old problem of ‘Russia and the West’. It was not only an ideology of small producers, but also the first ideological reflection of the specific features of the economic and social development of the ‘latecomers’, of the backward agrarian countries, carrying out the process of modernization in conditions created by coexistence with highly industrialized capitalist states. Moreover, it was also one of the first attempts at a theoretical explanation of the specific features of economic backwardness. Second, Russian populism was by no means an immediate ideo logical expression of the class standpoint of the small producers it was, str ictly speakin g, an exp ression o f this standpoint in the ideology of the Russian intelligentsia. This was perfectly clear to Lenin but he did not put an emphasis on it. However, in order to 9i
P O P U L IS M -IT
S NATIONA
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plac e R ussian po pu lism am on g th e o ther ‘popu li sm s’ in the d if ferent backward countries, we must place this aspect of it in the foreground and thus make clear that in spite of some archaic feat ures i n the p op ulist id eo log y th e soc ial and politi cal mo ve me nt s inspi red by it w ere not ‘ pr im itive m ov em en ts’ in Hobs bawm’ s sense o f these w ord s.51 T h e ‘peas ant q ua lity’ o f Russian pop ul ism cann ot be interpreted in term s o f ‘n a tiv ism ’ (or ‘ tradi ti onal ism’ ) as opp osed to ‘inn ov ation ism ’,52 sinc e po pu lism was ne ve r a ‘primitive’, indigenous ideology of the Russian peasantry. This brings us to the third point: Russian populism was not only a Ru ssi an reaction to W estern cap itali sm , b ut also , and pe r haps first of all, a Russian response to Western socialism. It was a reaction to Western socialism by democratic intelligentsia in a backward peasant country at an early stage of capitalist develop ment. And it is quite understandable that it must have been, first of a ll , a reac ti on to m arxism - after all , M arx was by then th e leading figure of European socialism and, at the same time, the author of the most authoritative book on the development of | capi tal is m. T h e em ergen ce o f t he fu ll-fledg ed , classi cal populism | coinci ded in ti m e w ith th e f irs t wa ve o f the diffusion o f mar xi st 1ideas in Russia. Russian populists were, of course, not marxists, an d it was v ery ea sy f or Plekhanov to accuse them o f clinging to a n ‘unscienti fic ’ and ‘ utop ian’ kind o f socialism. W e can s ee, however, that the populist response to marxism was srcinal and creative, an d t hat Plekhanov’ s b elief in the existe nc e o f a un iversal and un i li ne ar pat te rn of s oci al develop m ent - a com bin ation o f natural ist ic evol uti onis m w ith H egelian ‘ necessitarian ism ’ - wa s, aft er al l, a particular, historically determined, interpretation of marxism. Like Russian populism, Plekhanov’s marxism was an attempt to give a socialist solution to the specific problems of a backward country, and history has shown that his solution was no less ‘utop ian’ than that o f th e p op u lists .53 There can be no doubt, I think, that studies of Russian popu lism can help us to understand some ideological patterns which emerge today in the backward areas of the contemporary world. There are certain similarities between Russian populism and the ‘populist’ attitudes towards the problems of industrialization, to wards the West and towards the relics of the indigenous archaic past in many countries of the so-called ‘third world’. Perhaps some par al le ls in the inte rpret ati on o f marxism, or in the resp on ses
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to Marxism, could also be found. But there are also essential dif ferences which confirm the view that nothing can be repeated in history. The ‘populists’ of our times are living in a world where cla ssic al capitalism - capitalism as described by Marx - no longe r exists; in a world where nobody claims that the European pattern of development has a universal significance; a worldstates. which has gone through the historical experience of theinsocialist I do not feel myself competent to declare whether it is possible to construct a definition of populism which would comprise all ideologies and movements in all parts of the world which for some reason have been given this name. I am rather sceptical about it, but if such a definition were found, if it pointed to some really existing common traits of so many different ideological and social phen om ena, I wo uld welco m e it - it is a lw ay s go od to s ee pr ob lems in a wider comparative setting. But even in this case I would insist that Russian nineteenth-century populism has some unrepeatable features, and th at th ese features mu st not be negle cted for the sake o f broad generalization s. I f the word ‘pop ulism ’ were acc ept ed as a common name for such disparate phenomena as, for instance, North American populism and Maoism, I would prefer to stress the distinctive, historically concrete features of classical Russian populism by calling it 'n ar odni che stvo '.
N otes
1 The text of this paper is a shortened and modified version of some parts of my book , which is to be published by The Clarendon Press. 2 C f. B. P. K uz 'mi n, ‘Narod nichestvo na burzhuazno-demokraticheskom etape osvoboditelnogo dvizheniya v Rossii ’, Vol. 65, 1959. Reprinted in B.P. Koz’min, Moscow, 1961. 3 R.P ipe s, ‘Narodnich estvo: A semantic inq uiry’, Vol. X X II I, N o. 3, Sept embe r 1964. 4 Ibid., pp. 441-2. 5 Ibid., p. 458. 6 Ibid. 7 G .V . Plekhan ov, Moscow, 1956. V o l. I, p. 66 (quote d b y Pipes, p. 453). 8 It should be noted, however, that the English edition of Venturi’s boo k appeared under the titl e: (London,
The C ontroversy er ovC apitalism. Studiesni the So cial Philosophy ofthe Russianopul Pists Istoricheskiye Zapiski, Iz istorii revolutsionnoy mysli v Rossii, Slavic Review ,
Izbrannyefilosofskiyeproizvedeniya,
Roots of Revolution. A History of the Populist and So cialist Movements in N ineteent h-Centur y Russia
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LISM —ITS
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ION
AL
C HARACTERIS
TICS
i960). This title is much better than Populismo russo, since it clearly indicates that the book deals not with Populism as a current of thought bu t wi th the po pu lis t per iod in th e Ru ss ian re vo lu tio na ry mo vem ent . 9 R. Pipes, op cit., p. 458. 10 Koz’min wrote about this: ‘Only Lenin’s criticism of Populism was reproduced and Lenin’s recognition of the great historical significance of this current of revolutionary thought was passed over in silence. This prac tice amounted sometime s to an open falsification.’ ( B .P . K o z ’min, Iz p. 640.) istorii revolutsionnoy mysli v Rossii, 11 Leninskiy sbornik, X IX , p. 237 ( quoted by K o z ’mi n, op . ci t. , pp . 6456). 12 V. I.Lenin, Collected Works, MoscowLondon (since i960), Vol. I, 337 13 Ibid., p. 338. 14 Leninskiy sbornik, X IX , p . 2 37 . 15 V.I.Lenin, Collected Works, V o l. X V I I I , p. 163 . In th is ed iti on o f Le nin ’s work s the word ‘naro dnichestvo ’ is rendered ‘naro dism ’ ; I thi nk,
P
however, that it is appropriate to replace this awkward neologism with the generally accepted term ‘populism’. 16 As to Venturi, he has acknowledged that, ‘strictly speaking’, before 1870 there was only prepopulism in Russia but he gave up this discrimination in order to avoid being a pedant (Cf. preface, Roots of Revolution, p. xxxiii). 17 V. I.Lenin, Collected Works, V o l. I I , p. 504. 18 Ibid., p. 504. Populism, as opposed to the ‘heritage’, was characterized by Lenin as ‘a system of views which comprises the following three features: (1) Belief that capitalism in Russia represents a deterioration, a retrogression; (2) Belief in the exceptional character of the Russian economic system in general, and of the peasantry, with its village community, artel, etc., in particular; (3) Disregard of the connection between the “intelligentsia” and the country’s legal and political institutions, on the one hand, and the material interests of definite social classes on the other.’ (Ibid., pp. 5134. The last point referred to the socalled ‘subjective sociology’.) In a later article (‘Democracy and Populism in China’) Len in t ook the view that populism ‘ in the specific sense o f tha t term , i.e . as distinct from democracy, as a supplement to democracy’, consisted in a combinati on o f advocacy o f radi cal agra ria n reform with ‘socialist dre ams, w ith hop es o f av oi di ng th e cap ita lis t p at h ’ . (I b id ., V o l. X V I I I , p p . 1 6 5 6 .) 19 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 505. 20 Cf . especi all y ‘A Chara cter isat ion of Eco nom ic Ro man ticism’ , ibid., V o l. II . 21 Ibid., pp. 5156. 22. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 503. 23 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 217. 24 R.Pipes, op. cit., p. 458. 25 The representatives of this current, being ‘apolitical’ in a much more literal sense than the revolutionaries, were by no means advocates of the liberal parliamentary system; liberalism in political economy was 94
RUSSIA
for them a real bugbear, a synonym of the most ruthless capitalist exploitation. They were liberals only in the very broad and specifically Russian sense o f this word in the sense of hoping for nonrevolutionary progress by means o f social reforms from above. 26 A . Pashkov, V. 1 90. Moscow, i960, pp. 689. 27 It was due to the populists that the ideas ofCapital began to spread among Russian peasants and workers: an activist of ‘Land and Freedom’, Y .M . Tish chen ko, never parted with Ma rx’s book during his participation in the ‘Go to the people’ movement; another member of ‘Land and Freedom’, the eminent revolutionary S. Kravchinsky, wrote a tale, ‘Mud ritsa Naumovna’, in which he tried to illustrate and popularize among the workers the marxian theory o f surplus value. Almo st all populist thinkers both revolutionaries and reformists, from Tkac hev to Vorontsov used to refer to Marx and to draw largely from him in their criticism of liberal political economy. 28 Reprinted in N. K. Karataev, Navodnicheskyaya ekonomicheskaya lit-
Ekonomicheskie rabotdy
. Len ina kh godov,
1958, pp. 12559. eratura, 29 Cf. Moscow, ibidem, pp. 1609. 30 The combination of a rather negative attitude towards Marx as a politician with a deep reverence for him as a theorist was, indeed, very typical of the Russian populists. Stefanovich, one of the most representative populist followers of Bakunin, expressed this dual attitude as follows: ‘Ma rxism, as a theory not as membership in the Western socialist party and espousal of its practical policy does not exclude Populism’. (Quoted in, S. M. Levin, Obshchestvennoe dvizhen ie v Rossii v 6070 gody XIX veka, Moscow, 1958, p. 334.) 31 N.K.Mikhailovsky, What is Progress? (1869). 32 Idem The Struggle for Individuality (1875). 33 K.Marx, Capital, Mosc ow , 1954 (in English), pp. 349, 361, 363 (Chapter X I V Division of Labour a nd Manufacture). 34 Ibidem, p. 329. 35 Cf. ibidem, p. 7 25 : ‘T h e 18th century, however, did not yet recognize as ful ly as the 19th, the identity between national wealth and the poverty of the people.’ 36 It should be noted that the same line of reasoning was repeated later by Ma rx in the drafts of his letter to Zasulich of 8 March 1881. Com munism, argues Marx, is the revival in a higher form of the ‘archaic property relationship’, represented by the Russian peasant commune and,
,
therefore, it mig ht be possible for Russia provided that the external conditions were favourable to pass directly from rural communes to modern, largescale communist production (cf. Marx and Engels, Sochinenija, Vol. 27, Moscow, 1935, pp. 671 97 ). 37 Cf . Marx, op. cit., pp. 91 0. 38 Cf. Mikhailovsky’s formulation of the tragic dilemma facing the Russian ‘disciple of Ma rx ’ : ‘this ideal, i f he is really a disciple of Marx, consists, among other things, in making property inseparable from labour so that the land, tools and all the means of production belong to the 95
P O PU L ISM
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S
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ONAL CHA
RA CT ER I ST I CS
worker s. O n th e ot he r ha nd , i f h e re a ll y sh ar es M a r x ’s his tori co ph ilos o phical views, he should be pleased to see the producers being divorced from the means of production, he should treat this divorce as the first phase of the inevitable and, in the final result, beneficial process.’ 39 Cf. Mikhailovsky’s article on Struve, ‘Russkoe bogatstvo’, 1894 (reprinted in: Vol. VII). 40 Cf . A . Gerschenkron, , Frederick A. Praeger, New York and London, 1965. 41 V . Vorontsov, S P C , 18 82. 42 Chemyshevsky, (1859). 43 Cf. Karataev, op. cit., pp. 8398. 44 Cf. Plekhanov’ s a rt ic le ‘Th e La w o f the Econo mic D evelopment Society and the Tasks of Socialism in Russia’, 1879 ( , Vol. I). 45 Vorontsov, op. cit. 46 Cf. Marx’s letter to Danielson of 19 February 1881. (Marx and Engels, London, 1936, p. 383.)
Poln. sob r. sochinenij ,
spective
Economic Backwardness in Historical PerSud'by Kapital izma v Ro ssii, Kritika filosofskich pred ubezhd enijprotiv obshchin nogo zemlevladeni ja Sochinenija
of
Selected Correspo ndence, 47 Cf. ibidem, p. 386. 48 Danielson, Ocherki nashego pori eformien nogo ob shchestvennogo Khozyajstva, SPB, 1893. 49 Cf. Marx and Engels, Selected Correspo ndence , pp. 499500. 50 Cf. Pere piska Marksa i Engelsa s russk imi p olitichesk imi dejatelam i, Moscow , 1 951, p. 341. Letter o f 26 Feb ruary 1895. 51 Cf. E. J.Hobsbawm , 19 20 Manchester, 1963. 52 Cf. Bry an A . Wilson, ‘M ill ennialism in Comp arative Perspe ctive’, Vol. VI, October 1963; Y on in a T a lm o n , ‘ P ur su it o f th e M il le n n iu m — T h e R e la ti o n be tw ee n Religious and Social Change’, 3, 1962. It seems worthwhile to note, by the way, that millenarian motifs in Russian populism ar e insi gni fic ant, i f not totally absent. A millenarian an d m essianic tinge was incomparably stronger in the Polish romantic populism of th e fi rst half o f the ni neteenth century. O f the Ru ssian p opu lists the most ‘millenarian’ was, of course, Tkachev. It is not accidental that he wa s gr ea tly int eres ted in T h o m a s M ii n tz er . 53 Populist ‘ utopianism’ consis ted i n the be lief tha t sociali sm in Russia, either socialist revolution or socialist evolution of the Tsarist stat e — wou ld autom atically save the Rus sian peasants fro m p ay in g the
Primitive Re bels. Studies in archa ic forms of social ov mementsin the th and th centuries, Comparative Studies ni Societ y and H istory,
EuropeanJournal of Sociology,
after
heavy cost of industrialization. The ‘utopianism’ of Plekhanov consisted in his ideal of a socialism being built in Russia the final accomplishment of the process of Westernization, on the firm basis of a highly developed and democratic capitalist society. He was convinced that his recognition of ‘historical necessity’ would once and for all save him from utopianism. In fact, however, his concept of ‘rational necessity’ turned out to be the very essence of his own utopia. It was, indeed, the utopia of a Russian Westemizer who wished for his country a ‘normal’, ‘European’ development, following the rational sequence of ‘phases’ and always perfectly harmonized with the ‘inner’, economic and cultural, growth.
96
CHAPTER FOUR
EASTERN EUROPE G hi ta I one sc u
M uc h has be en w ritten o n t he subject of the ag rarian o r pe asa nti st movements of Eastern Europe. They are inseparable from the histo ry and particularly th e social history o f the following count rie s which emerged or re-emerged after the First World War as full sov ere ign s ta te s : Polan d, Rum ania, Bul gar ia, Yugosl avi a, Hung ary and Czechoslovakia. The peoples of these countries differed in m any resp ects. T h ey had different et hnic src ins: the Hun ga ri an s and the Rumanians are not of Slav srcin. They had different religious backgrounds; the Rumanians, Bulgars and Serbs are pre dominantly Orthodox as against the majority of Catholics in Pola nd an d H un gary . T h ey had diff erent soci al, admini str ati ve and political m entalities, according to whether they ha d been ru led by the Tsarist, Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empires; and as a point of special interest to the subject of this essay their attitudes toward s th e solution o f the m ain agr ic ul tu ral p robl ems - th at of the emancipation of the peasants and the distribution of land ow nersh ip - had b een diff erent , accor ding to t he att it ude of t he imperial government. Their main common denominator, how ever, was their social structure. In Czechoslovakia only one-third of the population was engaged in agriculture, but in the other countries the proportion was between two-thirds and threequarters. This massive presence of a rural population was the main social and economic problem of these new states, and its solution their main aim. The abundant literature produced on the subject since the dawn of the twentieth century reflects this preoccupation. The literature thus produced can be divided into two categories. First comes the body of literature written by the doctrinaires of
97
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S NATI
ONAL C
HA RA CT ER I ST I CS
these mov em ents them selves d uring th e tw o m ain phas es of their history. In the first phase it is characterized by an optimistic tone, following the prophecies of the coming of the peasant era. This phase stretches from the beginning of the century to the late twenties when it might well have seemed that governments of the peasant parties were firmly installed in several East European countri es. I n the las t pha se the to ne is m ore som bre, w ith dr am at ic accents. The outraged denunciation of the royal dictatorships which had dislodged the peasant parties from power in many East European countries, then the fight put up by the weakened peasant parties against the fascist regimes which had banned them and finally, after the war, the despair of the peasantist leaders who had fled the new communist dictatorships, are successively ref lec ted in thes e w ritings. The other category is formed by the more analytical works produce d in t he W es t: a general econo m ic exam ination is tha t of the Frenchman F. Delaisi, Les deux Europes. A particularly pro found ideol ogic al and poli ti cal stud y on on e o f t he m ovem ents1 is that of the American Henry L. Roberts, Rumania , P olit ical Pr o blems o f an Ag r ar ian S tate? Finally there are two works which discuss the conflict between communism and peasantism; at the theor eti cal level there is D av id M itrany ’s M a r x v er s u s t h e P ea s a n t3 and at the or ganiz ati onal level G eorge D . Jackson Jr’ s Com int er nand Pe as ant in E as ter n E ur op e , 1 9 19 1 9 3 0 ? In these two latter works the filiation of peasantism with popu li sm is par ti cul arl y s tress ed - the object o f t he an alysis b ein g to show the fundamental dif fere nce betw een all branch es o f agr ari an is m and a ll branc hes o f marxis m. For the p urpose o f this essa y, of which a great part must necessarily be recapitulative, one should start with an outline of the differences between populism and peasantism. The three most relevant characteristics, from this point of view, o f narodnichestvo or populism, born in Russia in the nineteenth century, in great part as a reaction to western socialism are that it claimed to implement the inevitable laws of history by providing short cuts, as fo r instance t h e transformati on o f archai c co llectivistic institutions into advanced socialist ones, and thus by-passing on e hist oric al s tage, cap italism ; that espe cially in its later ph ases it ar gue d tha t t he desti ny o f the p eople (which w as im plici tly bu t n ot explicitly formed by the peasant masses) could not be fulfilled
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without a resolute political leadership, to be supplied presumably by the i ntelligentsia wh ose historical m ission was to hel p t he pe opl e; and that also in its later stages, it believed that only by smashing the old state could the new, communitarian, society emerge. By comparison peasantism, born in Eastern Europe in the twen tieth century , in part as a reacti on to both Russia n populi sm an d Western socialism, shows the following three characteristics: it takes the individual peasant explicitly as its social prototype and proposes to mould the society and its state on the peasant’s con ception of work, property and administration; it blends its socialeconomic doctrines with a strong nationalistic concern for the emancipation of the respective ‘people’ from under foreign domi nation ; and it claims that the peasantry is entitled as a class to the leadership of the political society, not only on account of its elec toral preponderance but also because of its innate spiritual and national values. These distinctions (inevitably much simplified) help to disen tangle the trends in the ideological populist-peasantist amalgam which belong more specifically to the earlier Russian populism and those which belong more specifically to its East European heir . T h ey also h elp t o o ut line three la rger h ist ori cal p eri ods i n the history of these ideas: that in Russia of pure populism; that in Eastern Eu rop e o f the transiti on betw een populism and peasantism; and that o f pure peas antism in Easte rn Europe (during which so me of the abandoned populist attitudes were taken up by communist and fascist movements).
BETW
EEN
POPU
LISM AND PEAS
ANT
I SM
, po pu lism , spread into Easte rn Europe from Russia. As in Russia the evolution of this movement followed in the dif ferent territories of Eastern Europe, each with different historical
N ar odni chestvo
background and attitude towards the problems of serfdom and of landownership, the changes in the condition of the peasantry or at least in this class's con sciousn ess of its o wn conditi on. Th e appear ance in Eastern Europe of the populist movement at the end of the nineteenth century coincided with or followed, with some regional time lags, the peasant unrest in Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Bulgaria and, especially, Rumania; and the full peasantist movement fol lowed in the wake of the agrarian reforms of the early twentieth 99
POPUL
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century in Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and the rather abortive ones of Poland and especially of Hungary (where the populist-peasantist movement gathered strength only in the thirties when the pressure of public opinion in favour of further agra ri an ref orm w as aga in felt very stron gly). T h us, whe re as the populist and peasantist ideologies in Eastern Europe were in part the result of the efforts of the respective national intelli gentsias to find intellectual solutions to the problems of the evolu ti on o f thei r soci eti es, like soci alis m for the W est and na r odni che stvo for Russi a, it was th e real i m pa ct o n the various societi es of the overwhelming agricultural problem which made them directly relevant. T h e R uss ian intel li gentsia att em pted to so lve th is ove rwhel ming and pres si ng problem by ad apting W estern socialism to Russi a’s conditions and circumstances. The East European intelligentsia sought to solve it by studying the relevance of both Western socialism and Russian populism to their own people’s conditions. T he reac ti on t o W est ern soci ali sm was thu s a dou ble one - on e indirect, through Russian populism, and one a d i r ec t o n e. But it was R uss ian populis m w hich the earl y E ast Eu ropean int el li gent si a abs or bed mor e avi dl y. T h e Poli sh p opu li st m ovem ent o f the ni ne teenth and early twentieth centuries was part and parcel of two dis ti nct but int ermingled m ovem ents. O n t he on e hand it s founders , l ik e W ysl ouch, were i nvolved w it h the R ussi an N a r o d n i k movement in Po land ;5 on the other hand th ey co ntribu ted the ir ow n br an d of pat riot is m to the i rresi sti bly strong Po lish n ationalist m ove m ent an d t hei r power of dr awing t he Polish peasantry i nto the com m on national fight through their own arguments. In Serbia, Svetoslav Markovic, the founder of both the socialist and the agrarian Ser bi an m ovements, w as a dir ect d isci ple of N . S. C hernyshevsky wh ose work s he re ad wh en a student in V ienna. C herny shevsky was also the dominant influence on the young C. Stere, a Bessarabian student, deported to Siberia for nationalist activities; afterwards Ste re f le d to Rumania wh ere he sett led a goo d tw en ty years before his own Bessarabia could join Rumania. In Stere’s work one can discern more clearly a double distinc ti on : tha t, gene ral ly speaki ng, betw een po pu lism and pea santism , and that between the specifically Russian populism, and East Europ ean populi sm, in this case R um anian pop ulism or Indeed it so happens that in early East European populism Stere’s
poporanism
io o
EASTERN EUROPE
wo rk st ands o u t as th e m ost art icul ate and the m ost lucid. (On the other hand, Stere was to prove more successful as an intellectual than as a politician, whereas his Serbian, Bulgarian, Polish or Slovak opposite numbers were already showing their remarkable political talen ts in th e dir ect p olitica l figh t.) S tere’ s seri es of art icles, ‘Social Democracy and Populism’, published in 1908 in his Jassy monthly, V i ata R om an easca , is justifiably considered the most representative work of Eastern European populism-peasantism. Stere benefited from two circumstances. First, Rumania was then, unlike Poland , for insta nce , a fully in dep end ent st ate with a consti tutional political regime, where serfdom had been abolished since 1864. Moreover, in 1907 a peasant revolution had shaken Ruma nian society and aroused it to awarene ss o f the impor tan ce a nd t he im m inen ce o f the agra ri an prob lem .6 T h en Stere benef ite d from the presence of a worthy ideological opponent in C. Dobrogeanu Gherea, who, while Stere was engaged in defining Rumanian populism, was doing the same for Rumanian socialism. Both crystallized their doctrines by opposition and contrast to the doctrine of the other. Like Stere, Gherea too had come to Rumania from Russia. The difference in social srcin told on their doctrinal leanings: D ob rog ea nu Gh erea w as o f Ru ssian Jewish st oc k : his real name was Ka tz. H is in clina tion s were towards interna ti onal soc ial ism. Stere’ s stock w as o f R um anian yeo m anry in Bessara bia. 7 H is leani ngs we re agrarian and nationalist. Thus they reproduced in the peculiar Rumanian setting, where the main political dialogue at that time was between conservatives and liberals, the confrontation between the Russian socialists and the Russian populists. But if this was a Russian style dialogue pursued in a different context, it differed from the by then intensely radicalized Russian left-wing movements in its attitude towards the political methods for solving the peasant problem. Both the former Russian socialist and the former Russian populist believed in a gradual social and econ om ic chan ge, rem inisc ent o f the left-wing poli ti cal mo veme nts in Russia before they took a decisive turn towards radicalism. In the milder, national and political, conditions of Rumania the doctrine of gradual evolution seemed more plausible. Gherea was to all intents and purposes a Plekhanovist. His major work N eo iobag ia , ‘Neo-Serfdom’, which influenced both the Socialist and the Communist Parties of Rumania, the latter at least until 1935, 101
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was based on th e idea o f t he necessary phase o f econ om ic an d so ci al transition for Rumania. Stere was a constitutionalist populist, even before he d istil led both the se a ttitud es in to a coheren t do ct ri ne o f R umanian peasantis m, for w hic h h e p rovided the b asi c in sp ira ti on. N either of them was p ro-capit ali st, bu t bo th o f them be liev ed that Rumania would have to go through some capitalist evolution, Gherea advocati ng it for the sake o f the industrializati on on whi ch depended the formation of the conditions leading to socialism, and Stere accepting the fact of life of the growth of capital in privately-owned agriculture. The more cogent arguments of Stere and the Rumanian Poporanist school were political, social and national. They all derived from the massive affirmation of the plain, common-sensical and statistically irrefutable fact that the overwhelming majority of Rumania’s population was of peasant stock, lived in the country side and was engaged in agricultural occupations. This led to social, economic and above all political conclusions. Indeed the stress was laid by the poporanists on the political aspect. ‘For Rumania, a state of peasants, the fulfilment of the tasks started by the generation of 1848 makes it imperative for its successors to fight for the realization of a true, powerful and healthy rural democracy’, wrote Stere. Agrarian reform and electoral franchise went hand-in-hand and in Stere’s conception the latter could be even more important in its effects than the former. This political, even electoral, prerequisite compares strikingly with the primacy of the social plane asserted by the Russian populists of
Z em li a y
V ol ta in the seven ties.
If we carry out a peasant policy, freedom will not be a fundamental aim but an inevitable result . I n fact it will be like som e natural sub sidiary product in a chemical or technical process just as coke is formed during the making of gas or smoke when one lights the stove. Political liberty, the right of the human being to full invulnerability, will come not from demands and petitions on the freedom of the press or the inviolability of th e individu al. . . but fr om ‘la ws of God writt en in the hear ts o f the movement.’8 The political-electoral preponderance of the peasantry was for the poporanists the determining factor. Only through the political action of the peasants, and of the peasants alone, could the neces sary reforms be carried through in Rumania. ‘Can these tasks be
1 0 2
EASTERN EUROPE
assumed in contemporary Rumania’, asked Stere in 1908 in the same work, ‘by a social-democratic party, or even so could this party put such tasks on the shoulders of the scores of wretched “proletarians” created somewhat artificially in our country by the deliber ate advanta ge and s ub sid ies granted to our indus try ?’ Yet unlike his Serbian or Bulgarian or Croat colleagues, Stere did not then op enly advoca te the creation of a peasant par ty - which i n Rumania was formed spontaneously, some ten years later, by several groups, not all of which acknowledged their ideological filiation with his poporanism. This was due in part to Stere’s belief that in the wake of the 1907 revolt a new class-party might be carried irresistibly, in the tense situation prevailing then, to take extremist positions. But it was also due to the fact that in the eyes o f the pop oranists the num bers o f peas ant-c it ize ns and vo te rs were so overwhelming that, once their electoral rights were fully established and guaranteed within the constitutional framework, they could, and perhaps should not be expected to remain a mono lithic electoral bloc. Different economic, regional, cultural or simply ideological backgrounds and a rapid rhythm of social mobility could lead to national cleavage within this large mass. These sub-groups might be attracted by the programmes and ideologies of other parties, might even form their own splinterparties. Whereas it was predictable that a large class-party of the peasantry would come into being and continue to survive, the poporanists did not believe, as did for instance later Stambolisky’s Agrarianists, that in con dition s o f consti tutional plu ra li sm it woul d be possible and indeed advisable for all rural voters to be com mitted to support one single party. The experiences recorded in Rumania or Poland, where the peasants divided their votes among several parties, although the majority voted for the peasant party, proved them right. (In a different context this was confirmed later also in India, although there the Congress Party, which was also the ‘party of liberation', had even stronger claims to the loyalty of the voters, who, in India too, were overwhelmingly rural.) Another argument was the national one. The poporanists re proached the socialists with making the foreseeable national evolu tion depend on the slow and uncertain growth of industry in Rumania. The Rumanian industrial workers’ class would make its influence felt in the political process only when and if it became a sufficien tly sizea ble so cial force. T h ey als o rep roa che d the soci ali sts
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with accepting that Rumania, and for that matter any under developed country, shou ld always fo llow in the w ak e of th e more indu striali zed co un tries. ‘W h o can lim it from n ow ,’ ex claime d Stere, ‘ the ro le wh ich th e Ru m anian nation can play in t he h istory o f t he culture o f the w orl d? W ho has the right to depri ve u s of the po ssibil ity o f an active national life, o f the endeavour to mak e our contribution to the common texture of mankind through the creations of our own national genius?’ T his, o f cou rs e, sound s very mu ch l i ke the nar odni che stvo historical messianism. But how then can it be reconciled with the non-revolutionary attitudes of the poporanists and with their rejection of the idea of adapting the past agricultural communi ta ri an instit utions to the nee ds o f the future society, thus re ac hi ng communism before the West, without passing through the capi tal is t pha se ? It sho uld o f course be rem em bered here t hat t he srcinal communal form of property was not a characteristic fe atur e o f the earl y agr ic ult ural custom
s o f the Rum anians . T he
answer lies in the vision of the poporanists of an organic develop m ent of the entire
society,
econ om ic, p olit ical and
cul tur al , i n
which the creative forces of the country could progress freely withi n the speci fi c co ntext
o f a small Eu ropean
country wit h a
dominant agricultural population. Denmark was and remained the model of such a civilization for the poporanists, as well as for most East European peasantists. Indeed the fact that Rumania was a small country was a deter m ining f ac to r i n the pop oranists’ nationali st policy. T h ey show ed gr ea t c oncern t hat such a r evolt as the pea san ts’ rising o f I9 °7 should not occur again. Their urgent advice to the government to speed up the carrying out of agrarian reforms was accompanied by equall y pressi ng advice t o th e op po sition to pra ctise res trai nt so as not to incite the peasant s into un prem editated action. For, it was argued, wast he a dom smallinati country surrounded empi res ,Rumania fro m under on of w hich it wasby jushostile t em ergi ng, and it still had to achieve final reunion with the Rumanian pro vinces still occupied by those empires. Revolts, social upheavals and revolution would only offer these empires fresh opportunities to intervene in the affairs of the newly independent country. Stere shared this concern not only with the Liberal and Conserva tive Par ti es , but al so with the social ist Do brog eanu G herea. T h e latter too was deeply concerned with the problem of the national
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integri ty o f the c oun try. It m igh t be added that Ruma nia n na tion al ism in both men was fanned by their fear of the Russian Tsarist empire. From the economic and social point of view the poporanists believe d that th e d istrib ution o f the land among the pe as an ts woul d alm ost auto m atically lead to a ctive p easant part ici pati on in n atio na l prod uction an d to the ex pan sion o f the dom estic ma rk et. A norm al cycle of internal economic circulation between towns and villages, and a broad social basis, would thus be established. But the principle that each peasant should be the owner of his land was circumscribed in two respects. The first was that the plot of land should ideally be of a size sufficient to produce enough food for the family of the cultivator. The second was that widespread co ope rative s sh ou ld be established so as to enabl e the pe as an t own er s to share the means of production, instruments, funds and prod uction work . But in order to achieve these economic, social and political reforms, the handicapped peasants needed the help of other, more advanced, social elements, and, above all, of the intelligentsia. T h e follo w ing passage from Stere’ s wor k i s a shr ewd s umm ar y of th e adv antag es the intelligen tsia m ight o btai n, if the pe as an tr y we re to achieve its goals. The economic progress of the peasantry will open a vast field of action for the intellectuals because it will create a demand for specialists of all kinds in the peasant economy: agronomists, technicians, leaders and managers of cooperatives; it increases considerably the openings for doctors, lawyers, engineers, veterinary surgeons, etc.; it will lead of necessity to a considerable increase in the number of schools of all kinds thus creating an immense opening for teachers and professors of all categories. Above all it will lead to an extraordinary intensification of the g en er al cu ltu r e [italics in the text] higher degree schools, scientific laboratories and institutions, as well as to an inevitable blossoming of pure science, literature and arts. T h is delib era tely practical, and slightly c ynical , des crip tio n of the reasons why the intelligentsia would find it in its own interest to ‘go to the people’ is a characteristic twentieth-century and East European replica of the much more romantic and self-deceiving reasons with which the early Russian populists had justified the same impulse. Thus the Russian populist Klements, when he asked himself ‘why was he going to the country?’ answered that it
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was because ‘I wanted to live the life of the people and suffer for them’. Yet, on the other hand, there is also a great difference be tw een the im age o f a peasan try trying to persu ade the in te ll ig en ts ia to help it in its fight for social and ec on om ic em ancipation, an d that o f a dict ato ri al peasan try-cl ass o f som e o f the p easanti st re gi mes in pow er aft er the First W orld W ar (and esp ecia lly that o f St amb ol is ky in B ul gari a) ord ering the intelligentsia to pro vide it w ith the ki nd of culture which would be convenient only to the peasants. Here aga in , the po poranist s w ere a transi ti onal p henom enon .
PEASANTISM
The First World War brought agrarian reform and electoral suf f ra ge i n its wake in m ost o f the East Eu ropean countri es. T his wa s enough to bring fully-fledged peasant parties into existence in each of these countries, with the exception of Hungary. Some of them, as for instance the Serbian Agrarian Party, the Croat Peas ant Party and the Bulgarian Agrarian Union, had been formed before the war and had already had the opportunity to show their political vitality and strength. But now with this double enfran chis ement o f the peas ant m asses there w as n o do ub t left that th ose political organizations which received their votes would also be in control of the politics of the country. That there was a direct filiation between them and the pre-war populist movements there was no question. But, on the one hand, their leaders themsi Ives were not so eager to overstress this filia tion: a Rumanian peasant leader went so far as to deny the links bet ween the Rumania n peasa nt part y and the popo ranist m ovem ent which, he said, was an entirely different thing. And, on the other, hand, they w er e different, for reasons which became gradually more apparent. Apart from anything else, whereas the populists, both in Russia and in East Europe, always showed some reluct ance, or even hesitation, to turn into class parties with their accompanying programmes, cadres and political clientele, and to engage in the game of politics in order to obtain power for a par ticular class, the new peasant parties made of this their r ai son d 'etr e . They claimed to be class parties and presented themselves as the political instrument with which the peasant class would or ha d con quere d the l eader shi p o f society. T o be sure there w ere differences in the accent they placed on these claims, with
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probably the Bulgarian at one extreme and the Czechoslovak at the other. Their leaderships were for instance divided in opinions like all political parties, when faced with the alternative of conquering power immediately, or presenting themselves as revolutionary parties or constitutionalist parties. In fact this depended than anything else on the passage to power they were going to more have in each country and on the different political backgrounds of each of these co un tries. T h u s w hereas Stamb olisky’ s Agrarian Union i n Bulgaria always remained a party with a revolutionary outlook and methods, the Czechoslovak Party of Farmers and Small Peasants was totally dedicated to the observance of the strictest constitutionalism and ‘The (Polish) party’s programme was by no means revolutionary. Its main object was to gain political equality for the peasants within the framework of a parliamentary regim e.’ 9 (T h is split m ind was also refl ecte d in the composition of the leadership of all these parties, which was a mixture of young intellectuals and genuine peasant personalities. More often than not the leader wa s recruited from amo ng the lat ter - and Mi halac he of Rumania or Witos of Poland preferred to dress in their peasant clothes.) The other great difference in the attitude of the peasant parties concerned the question of which classes in their societies were th e natural alli es o f the pe asan try: the m iddle clas ses or the workers. But of this more will be said later on. The general philosophy of the peasant party doctrine was still based on th e b elie f in th e natural superiority of the peasants’ way of life and of th e rura l society over the urb an lif e o f bot h bour geoi s and industrial workers. There was nothing mystical in this belief and the initial impulse of the early Russian populists to ‘go to the people’ so as to share its martyrdom was here replaced by the be lief t hat on e w ent to th e peop le so as to be in dire ct c ont act wit h the ultimate power-holders in the society and also nearer to the sources of physical well-being and of moral regeneration. Two doctrinaires who otherwise had little in common like the Yugoslav R ud olf Herceg and the Russian, now Ameri can, sociol ogist P it ir im Sorokin (whose early works in exile had a strong influence on the Czechoslovak peasant movement) shared this fundamental belief in the natural advantages of that class of society which had not become alienated from the normal condition of mankind. For both the towns were parasitical excrescences in which exploiters and
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exploited (and in them the condition of the industrial workers was described as the most unnatural and unhappy), once torn away from their natural community, fell prey to the unhealthy instincts of greed and revolt. The setting and the rhythm of the peasant’s life alone could ensure the reconciliation with human fate, regardless of whether this was part of a pantheistic or of a straightforward religious conception. Finally the peasants were the producers of the goods without which towns and their populations would perish. While the villages were self-contained the towns, in all their splendour, were dependent on the products of the countryside. T he foll owing quotat ion f rom F. M il an H od za’ s book on Federatio n in C entr al E ur op e is a particularly restrained description of this idyllic conception: In Central Europe democracy had to be extremely anxious to con solidate and to defend the results of its struggle for freedom. It had to find the consolidating idea in spiritual and political discipline and it succeeded in finding the main consolidating social element in the peasantry. Rural men constructed their ideas on three possible bases. One may have been a religious tradition. The second emanated from the peasant s’ family life. Th irdly , orderly regulari ty was the lesson taught by the soil and its function. What the rural masses finally offered the universal democracy of Central Europe was therefore the extensive sup port of the idea of ordered freedom. Longing for freedom, individual and social freedom, had been embedded in the depths of the peasants’ souls. A two-fold aspiration grew in him, for Liberty and for Order. Th ey did not can cel e ach othe r. T h e peasants ’ min d was not destru ctive; it was an outspokenly constructive and synthetic one. Most peasant parties were also adamant in their belief that the ri ght of pr iv at e ownershi p o f t he la nd and o f other goo ds was one of the foundations of the good society. To encourage the small peasant owner to make a success of his enterprise was one of the tenets of their programme. These peasant parties thought that they found their natural social allies in the lower middle classes which, like them, had to form their own capital and like them should have had a genuine interest in ensuring that the state would encourage the small producers and would not concentrate its inves tment s on an d direct it s subsidies towards indu stry. T h e new middle class which was slowly forming in the towns of under capitalized Eastern Europe would be the natural partners of the
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new rural mid dle class o f peasant ow ners. T h us the spe ci fi c hi at us in the structure of the East European societies, the absence of the middle classes and of the natural bridge which they should form between capital and labour, would be gradually filled. But, as will be seen later, the radicalization of politics in the shadow of the growth of fascism made the younger generation of peasantist leaders incline rather towards an active alliance of the peasants and the w orkers . Most peasant parties were also, specially in the early phases, opposed to industrialization. But here an evolution of the initial attitude can be followed in three different stages, each illustrated by a period of peasantist government in three different countries. The first phase can be found in the conceptions of absolutist government of Stambolisky in Bulgaria (October 1919-June 1923). Here the positions were exclusive and reactionary, and the methods drastic and revolutionary. No peasant leader hated the towns and both its categories of inhabitants, bourgeois and industrial workers alike, more than Stambolisky; and no other peasant leader was more deeply convinced that the mission of the government of the will of the (peasant) people was to perpetuate forever and to extend everywhere the rural conception of life. (Indeed Stambolisky was also the most active organizer of the Agrarian International and the prom oter o f a Euro pean Peasant U n ion .)10 Applied to a coun try in which the ownership of the land was more evenly distributed than anywhere else, and in which the agricultural overpopulation was not so staggering as in neighbouring Yugoslavia or Rumania, the sy m bo l of the p easant owner-voter made more sense . But eve n here it had been necessary to limit land-ownership by legislation to a max imu m o f seventy-five ac re s and to enact t hat any physi cal ly fit male between twenty and forty years of age should do some regular manual labour in public works. And even here the Com munist Party made remarkable inroads in the massive peasant electoral majorities. The new generation of Bulgarian agrarian leaders advocated an active social collaboration with the industrial workers (contrary to Stambolisky, who favoured contact between peasants and industrial craftsmen) for the final purpose of building socialism. As for industrialization, Stambolisky would admit that only the secondary industri es w hich were of use to the cou ntr ysi de should be encouraged and allowed to grow. He also believed that indu strial workers sho uld be kept un der the strict polit ical contro l of 109
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his party and espe cially o f its para-m il itary organizat ion the Orange G u ar d , which was the terroristic arm of his power-apparatus. W hen faced w ith a general stri ke o f th e rail waym en in 19 20 h e did not hesitate to send in the troo ps and to deal w ith the lead ers of the workers in the harsh way more usual to right-wing governments. For the Rum anian econ om ist Virgil Ma dgearu, wh ose t he or et ic al works were published during and after the thirties when he was in pow er and responsible for the e con om ic p olicy o f the p easant party, industrialization was already necessary (even if perhaps a necessary evil). The peasantry was the main consumer towards which industrialization should be orientated, both for the con sumer goods which its mass production could throw on to the market and for the agricultural machines and tools which would rai se the low level o f m ech aniza tion o f agriculture. Bu t i ndust rial i zation, although thus encouraged in principle, had to submit to two limitations: generally speaking it should be kept at the level of a small under-capitalized country with some obvious resources in raw materials; and it should not be sheltered behind a dense shield of anarchic protectionism which would conceal the unsuit ability of some of the industries proposed both with regard to the country’s resources and with regard to its inferiorities in open competition, in the European international market. Indeed, Mad gearu was the advocate of free trade and saw no future for the East European economies without strong economic and trade exchanges with the industrial West. (Madgearu was much less enthusi ast ic t han eit her his Bulgarian or his Cz echoslov ak oppo site numbers about the Agrarian International which he suspected of an inevitable Slavophile tendency.) As for the private ownership of land, the Rumanian economist insisted that the peasantist government should do their utmost, by law and by economic measures, to establish a country-wide system of co-operatives. He, too, forecast the era when a more modern organization of the division of labour in agriculture would replace the old one. Inthe do ctrineo ftheC zech oslov akP easa nt Part y, as it cryst all ized during its long stay in power, during which it also benefited from the open democrati c consultations w hich w ere a characterist ic feature of the Czechoslovak regime, the concepts of industrialization and co-operativization were the two, intertwined, basic principles. As far as industrialization was concerned, although Czecho slovakia was highly industrialized, Milan Hodza clearly defined
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his pa rty’s view s on th is p oin t. ‘Central European count rie s ne it her will nor can eve n re no un ce in du stria lization .’ But, as in Madgearu’ s theories: ‘It must not however be an anachronism. Haphazard or incidentally profiteering industrialization may be forbidden by common sense. If however common sense does not do so, then it has to be prevented by planning.’ As far as co-operativization was concerned, here again Czechoslovakia benefited from the ad vanc ed stage of her deve lopm ent. T h e fact t hat t he mech ani zat io n of agriculture was highly advanced, that as a whole Czechoslovak agriculture was not under-capitalized, or at any rate not in com parison with the state of under-capitalization of the other East European countries, and that agricultural overpopulation was an unknown factor, all these helped towards substantial achievements by the co-operatives. They secured a greater concentration of resources and a better articulated divison of labour, and estab lished a more direct economic communication between towns and villages. (Indeed, one of the notable Czechoslavak experiments was the scheme of direct exchanges between the agricultural co operatives from the countryside and the urban socialist consumer co- op era tives .) ‘ Agra rian autocracy was boun d up with profi teeri ng capitalism, Agrarian d em ocracy was n o t,’ wrote Hodza, ‘ and this fact enabled it to fight and to conquer by marketing populations based firmly upon regulated co-operation. Any marketing regula economi e dir ig ee. I would call it an Ordered tion implies a sort of Economy. At the same time however it maintains and institution ally intensifies individual property. A combination of these prin ciples reinforcing individual property and inducing all those in terested t o co-op erate mark s a new system of democ rat ic econo m y!’ Ind eed H odza hop ed that th is wou ld slowly al ter th e ve ry c onc ept o f private prop erty in th e Czech oslovak and Ea st Europe an c ountry side. A s a matter o f fact this functional conception of the own ers hip of the land (which David Mitrany describes as the ‘chief tool’ of
the farmer: ‘His chief tool is the soil itself, or rather it is partly tool, partly raw material, a unique combination in the whole scheme of production) did not disappear completely with the col lapse of the peasantist regime. On the contrary, it reappeared from underneath in those communist countries, like Poland and Yugo slavia, w here the land was n ot collectivi zed - an d fo rme d f or instance the main theory of the Yugoslav League (Kardelj) doctrine. h
i
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The passage through power of the peasant parties in Eastern Europe was frustrated, short and dramatic. With the exception of Stambolisky’s absolute reign for two years over Bulgaria, in the other countries the peasantists’ rule had been achieved more often than not t hrough diff icul t coalitions - had m et w ith ho stil ity f rom both Right and Left, and had been checked and harassed during its exercise by concentric oppositions. This was partly due to the fact that these parties were newcomers in a struggle in which conservatives and liberals (and later socialists) had believed that they had the ring all to themselves and that they would continue, as in the Western democracies, to be the main competitors for political power and for the people’s favours. But now the ‘people’ had, as it were, materialized and the appearance of the massive peasant class with its strong political representation made the ‘classic’ parties look rather like marginal political groups. There were, to be sure, serious reasons to think that in each of these countri es the peasa nt parti es w ould gradually transf orm them selves into a ‘catch-all’ party (and here again the comparison with the Indian Congress Party could be enlightening). Indeed the perma nent electoral majority of these parties, itself a result of the initial aggregation of regional and local interests on which the parties had been founded, had the effect of drawing other political and electoral groups into coalition or cartel with them. This reformed even more the social and especially the ideological homogeneity of the peasant parties; but it did, on the other hand, make their electoral majorities look even more unassailable. This sort of dic tatorship by electoral immobility gave to the adversaries of the peasant parties a sense of impatience and led to the feeling that it should be changed by anti-constitutional means once the consti tut ional syst em had been sei zed-up from within. W hen K ing Bori s in Bul gar ia in 1923 , Pilsudski i n Poland in 1926, K ing A lexander II in Yugoslavia in 1929 and Kin g C aro l II in Ru mania in 19 31 act ed fro m without the constitution t o stop or up set i ts routine f un ctioning the peasant parties had more to lose than any other political force. There were two main reasons for the downfall of the peasant parties. One was the great economic depression which affected the economies of the small East European countries more deeply than those of any other national economies (in so far as they were
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dependent on the world agricultural market and on the amount of ca pi ta l w hich th e W est E urop ean countries could inve st i n their modernization programmes). The other was the virulence of the attack of the dictators against them. The fact that they were dislodged from power by what is described now as ‘seedy Balkan dictatorships’ (royal or military) and which of course cannot com pare with the technique and purposefulness of the fascist or com munist dictatorships, seemed to surprise political historians, who could not understand why parties with such deep social roots could be so easily put down by such old-fashioned dictatorships (while regarding the fight against either the pro-nazi regimes or the Soviet-controlled communist dictatorships as an entirely dif fer ent matter) . T h e answ er prob ably li es in the fac t t hat , on the one hand, the blo w s th at e ve n s uc h ‘seed y dic ta to rs hi ps* can del ive r to constitutional regimes are too strong and disconcerting for the latter (more than thirty years later a group of generals was able to upset, in a Eu rop e in w hich R igh t-w ing dict ator ships wer e wani ng, the foundations of the Greek constitutional regime); and, on the other, that, like the Greek democratic parties of the sixties, the peasant parties of the thirties had not done enough to activate political participation and to build their social defences in depth. T h e p easant parties were the victims o f the frag il it y of the demo cratic institutions in the East European countries. This is proved p er a con tr a r i o by the fact that in Czechoslovakia, where these institutions were built on firmer ground, the peasant party and other democratic parties continued in existence until the national state collapsed under the blows of an external dictatorship. The peasant regimes had helped to bring into being or at any rate to consolidate parliamentary institutions. They expected them to last and they expected to be sheltered by them. When these institu tions were swept aside or emptied of their content, the intrinsic political organization of the democratic parties collapsed with them. With the exception of the Bulgarian Agrarian League, which under Stambolisky had, as already mentioned, set up the extraparliamen tary organization know n as the Orange Guar ds, the ot her peasa nt parties had no mean s o f defence again st or gani zed vi olence and terrorism. What is worse, during their years of control of the state they had not completed the political education of the masses which alone could have increased the participation of these masses in the political process. The millions of placid rural voters had
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not been transformed in these short years into active citizens and resolute defenders of the existing political institutions. With the exception of Czechoslovakia, the electoral procedures were, even under peasantist governments, still subject to governmental pres sures, corruption and sometimes even frauds, and the executive, both at the central and local levels, could easily overpower the j u d i c ia r y a n d t h e l e g i s l a t i v e . T h e i n s t i t u t i o n s w e r e th e r e ; b u t they had not gathered enough strength from within to become autono mous and to serve as organs of mediation between the rulers and the ruled. Another cause of this sudden collapse was the lack of interior articulation of the peasant class as a social unit. Whereas it is true to say that even such a powerfully organized class as the German working c la ss, with its particularly de
ve lop ed netwo rk o f tra de
unions, bu ilt in dep th, d id n ot resist the
att ack o f the n azi di ct at or
ship any bett er, and that therefore it w
ou ld have m ade no dif fe re nce
if the peasant class had possessed a comparable internal organiza tion, it is also true to say that the co-operative network of the East European countries never came near to representing something comparabl e wit h a system o f agricult ural trade u nio ns. In part s of the region, and especially in Czechoslovakia and in Croatia, where the entire operation of co-operativization had been led and effected by the Croat peasant party, the results showed what the co-operatives could mean if they were given enough importance and im petus.1 1 Bu t they had n ot tim e en ou gh to coa gu late; and they reflected in their conflicting composition the division within the cl as s i tself betw een ‘haves’
and ‘ h av e-n ots ’. O n the
other
hand, like their political counterparts, the peasant parties, they had not achieved, not even irreversibly started, the modernization of their societies. Yet only this could have put these countries on the right track of development. And only this could have broken fr om withi n, and in f avour of the peasant class, th economic ill-adjustment of these societies.
e so cial and
This of course leads to a much vaster question, whether the peasantry as a dominant class is historically able to effect the revo lut ion o f m odernizati on. Or, on th e contrary, sh ou ld the proc ess of modernizat ion be car ri ed out against the peasa nts against the people for the people? In his reflections on the ‘Social Orig in s of Dicta torshi p and D em ocra cy’ , Barrington M oo re Jr writes:
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By themselves, the peasants have never been able to accomplish a revolution. On this point the Marxists are absolutely correct, wide of the mark though they are on other crucial aspects. The peasants have to have leaders from other classes. But leadership alone is not enough. Medieval and late-medieval peasant revolts were led by aristocrats or townsmen and still were crushed. This point should serve as a salutary reminder to those modern determinists, by no means all Marxists, who feel that once the peasants have become stirred up, big changes are necessarily on the way. Actually peasant revolts have been repressed far more often than they have succeeded. For them to succeed requires a somewhat unusual combination of circumstances that may have occurred only in modern times. Success itself has been of a strictly negative sort. T h e peasan ts have provided the dynamite to bri ng down the old building. To the subsequent work of reconstruction they have brought n ot h in g; inste ad th ey ha ve been its first victims.12 Would populism have been better equipped for the task of modernization than its chronological heir, peasantism? This is a second question which can be put from the more circumscribed point of view of this ess ay. T h e questi on coul d be pro mpte d by t he observation that the parties which had carried on, before the Second World War, operations of modernization, communist or fascist, and specially the three communist parties which succeeded after the Second World War in making genuine revolution, in Yugoslavia, China and Cuba, had undeniable populist overtones in their ideo logy and p olicies. T h e q uestion can al so l ea d t o a com parison of the inherent advantages of populism, in contest with peasantism, when looked at from the angle of the fitness and suit ability for the leading role in modernization of either of these doctrines. The very ethical, and logical, basis of peasantism, its claim to be, as proved by electoral verdicts, the mandatory of the peasant class (which is also the majority of the people), proved a double brake on the drive to modernization. A substantial part of the peasant class, at least all the peasant landowners, felt almost instinctive apprehensions against the possibility, or rather proba bility, that a forcible modernization would amount to the use of agricultural production as the basis for the badly needed accumu lation of national capital. The conservatism of the peasants was not only of a psychological nature; it had a strong social and economic foundation, even if in the early thirties the dreary reali ties of Stalin’s collectivization were not widely known. On the
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other hand, t here l oom ed th e q uestion - increasingly ask ed by the fasc ist and com m unist anti-parl iamentary doctri naires - whe th er the procedures of electoral consultation and of political bargaining between the plural social and political groups could ever give to the operation of modernization the ruthless energy and trenchant speed without which it collapsed could notbefore be carried out. Theanswer East Euro pean agrarian regimes a considered could be given to this question. Students of the problem of moderniza tion in an agrarian country with a pluralistic-constitutional regime have now transported their inquiry and investigation to India where, in an undeniably different context, the political society is ultimately faced with the same problem. In contrast with peasantism, populism, unencumbered by class associations and by constitutional principles, could lend some of its b asi c atti tudes to the n ew, authori tari an m eth od s o f mod erniza tion. It called for direct action under the resolute leadership of those who ‘go to the people’ instead of waiting for the people to call them. This went together with its quest for the short cuts leading to the great universal avenues, the rejection of set itiner aries, allegedly compulsory, the somersault in the relations between ‘backward’ and ‘advanced’ societies by using archaic ethnic insti tutions for the new social and economic purposes. Finally it could profit from the use of the cloudy notion of the p eo p le which could mean the peasantry, or could mean the peasantry and the workers, or could mean the national community in itself, or the society as a whole, according to whether this neo-populism leaned towards communist or towards fascist attitudes.
F AS
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Already in the thirties, while the majority peasant parties were bogged down in insol uble econom ic problems and were losin g their initial impetus, extremist political movements tried to agitate the peasantry. They were reckoning with the disenchantment of the country as a whole, and with the particular impatience of the poor peasants, who were legion. This was not, either for the commu nists or for the fascists, m ere political and electoral ta ctics ( altho ug h there was no political movement in an East European country which could justify its existence unless and until it won some sup port from the m assive res ervoi r of the peasant m ajori ties ). For
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the comm unists it w as th e app licati on of th e L eninist re vo lu ti on ar y st ra te gy o f th e alli ance be tw een the work ing cl ass a nd t he pe as an tr y, an d the accep tance o f the rule that n o revolut ionary si tuat ion co uld be obtained in an agrarian country without the background of the discontent of th e peasantry. For th e fascists i t was the conti nuati on of the basic tradition of all Right-wing movements in agrarian societies of idealizing the native peasant so as to oppose him as a prototype to the corrupt urban dweller and to the foreigner, especially to th e Jew .13 Indeed both these extremist parties, neither of which had a positive doctrine, or solution, for the peasant class (in Russia collectivization only started with its dramatic and doubtful initial phases, and in any case it was no t a po licy to be adver ti sed among the peasants), concentrated exclusively on ways of stirring up the dark instincts o f hatred in th e peasant. oth part ie seducated succe eded in show ing that even with enfranchised and B progressively elec torates sheer hatred continued to be a powerful motive of mass politics. The communists fanned the social hatred, preaching further expropriation (although in Bulgaria and Rumania the land had been distributed already) and also tried to drive a wedge be tween the various strata of the peasant class itself, becoming the ch am pio ns o f th e ‘poor peasan ts’ . In Bul gar ia , the cam pai gn achieved some success. The party made some inroads in the Bul garian peasant electorate. It also succeeded, while in opposition, in improving its relations with the Bulgarian Agrarian Party, this led in the late thirties to close electoral and political associations. T h e fascists projected su ccessfully the hate ful imag e of th e fo re ig n (Jewish) middleman, squeezing the national wealth from inter mediary positions of economic control. In Rumania, the Iron Guard had no great difficulty in rekindling widespread feelings among the under-capitalized peasantry against Jewish urban usurers and against the towns and the Capital, subjugated by foreign capital and by its agents, mostly Jewish, in control of the resources of the country. In the elections of 1937 (in which it is true to say they had benefited from an electoral pact, with the national-peasants in opposition against King Carol’s dictatorship) th ey ob tained sixteen per cent o f the votes, while ot her anti- semiti c parties obta ined nine per cent - as agai nst t he twenty-one per cen t of the National Peasant Party. Thus the old reflex of populist elemen tary politi cal p sychology - ha tr ed - which the pe as an ti st s ll7
P O P U L IS M -I T S
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had toned down after their long stay in power and after the upper layer of their electorate had made obvious economic and social progress, was now benefiting the extremist parties. The other main theme of the populists which was now taken over was that o f rev olution . O f all the E ast European pe as an t parties only the Bulgarian still defined itself in the thirties as ‘revolutionary’; but even the Bulgarian and the Croat peasant parties, which received the harshest treatment at the hands of the dictators, were naturally pledged to parliamentary institutions, both as the m eans o f com ing to p ow er and o f exercising i t . As f or the Rumanian and Czechoslovak parties, which had no revolu tionary past or tradition and which formed an internal coalition with other political groups representing the urban lower middle cla ss es, they rel ied exclu sively on con stitutiona l m eans o f pol it ic al warfare and of government. The theme of revolution both as the efficient and satisfactory means of ascending to power by taking a direct revenge on the persecutors, and as the direct means of leading society towards prescribed goals, was necessary to both fas cis t and com m unist ideologies. It was ne cessary b ecau se indeed, like the radicalized Russian populists, these ideologies preached that the old state-machine had to be smashed and replaced by an entirely different one. It was necessary also because of their com mitment, with dif fer ent a nd ind eed co ntradictory m eans and goal s, to extricate their countries from their status of inferiority and to fi nd means f or thei r ra pid passage t hro ugh the stages o f econom ic development. Like the populists they claimed that it was possible for these societies, if properly harnessed, to find in themselves the forces and means for this development. Like the populists they conjured up the image of a strong helpful state which would ban and eliminate from the healthy body of society the exploiters and obstructers (landowners and bourgeois, in one perspective, Jews and foreigners in the other) and then pool all resources and fo rce s toget her fo r t he building up o f the m odern b ut autochtho nou s structures. By the mid-thirties, this, of course, made more sense and had a stronger appeal for the masses. The proposed revolution had been successfully effected in other countries. The models of these new states were already in being. The Russian and the Italian and German, and to a certain extent the Japanese, revolutions rivalled in showing the results of the modernization which they had 11 8
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obtained by different means, but which had in common the fact that they had been achieved without and against the principles of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. To be sure the adepts of the fascist, nazi or communist doctrines were attracted first by the principles of these doctrines. But they found in the practical results of the modernization which they were achieving practical proof or confirmation of their superiority over the doctrines of peacef ul cha nge . C ut ting across social links, exalting the in dus tr ia l might of the state and subordinating in theory all particular acti vitie s to the pu blic intere st - the y w ere able af ter a s hor t t ime t o show results which made the activities of the pluralistic-constitu tional state look like endemic contradictions and procrastinations. Thus the manifold attractions of revolution, revolution as insur rection, revolution as the historical vehicle, and revolution as the means o f givin g a ne w and un ilitary shape to il l-adjust ed soci eti es in the fev erish atm osp her e of the new ra ce f or h ist ori cal a dva nce . T his legacy of populism, abandoned by peasantism, was fighting it back. Although this would go far beyond the domain of the present essay, it is h ow eve r natural to re mar k that, aft er the Second Worl d War, a new series of revolutionary states, born all three of them from military actions carried out with the help of the peasants of the countries concerned, Yugoslavia, China and Cuba, afterwards led to a new conception of revolution with at least two obvious populist overtones. One, especially stressed in the Maoist doctrine, is the already mentioned recognition of the importance of the peasantry for the success of the revolution and in the structure of the new society. The other is the projection on a world scale of a rural world-revolution against all urban centres, regardless of whether capitalist or communist. The green rising of Chesterton and the Agrarian (or Green) International of the peasantists acqu ired a different sub stance and qu ite dif fer ent dimensi ons whe n projected onproclaimed to the background of the fight againstFrom the urban civilization by the new revolutionaries. Asia, from Africa, from Latin America the neo-populists of the guer rillas visu aliz ed a w orld -en circle m en t of al l the ‘haves’ shel ter ed in the towns or basing on them their enterprises of exploitation of the countryside, by all the ‘have-nots’, all the dispossessed and dam ned o f the eart h - an image as unlikel y but as apo cal ypt ic as th e initial imag e o f the ‘peo p le’ o f the nar odni che stvo, characterized by the depth and irremediability of its misery.
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Notes 1 Three articles European Review,
Slavoni c andEast
by Peter Brock published in the ‘Boleslaw Wyslouch, founder of the Polish peasant party’ (December 1957), ‘The early years of the Polish peasant party’
(Octo ber 1954) , and ‘Politics o f the Polis h Peasa nt’ (O ctob er 195 5), form a substantial contribution to the history of the Polish agrarian movement. Y e t, th e au tho r cho ose s no t to di st in gu is h id e ol o gi ca ll y or histo rically in Poland between populism and peasantism, and uses both terms as interchangeable. ‘Indeed’, he says in his article on Wyslouch (loc. cit., p. 139), ‘in the early years of the movement, peasantry and people ( ) were considered as synonymous terms. On the other hand populist and people’s parti es outside Poland have often had little or noth ing in common wi th the peas ant movem ent.’ 2 Yale University Press, 1957. 3 London, 1951.
lud
4 Columbia University Press, 1966. 5 A t S t Petersburg he was in conta ct wi th the semiconspira torial s tud ent circles which advocated (Brock, , loc. cit., p. 140). 6 Th e cou rse and t he dimens ions o f the events o f 1907 in R uman ia ju st if y the ir des cri pti on as a pe as an t re vo lu ti on . W h a t sta rted in the spring of 1907 as one of the frequent local revolts, inspired by anti semitic parties against Jewish moneylenders in the countryside, ended a few weeks later as a nationwide movement with peaks of violence in districts where there were no Jewish inhabitants in the countryside. It wa s an al lo ut rev ol t o f all pe asa nts ag ai ns t la nd ow ne rs an d th e go ve rn ment which b y its l aws had helped the landowners to explo it the peasan try and bring it to a state of hopeless misery. It was spontaneous and spread like a bushfire. There was no party or political organization behind the infuriated peasants. But so general did the movement become and so obvious was its tendency to converge against the towns, and especially the capi tal , that the governmen t decided to use full military m eans again st it. According to the most often quoted statistics almost ten thousand peasa nts wer e sho t. It was als o admitted that the Rum anian A rm y was given this terrible mission because both the AustroHungarian and the Tsarist Empires threatened to send their own troops into Rumania to
narodnichestvo
Boleslaw Wyslouch
quell the revolt. 7 The Polish populistpeasantist leader Boleslaw Wyslouch, who also came from the upper ranks of the Polish gentry, advocated strong nationalistic views. ‘The very existence,’ he wrote, ‘of a Polish ethnographic group, numbering some twelve millions, forms a permanent guarantee of our nat ion al e xist ence . . . it is jus t on thi s point that we discer n common ground where our national ideals can come to terms with the universal democratic ideals.’ (Quoted in Brock, loc. cit., p . 143.) 8 From the collection of the journal as quoted by F. Ve n tu ri : London, 1965, p. 623.
Roots of Revolution,
Boleslaw Wyslouch, Zemlia y Volia
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Thepolitics ofthe P olish peasant party,
9 Brock, loc. cit., p. 211. 10 The Agrarian, or Green International, was the popular name given to the International Agrarian Bureau set up in 1927, in Prague, by the Czec hosl ovak Part y of Small Farmers and Peasants, the Serbian Peasants Union, the Polish Peasant Party Piast and the Bulgarian National Agrarian Uni on. Alt ho ugh the main initiator was the last party, the Czechoslovak party succeeded in acquiring the organizational upperhand and in giving to its ideology a definite 'democratic panslavistic’ flavour. It held yearly congresses and published a bilingual In November 1927 a conference was held in Paris and all peasant parties were asked by the organizers to join in an international organization aiming at strengthening the peasant political movement. The fundamental principles of the international movement were: the preservation of the private property of the land, the need for organized international trade, the intensification of cooperative organization, the fostering of technical education and the fight against undercapitalization of agriculture. In May 1929 the first general assembly was held with, by
Mezinarodni Agrarni
Bureau Bulletin.
then, seventeen European (national or regional) parties attending as its members. The growth and success of the Green International considerably worried the leaders of the Third (Communist) International, which had its own Agrarian Section. But after the economic crisis of 19302 and the fall from power of several peasant parties, the International Agrarian Bureau slowly dissolved in inactivity. 11 In one count y (Samobor near Zagreb) ninetytwo per cent of all households ‘were included and in a number of other counties well over fifty per cent of all peasant households were members’ of the Croatian Peasant Party cooperative organization, the Gospodarska Sloga. ‘Gradually the Gospodarska Sloga spread its activity into practically every aspect of economic life of the Croatian peasants or producers and sellers, as consumers, and also as workers when they were working for wages in agriculture and in forestry.’ Jozo Tomasevich: Stanford, 1955, p. 616. 12 Barrington Moore Jr, All en Lane, London, 1967, pp. 47980. 13 Until he changed it for the green fascist shirt, Cornelius Zelea Codreanu, the leader of the Rumanian Iron Guard, a foreigner by srcin and a university student, wore peasant costume. He also rode a white horse when visiting the villages.
Peasants, Politics a nd Economic Change in Yugoslavia, Social Origins of Dictatorsh ip and em Docra cy,
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CHAPTER FIVE
AFRICA J oh n S . S a u l
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AFRICAN P
OP UL ISM
We enter here upon treacherous and uncharted au t ho rs wh o do m ake use o f t he no tion anal yse s o f thin gs African rar ely bo ther to they sel dom d eign to grac e the use o f the
waters. Those few o f ‘ po pu lism ’ in t hei r define it; furtherm ore ‘co n ce p t’ i n the bod y
of t hei r text with so m uch as a ci tati on in th e ind ex! W e shal l look at some of this literature in an attempt to gain initial purchase on our subject, but our critical function must transcend its limita tions. Even then we can only hope, at this stage, to lay down cer tain distinctions and guidelines of use for further discussion; as we sh al l see , any defini ti ve eval uati on o f the m ean ing o f ‘ po pu li sm ’ in an African context must await the genesis of more nuanced observation and theorizing as to the nature of the overall process of change in Africa, a programme of work only now beginning to yield its firs t fru its.1 Two initial distinctions must be made, for a failure to make them has, in the past, led to a measure of confusion. Firstly, in the literature and in our thinking about populism there are two different ‘definitions’ of the phenomenon rattling around. These will be seen to be related in certain important ways; none the less the choice of one definition rather than the other, whether made explicitly or implicitly, carries discussion in divergent directions and they must therefore be spelled out. Thus, on the one hand, w e fi nd Falle rs c onsidering ‘ po pu lism ’ to be an id eo logy w hich post ulat es t hat ‘ legi ti m acy resides in the pe op le’ s w ill’ - po pu li sm as ra di ca l democracy, as i t were.2 O n th e other, W orsley see s it as a response generated ‘wherever capitalism has penetrated into 122
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traditionalistic peasant society’, an ‘ideology of small rural people threatened by encroaching industrial and financial capital’. Arrighi has made a similar point rather more sharply: ‘Populist ideologies are unorthodo x p recisely b ecaus e th ey uph old the re si sta nce a ga inst the spreading of capitalist relations.’3 In contrasting these two notions, the stress of our examples has been on matters of ideology, but this is premature; a second im portant distinction must be introduced. For ‘populism’, in both the above senses, has been used in each of two different ways (though these two overlap). It may be used as an analytical cate gory, thought to be descriptive of aspects of reality. To take an example, a movement may be described as populist because it is felt by the observer to be an actual movement of ‘the people’ in some important sense, a movement distinctive because it is ‘popu lar’ as regards participation in a way that other movements are not. It may also be used as a term which characterizes a body of ideas or a n ideolog y. T o return to the exam ple of t he so-cal led ‘ popul is t movement’: here one might wish merely to characterize the ideo logy of such a movement as ‘populist’ (in either or both of the senses suggested in the preceding paragraph). The actual ‘truth’ of that ideology in relationship to the composition or interests of the movement or the society as a whole could well be another matter. W e sh all see that the u ses to which men, par ticularly leaders, can put those ideas thought to be best described as ‘popu list’ are most varied. These sets of rather abstract distinctions by way of introduction, then; they will be fleshed out as the paper proceeds. 2
2
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We may begin by working out from Fallers’ definition. A closely related note is echoed by a number of observers of Third World developments: that this is an era characterized by the real or po tent ial invo lvem en t of the ‘ma sses’ in politi cs in a way unkn own before this century. ‘Populism’ for Apter is a word which sums up this novel surge forward: ‘Today, however, most governments operate in a climate of populism and mass participation. How much populism is controlled and shaped, as well as the degree of responsiveness by government to the demands of the public, constitutes the characteristic problem of government, especially 123
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in mo der nizing so cie ties .’4 H alpern uses the word in or de r to characterize the ideologies summoned forth by this fact; the dis tinction in emphasis is not unimportant. ‘Every politician every where in the mo dern age prefers to speak in the nam e of the ‘pe op le’ . . . p op ulism can be a m ask for alm os t any progr amm e, or else a nostalgic em otion alism for no progr am m e but imm ediate sa ti s faction.’ 5 Furtherm ore, in th e T hir d W or ld, and especially Af rica, the te rm ‘m ass’ tend s im m edia tely to take on a pred om inantly r ural referent; it is in the countryside that the ‘people’ are to be found in their hundreds and thousand s. The reality of growing popular participation and awakened popular consciousness in recent African history has been most explicitl y identifi ed in the lit erature as the quin tessen tial ‘ pop ulism’ by Apte r him self an d by D .A . L ow in their respecti ve wor ks on Buganda. In parti cular an impo rtant article b y L ow 6 m ay se rv e, all too briefly here, as a for documenting certain locus classicus strengths and weaknesses of ‘populism’, so used, as an analytical category. Low summarizes with admirable precision the process by which, arou nd the tur n o f the cen tury, the th en current gene ra tion of administrative chiefs, with British assistance (especially within the terms of the 1900 agreement) consolidated a position of power both politically and economically as a landed oligarchy. In so doing they aggrandized themselves at the expense of the hitherto extremely powerful Kabaka (or King) but also of the people (in Luganda, the ba k opi ) , the mass of the peasantry, whose significant measure of bargaining capability vis-a-vis the chiefs was now seriously undermined. Low then traces the manner in which ‘ the Pe op le’ gradua lly asserted them selv es ov er the next sixty years after the agreement, occasionally with the important assistance of the colonial government; this is the phenomenon which he terms ‘populism’. In pa rt ic ul ar he notes the recurri ng imp ortanc e o f the netw ork of clans (the ‘Bataka’ pattern) within the society, closer to the people than the chiefly administrative hierarchy and more egalitarian, as a rallying point for resistance to overweening chiefs. He also mentions the impact of the gradual transformation of the landedestate system of the Agreement into a primarily small-scale, peas ant, cash-cropping system, thus making possible a new bargaining position for an ‘independent yeomanry’. Importantly, as Apter al so s tre ss ed, this pop ulism has t end ed to take on a ‘ ne o-tra dition al’
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cast, defensive about many traditional ideas and practices and fie rce ly ‘natio nalis tic’, b u t its general thrus t again st an elite of chiefs within Buganda tended to remain undampened. He con cludes that it was this thrusting populism, suspicious of the chiefs and whetted by complementary economic grievances against Pro tectorate and Asian control of marketing, that led to riots in Buganda in 1945 an<^ J949 an^> after the incident of the Kabaka’s deportation, to a real curtai lm ent o f th e ch iefs’ position in the name of ‘ the P eop le’. Low thus builds his model of social and political change quite squarely on the triad of ‘kabaka, Chiefs and People’ and the inter action of the three, concluding that there ‘have been changes not of the structure itself but of the distribution of political power within it’ and between, that is to say, its three monolithic com po ne nts.7 Y et o ne sus pe cts that Buganda society wa s, quite simpl y, rather more complex than this; so used ‘populism’ can become a dangerous metaphor. Compare Wrigley: . . . the rise of an active, broad-based economic middle class is acting as a fermen t wh ich is steadily dissolving the fab ric of traditional so ci et y. . . . The uniform mass of rustic commoners has begun to split up into groups which are notably well-to-do and others which are notably poor; and the economic structure has been further complicated and diversi fied by th e rise o f a professional class, by t he influx of migrant labourers and growth of commerce andfluid urban wage-employment ofisevery kind.by Asthe a result society has become and amorphous; there great economic differentiation but hardly any clear-cut stratification.8 As early as 1952, Wrigley noted in a village the following division of farmers: nineteen per cent well-to-do; twenty-seven per cent m idd ling pe asa nts ; thirty-thr ee per cent poor peasants; twent y pe r ce nt la ndle ss labourers.9 T o be sure , m ost of those a t the v ery bottom were immigrants, but Bugandans were to be found at every level. O ne m ust su spect that such divisions among t he pe opl e fo un d some expression, if only in variable degrees of consciousness and involvement. And such was, of course, the case. Apter mentions from time to time a number of sub-groups of importance as, for example, chiefs who had been removed: ‘With inherited land, a sense of their own worth, and considerable education, such farmers attempted to engage in economic enterprise to restore their social st at us. . . . In most cas es they coul d not compet e suc ce ss fu ll y
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with Asians and European business groups, or else they came up against go ve rnm en t re stric tion s.’ 10 T h e se m en , clan le ade rs , bu si nessmen, mission employees, are mentioned as activists; Low him self cites the important role of African rural shop-keepers and African taxi-drivers, in competition against Asians. What of the possibly differential role of the varying strata of cultivators them selves? Unfortunately no one has thought to check. In any event Lo w is f orced to con clud e his ap oth eos is o f ‘po pu lism ’ wit h the observation that changes, such as the important redressing of the balanc e o f chiefs’ pow er in the late fift ie s‘have been effec ted, not by determined mass movements (either of the chiefs on the first occa sion, or of the People on the second) but of aroused minorities the Christian Chiefs in the 1880s and 1890s, the “political malcon tents” (as Professor Pratt has called them) in the 1950s. In many res pect s t hese m inori ti es m ay no t have been typic al o f t heir order: but in a Burkean sen se th ey w ere re pre senta tive o f it.’ 11 One is justif ied in feeling un easy w ith th is last formulat ion. Like the term ‘po pu lism ’as used so b road ly and in clu sive ly t hrough out the article it explains, or rather explains away, too much. The term itself threatens to stand in the way of more comprehensive data-collection and theory-building by prematurely closing ques tions that should remain open; throughout our discussion we must face the distinct possibility that such a concept only seems useful because of the relative superficiality of our analysis of the modernization process and the relative poverty of our present vocabulary for dealing with ‘mass’ phenomena. In the present instance, three important areas of inquiry are threatened with being blurred. First, the term encourages an overestimation of the s p r ea d o f p o p u la r i n v olv em en t. In social analysis it is all to easy to exaggerate the degree to which a population can be or has been aroused to action; our metaphors tend to impose hyperbole upon us. A warning against this seems particularly apt in an African setting where the pull upon individuals of the most localized of soc ial units and o f subsistence agricult ure is strong. Secondly, and closely related, it is tempting to overestimate the le v el o f co nscio usne ss of t he m ass of the populati on; this encourages a fai lur e to perceive differences in social situation (as, for ex am ple, class) among the people which can fundamentally determine vari able degrees of involvement and complementary retardations of consciousness. Thus despite Low’s final bow to a more complex
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reality, the centrality for his analysis of a monolithic, primarily pea san t, block has h amp ered his systema tic pur suit o f t his li ne of inqui ry. Finally, o ne fe ars that even w hen deali ng with t hose pe as ants who are more conscious and aroused to action, the concept 'p opu lis m* encourages th e a ssum ption o f a unity o fv ie w which may pass over the wide range of local variation of causes often charac teristic of activity in a period of upheaval and tend to lump all such activity under an inadequate covering rubric. In this context it becomes particularly tempting to take the claims of leaders for a clear reflection of realities at the base, though evidence suggests that the interaction of such men with 'grass-roots* protest may be m ost ambiguous . These points must be underscored for in fact the term, in the sense currently under review, is a tempting one, catching as it does the mood of a novel and valuable emphasis articulated by some recent students of African affairs. Complementing the ten dency of a first generation of Africanists to place almost exclusive emphasis upon the emergence of town-based, Western-educated El ites as th e pro gen itors o f nationalism,1 2 there has bee n a tendency to bring the ‘masses’ back into the picture as a vital force. John Lon sdale w rit es : ‘In short , there wo uld seem to b e some jus ti fi ca tion, in Western Kenya at least, for regarding the development of national consciousness as being stimulated to a large extent by local rural grievances and aspirations, directed and co-ordinated by m en w ith local ro ots.’ 13 Cliffe has ma de a similar poin t for Tanzania, stressing that the proto-nationalist associations which ' “provided the cells around which a nation-wide political organi zation could be constructed” were essentially rurally based’, ex pressing ‘the resentment of country people against outside inter ference in the things closest to them, their land and its use, their cattle and the ir way o f li fe*.14 Popu lar grievance s, the n, played a vital role in the articulation of a successful nationalist movement. Was this ‘populism*? There are familiar ambiguities and complexities. Certainly in Tanganyika rural protest was important but its character varied greatly from area to area. In some it was a force with a rather cl ear and sophisti cated p erception o f econom ic matte rs and beyond them of political implications; in other areas it was much more conservative, instinctive, backward-looking, narrow in focusresponding, for examp le, to imm ediate thr eat s fro m progra mmes o f 127
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agri cul tur al change, w ith no broader vie w on que stions of a ut ho ri ty and legitimacy that might seem logical corollaries. Only a leader ship cadre could generalize this protest for political ends and con trol at the ce ntre, ye t that lea de rsh ip’ s tie s to th e actual erupt ion of individual cases of rural protest were often largely peripheral and opportunistic. In addition, in areas where protest was more sophi sticated, as in Sukumaland with the rise of the co-operative m ovem ent which so on becam e a bul wark o f T A N U act iv it y i n the Lake Province in the 1950s, differentiation among the mass was import ant . E ven today this co -operative ca nno t clai m member shi p of over fifty per cent of the growers in some areas and members tend to be the most economically advanced growers there. More inf ormat ion on the real it ies of ‘ inv olve m en t’ w ou ld cle arl y be mos t helpful. Similarly Lonsdale’s work reveals a rather more complex model of a popular movement, suggesting the interaction of, among others, local clan leaders, African traders and Nairobi poli ti cians a nd the ‘m ass’ ; ther e was th us , in h is w ords , merely a ‘coincidence of rural fears and national aims’. Perhaps Martin Kilson, among recent writers, has reflected in the most rewarding manner on these and other aspects of Africa s nati onal is t ph ase ; interestingly
en ou gh , in so do ing h e has art icu
la te d a us age of the con cept ‘popu lism ’ w hich avoids at le ast some of t he limit ati ons we have m entioned above. Im plicitly he att empts to si tua te ‘ po pu li sm* as merely on e e lem ent o f broade r m ovem ents and processes of change, not as a global characterization of rela tively more complex phenomena. ‘In describing local political pressures as “populist”, I do not suggest that they were part of a systematic egalitarian ideology. I simply mean that they represent the lower reaches of provincial society, they came nearest to re fl ect ing the polit ica l feel ings o f what w e call the m asses - the li ttl e peo pl e.* 16 For Si erra L eon e he co m pile s an im pr ess ive catalogu e of examples of rural outbursts which, generally, have taken a violent, riotous form. These outbursts have tended to be directed against the chiefs who have aggrandized themselves as the agents of colonialism, but they are often confused and visceral. Populist demands for local political change were not precise about the institutional form the desired change should take. This, of course, was not surprising in so far as the rural masses lacked both the know ledge and the experience necessary to formulate details of institutional change. Nor was it always clear that populist political pressures were
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directed against the traditional authority structure as such, seeking its destruction as a legitimate political institution. Given the ambivalence of most rural Africans toward the chiefly groups, they were unable to push their grievances to th e point of outright re volution. . . . Th e groups who spearheaded popular protest not infrequently asserted their demands within a traditional framework.16
While admitting the seemingly chaotic, aimless and undefined nature of much of this protest he none the less insists that ‘on closer observation, the violent populist responses may themselves revea l som eth ing abou t the goals o f the ir per pet rat ors . More speci fic ally , b y co nsid erin g the o bjects o f pop ulist violence one may gain insight into both the goals of the populist groups and the causes of their vio len t b eh av iou r.’17 H e is th us at pa ins to note tha t impli cit in the attack on the chiefs, especially in their role in local tax administration and novel exploitation of customary rights, is some deman d for reform o f the structure o f aut horit y, if only at the l ocal level. In some sense, then, ‘populism’ becomes more than just an expr ession o f mass feeling s o f any sor t; even f or Kilson the i mpli cation is that these protests are ‘populist’ because in one way or another they do challenge authority from a democratic perspec tive. As he points out, it was ‘only when colonial government rectified these features of local administration, mainly through the extension of democratic reforms to the rural masses, that a more orde rly m od e o f local p olitical change was poss ible’.18 Despite his earlier definition it therefore remains unclear whether he con siders that a n y rural outburst can be considered populist in a useful sense or whether its use must be restricted to outbursts which contain elements of this latter dimension. It is, of course, true that a ny rural protest w ill tend to hav e implicati ons for the exis tent structure of authority. But ‘protest’ in Africa has taken many forms, from anti-witchcraft movements, independent churches, riots through to participation in articulate political movements. W e are back to the same co nu nd ru m : how consci ous doe s a move m en t have to be o f the ‘legitim acy’ question and of rel ated i mpli ca tions for action in order to be usefully described as ‘populist’. Certainly there are some aspects of this conscious sort to the politics of colonial Kenya, Tanganyika and Sierra Leone, whether or not ‘populism’ can be sufficiently differentiated as a term to serve in filtering them out. 129
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K ilso n ’s em pirical work is usefu l in another respect f or he en riches our perspective on the ambiguous relationship between ‘elite’ and ‘ m ass ’ w ithin con tem po rary A frican so ciety in sug ge st iv e direct ions; w e again ta ke up the fact o f his h aving situat ed ‘po pu lism’, as he defines it, as merely one aspect of the broader decolonization process. In this case study, he counterpoints mass frust ration and the vio len t ‘p o p u list’ form s o f it s release , ag ains t the politi cs o f the new , educ ated elite o f the ca pita l; di ff ere nce s of interest emerge most starkly. In fact the elite are shown to have rather more in common with the colonial government than with their rioting fellow-countrymen. ‘These [governmental and social systems] are after all the system the new elite aspires to control once colonial authorities transfer power to them. Populist be havior, in their reckoning, could hardly be permitted to threaten the tr ans fe r o f this po w er.’ 19 T h e adva nced elem en ts o f t he soci et y use the contras t betwee n their reasona bleness an d the ‘lawless ness’ o f ‘revolutionists’ (to q uo te S ir M ilton M argai) as a cat’ s-paw t o force the colonial power’s hand; the latter willingly strikes a bargain. In other a re as circumstances d ictat e a mo re p ositive elite identi fication with such protests than seems to have been the case in Sierra Leone, though even there the language of democracy was imposed by the colonial electoral system. In fact, as we have seen, it has often been a leadership cadre itself which has generalized protest and given it any coherent demand for popular control of authority which it may have, particularly, though not exclusively, at the national level. Once again more dilemmas are raised than answers given. Is such dlite consciousness of questions of legiti macy within a movement enough to earn for that movement the ‘populist’ sobriquet; if not, how much ‘mass’ awareness is neces sa ry and of what ki nd? 20 A nd even w here such con sciou sness apparently has moved the leadership cadres one must continue to ask questions concerning the sincerity of their protestations and the re al de gree of sol idari ty w ith the m asses w hich is in vo lved .21 Evidence from the post-independence period, as for example that suggesting the growing gap between the leaders and the led, may be brought t o be ar i n order to cast retrospective light on such questi ons concerning the lat e colonial period. It also leads to som e rel at ed considerations abou t the pla ce o f ‘p op u lism ’ in contemporary Africa.
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It is a closely related theme that Frantz Fanon has seized upon in his important writings and any student of populism in Africa must consider the relevance of the term to his work. For he sees the whole of the movement of anti-colonial nationalism through radically disabused eyes. The 61ite, presumptive leaders of the mass, have compromised with the values and institutional struc tures, economic and governmental, of the metropole, ignoring, in any real way, the potential of the countryside. Even in the case of rural ris ing s ‘w e se e tha t . . . w he n such an occasio n offers, the nationalist parties make no use at all of the opportunity wh ich is offered to the m to integrat e the p eople of the co unt ry si de, to educate them politically and to raise the level of their struggle; the old attitude of mistrust towards the countryside is criminally evident.’ This despite the fact that ‘in their spontaneous move ments the country people as a whole remain disciplined and altru istic. The individual stands aside in favour of the community.’ Fanon is equally certain about the pattern that this can be said to have imposed upon present-day Africa: ‘National consciousness, instead of being the all-embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole people, instead of being the immediate and most obvious result of the mobilization of the people, will be in any case only an empty shell, a crude and tragic travesty of what m igh t h av e b ee n .’22 Els ew her e, mo re prosaical ly and expli citl y, he argues that the elite will govern the ex-colonial machine for its own ends as a ‘new class’, and the mass will remain as it began. In t h is cr isis period he calls for a new kind o f pol iti cal pa rty that can in fact identify with the peasantry in ways that the nationalist m ov em en ts h ave failed to find and rouse t hem to an act iv e part ic i pation in the building of the new nation. The other corollary, of course, is that failing such changes and given the continuance of this state of ‘false decolonization’, rural radicalism, of one kind or another, must again assert itself. There is much truth in this characteri zation, how ever m uch Fanon may ove re sti mate t he uni ty of the populace or fudge certain ambiguities as to the quality of their consciousness. It is also true that for many revolutionary students and others, both in and outside Africa, this has been read as a call to arms for a new generation in the name of ‘the p eo p le’ - wh atever its merits as description, it is provi ding the basis for an archetypal pop ulist ideology.
P O P U L IS M -IT
S
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A R A C TE R I S T I C S
Experience in post-colonial Africa bears out many of Fanon’s obser vations, tho u gh rivalries am on g the ‘n ew cla ss * (e spec ial ly the marked a ssert ion o f claims to po w er b y th e milit ary) have h itherto been more important than any spontaneous assertion of mass desires. However, there are already examples of the eruption of rural radicalism and if this should prove a continuing pattern the descriptive vocabulary of ‘populism’ will again be temptingly near at hand. We might conclude this section by looking very briefly at Mulelism and the Kwilu rebellion of 1964 in the Congo; it is an example which suggests both the importance of the focus a continued preoccupation with ‘populism* might bring as well as the f amil ia r ambiguiti es. Crawford Y ou n g an d H erbert W eis s h ave noted the role of rural radicalism in earlier periods of Congolese development; Young, Gerard-Libois and others have traced the emergence of the ‘new class’ to power there, the extent of ‘false decolonization’ .23 W hat is striking to n ote is th e deg ree o f ex pli ci t reaction to this latter phenomenon in Kwilu. As three recent wri t er s have no ted : Ou r understa nding o f the K w ilu rebelli on takes i ts clue from the way in which it was descr
ibed and heralded
‘L a Deuxieme Independance’
b y m an y persons o f this pr ovi nce .
, ‘t he Second
Indep end ence’ -
they c all ed
it. This suggests, as do the materials we have examined, that the Kwilu rebellion was a revolutionary attempt to correct some of the abuses and inj ust ic es by which lar ge segments o f the po pulation felt oppressed four yea rs af ter off icia l In d ep e n d en ce , a n d an ef fo rt t o t r y o n c e ag ai n to express and concretely realize the goals and dreams promised by the ‘First Independence’ of i960.
In this pursuit of ‘the Second Independence’ there are clearly actual and important elements of popular assertion as well as an ideology, articulated by a most active and vocal leadership cadre, call ing ‘ to the op pressed clas s eng age d in suc h [agricultural, m anual] work to unite in brotherhood and in the revolutionary intention to overthrow the existing regime.’ On the other hand, like most other ‘mass m ov em en ts’ its character is n ot eas ily ca psu lized in a phrase: In sum the soci al dist ributi on and the m otivation o f th e follow ers and adherents of Mulelism in the Kwilu suggest far more than a banding together of ‘oppressed classes’ versus ‘exploitative classes of privilege*. Tribal, political, economic, religious and magical influences of various
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kinds have attracted persons of many different social groups in the Kwilu to the movement (and detracted still others). In later stages of the Kwilu rebellion, when the partisans began to make wholesale use of methods of terror and violence, many other people supported the rebels prima rily because th ey were afraid. 24
3 PO
PU
LISM
AND
THE
DEFENCE
AGAI
NST
CAPITALISM
We must complement the preceding analysis by turning to the other strand of ‘populist’ debate identified in our introductory paragraphs, thus talcing up the hints offered by Worsley and Arrighi. Worsley has made ‘populism* the crux of his analysis of the Third World (but particularly of Africa), and has in fact found it useful as a category both to describe African realities and to codify the ideological themes currently being articulated there. Within this framework the highlighting of preoccupations with authorit y as th e definin g charact eri stic of populism yields pri de of place to a focus upon the substantive or policy considerations that stimulate political action. And, as mentioned above, this is seen to involve a critique of the capitalist mode of production and way of life felt to be encroaching upon more traditional methods of ordering society. In Worsley’s view this was also the distinguishing feature of R ussian N aro dn ikism and N orth Americ an ru ral radicalism, both of which have been assigned the label ‘populist’; to this roster he would add the tota l expe r i ence s of existent African states. We will want to investigate further Worsley’s theses for they provide one of the few relatively systematic formulations of an explicitly ‘populist’ analytical framework being brought to bear upon African realities. But initially it is useful to expand upon the whole question of the incursion of capitalism into Africa and some of the more obvious results of that process. Once again Kilson has advanced a suggestive point of view: The term ‘modernization’ refers to those social relationships and economic and technological activities that move a social system away from the traditional state of affairs in which there is little or no ‘social mobilization’ among its members. More specifically, the term ‘modernization’ refers essentially to those peculiar socioeconomic institutions and political processes necessary to establish a cashnexus, in the place of a feudal or socially obligatory system, as the primary link relating 133
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people to each other, and to the social system, in the production of good s and services and in their exc ha ng e.26
One may quarrel over shades of emphasis here but it remains dif fi cult to o verestim ate th e d isrup tion cau sed by such an insertion , as the solidarities of clan, kinship and tribe falter. It is perhaps this added dim en sion o f c han ge in Afri ca t ha t h elps explain th e se em ing ‘irrationalities’ o f m uc h rur al rad ic al is m a nd its apparent lack of consistent focus, as, for example, upon centres o f authori ty. W ith traditi on no long er a wh olly stable gui de a variety o f reacti ons an d fram ewo rks for pro test (again rangi ng fro m witchcraf t eradi cati on m ov em en ts to m ore ove rtly polit ical gr ou ps ) beco m e possibl e. T h is is on e o f the reasons for the ‘unrel iabi li ty’ of populist or radical response under such conditions when one attempts to conceptualize them in terms of the dichotomy of Left and Right. Unlike the emergent African bourgeoisie, the masses are generally not themselves modernized and thus their relationship to colonial modernizers is different. But they do desire to be modernized, or at least to rationalize and clarify the complicated and disturbing situation of part ial or pe riphera l m oder nization in th e m ids t o f tradition al lif e an d w a ys .26
A partial vacuum is created for leadership, armed with even per functory organizational techniques and an ideology, to play a politically creative role as regards this protest (if such leadership should become available). The often random impact of the cash economy also provides some key to the uneven development of consciousness which has been noted earlier; in a great many instances and in different areas of a given country traditional fo rms and att achments l inger on in im portant w ays, cu tting across , in a far from uniform manner, the logic of modernization which Kilson has defined. ‘Capital ist relati ons’ , ‘the ca sh -ne xu s’ - un fortu na tely m any necessary subtleties of vocabulary for dealing fully with such im por ta nt aspe ct s o f m odernizati on are no t availabl e; this be com es par t icul arl y obvious whe n o ne ’s focu s is up on the respon ses elicit ed by such developments. It is clear, however, that if we are to use the term ‘populism’ to cover these responses we must see them as varying in conjunction with various epochs or phases in capitalist development. Thus it may seem useful to lump together Russian
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Narodnikism and North American Populism under the analytical rubr ic of ‘ p op ulis m ’ be ca us e b oth represent largel y r ural resp onses to the onward march of ‘capitalism’ or ‘modernization’ or ‘indus trialization’, but it is just as important to distinguish them. The first may be schematized as a communalistic response, defending the unit ofand solidarity, at the ce first impact capitalism, agaitraditional nst breakdown th e em ergen o f new andofunwelco me f or ms of inter-personal relationships; the second is individualistic and essentially market-oriented, defending itself against the further ‘rationalizations’ of an expansive capitalism (embodied, for ex ample, in the threat of large-scale agriculture) and the power of centralized urban financial and marketing institutions (both national and international) that have tended to emerge over time. Worsley, as seen in our initial two linked quotations and in the rest of his book, and others tend to lump these together for too many purposes, but the mere existence of what Worsley calls ‘communitarian’ aspects in the ‘individualistic’ phase (involving, say, the tendency to form co-operatives) is not sufficient ju s ti fi c a ti o n fo r th is . This is especially true for the African setting where some tradi tional, un rev olutio nized com m unities ar e just now being ma rk ed ly subjected to the pressures of the cash nexus at the same time that elements within individual countries, especially leadership cadres and certain economically advanced geographical areas, are facing the full implications of involvement in a complex national and intern ationa l eco no m y. Re spo nse s ar e scarc ely li kel y t o be uni fo rm, even if in some sense ‘populist’, and once again the label may merely work to obscure these differences and the full implications o f u ne ve n de velop m ent.2 7 Ind eed four pot enti al el ement s of the rural sector might be very roughly factored out at this stage: traditional, more communal modes of agriculture; small-scale pe asa nt fa rm ing; gro w ing diffe rentiat ion with som e far me rs b reak ing through to rather large, more capitalistic modes of production; attempts to transcend individualistic agriculture by creating novel communal modes of production, possibly on the basis of the srcinal traditional units. The exact mix of these elements in any given instance will be a factor of some importance. The sense of phasing may be suggestive in another way as well, for it further illumines the substance and character of much rural protest. It reminds us that, historically, such protests have arisen
*35
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IT S
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NA L
CH AR AC TE RI ST IC S
as much out of the rearguard actions of declining groups at major tur ning -po ints o f dev elo pm en t as from the p ositi ve t hr us t of pro gr essive e lem en ts. A s M oo re h as pu t i t, brill iantl y an d with a characteristically elegaic note, . . . the ch ie f social basis o f rad icalism has been the pea san ts a nd the smaller ar ti sans of the to wn s. Fr om thes e facts one m ay con cl ud e that the wellsprings of human freedom lie not only where Marx saw them, in the aspirations of classes about to take power, but perhaps even more in the d yin g wail o f a cla ss ove r w ho m the w ave o f prog res s i s abou t to rol l. Indu striali sm , as it co ntinu es to sp read, m ay in some dis ta nt future still those voices forever and make revolutionary radicalism as anachronistic a s cun ieform w ritin g.28
Be that as it may, our attention is at least directed once again to the probability of a most variegated membership in any so-called ‘populist movement*, and the possibility of its having rather Janu s-li ke characteristi cs. W e mu st now grapple , m ore d irect ly, w it h one o f the ma in prem is ses o f this w ho le app ro ac h: this con cern s the positi on t o be assi gned in
analys is to ‘the im pa ct of capi tal is m*. T o som e e xt en t
‘capi tal is m ’ becom es coterm inous here w ith ‘m oder nizati on’ - we have seen that for Kilson the latter term is virtually indistinguish abl e f rom th e process o
f establis hing the cash -nex us as t he c e nt r al
human relationship. In an African setting it has been suggested that the overriding logic of the colonial system is just this as well; though missions, for example, may educate with rather different reasons in mind their main impact, like that of other colonial institutions, will be to hasten the replacement of traditional ties with ‘capitalist* ones. We have mentioned already the great im portance of this force in breaking down the pre-existing rural syst ems of Africa; if t his p oint is push ed to the extreme, o f cour se , most radicalism of the colonial period becomes populist almost by def ini ti on. T hu s even w hen p easants at ta ck the ch iefs for abuses of power it is because they are part of the colonial system. And the colonial system is in turn a part of the world market system into which the colonialists are, without doubt, plunging African culti vators. Opinions will differ over this breadth of definition and its act ual uti li ty for anal ysi s; how ever, t his does indicate som e o f the br oad er ques ti ons wh ich m ust be aske d as to the range o f po ssible supporting premises underwriting a particular usage of the term
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‘populism’ in the literature. Thus the data which is relevant will vary with such decisions as to how wide to cast one’s net; to this en d more thinking is ob vio usly necessary on th e re al meaning an d import of colonialism and neo-colonialism. But there is in any case much evidence of direct and immediate reaction of a seemingly populist sortcolonial to capitalist economic forces. Any studies of the period will reveal some examples. Kilson’s work on Sierra Leone is rich with data concerning resis tance to hut-taxes and other devices designed to pitch-fork the African into a monetary relationship with the wider environment, whether as cash-cropper or migrant labourer.29 A rather different ‘phase’ o f resp on se is ev iden ced by the m anner in which econ omic grievance against price manipulation and the like by the protec torate government (in the form of money held back for stabiliza tion fund s — and British e xcha nge res erves ) an d As ia n b uy er s sup plem ented Bug anda pro test against the chie fs. Cr awf or d Young , writing on the Congo, has linked the genesis of widespread rural radicalism there directly to this process: T h e tota lity o f policies pursu ed in the rur al areas land a lienation, national parks, creation of forced
paysannats,
obligatory cultivation, other
labou r, relocation o f villages along
mod ernity up on the countryside.
the roa dwa ys im pos ed
I f we foll ow Martin Kils on in sug ge st -
ing that integration into a cashnexus is the key factor in distinguishing the political transition from traditional to modern, then we may conclude that there is no parallel in Tropical Africa for the degree of penetration of a modern economicsocial system throughout the entire territory. If we add to this the impact, first of evangelization, then education, we find the simultaneous infusion of new norms, of new cosmologies. . . . T h e colon ial system had in part succeeded in eliminat ing the subsistence economy, in methodically reconstructing an entire society b y its o w n b lu ep r in t. . . . B u t at th e sa me tim e, th e colonial syste m had eng end ered a p rofou nd frust rati on at t he level of t he ma ss. Th is is perhaps the key to understanding the astounding politicization of a large part o f the coun tryside in so brief a per iod of ti me. 30
And in Tanganyika the sort of rural resistance that underwrote T A N U ’s success in t he 195 0s was la rg el y in re sp on se to the attempts by the colonial government to rationalize peasant agri culture and make it a more successful financial enterprise. T h e range o f responses found in t he Tanga nyi kan c as e ( whi ch we discussed in Section 1) is illuminating in this context as well.
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CS
For in some areas the essential thrust of resistance was against a disruption of traditional ways even if it would mean a real benefit in ma rk et terms; in others the desire w as for ex tend ed control of the market by peasant growers and one result was the genesis of co operatives. ‘Narodniks’ and ‘populists’ perhaps, but certainly not exactly the same. As might be expected a similarly mixed pattern is widespread throughout Africa. Here too we might mention an add it io nal ana lyt ic al pr ob lem : that o f sor ting ou t and classifyi ng the content of various rural outbursts. Were attacks on the chiefs in Sierra Leone launched because of abuses of authority and consequent sentiments as to legitimacy or because of the content of chi efl y polici es and c onse que nt fears o f ‘proletar ianization ’? Or if, as is likely, both were in some vague way involved, what sort of b le nd of the two defi nes thei r ‘ po pu lism ’; log ic-ch op pin g agai n, yet unless the question is asked the term remains a most openended one. Uneven devel opment , such as that sugge sted b y the Tan ganyika n ex ampl e ab ov e, will be pre sent af te r inde pen den ce, tho ug h ind ivi dualistic patterns of economy will obviously continue to increase in i mpor ta nce ; it seems l ikel y, too, that the m os t articula te po litical ac tor s will t end to ris e from the ranks o f the ‘ind ivid ua lists’. O f necessity they will be more conscious of broader horizons, less traditional in their bias. In so far as they are moved to protest and not absorbed into the existing system, their focus is more on the na ti on al level ; the ir outburs ts will onc e agai n in vo lve so m e m ix ture of distaste for abuses of authority per se and mistrust of certain policy implications. For example, Fanon, mentioned in Section 7, st res ses both these aspec ts in his ‘po p u list’ p ole m ic, finding the policy dimension of his critique to lie in an anti ca pi ta li st st anc e. However, this com pon ent o f his ‘ p op u lism ’ is a direct response to a capitalism of a very advanced type indeed, a response to international capitalism in its neo-colonial phase and to the con ti nuing ro le of t he ex-colonial sta tes them selves. H is characterization of African leadership is crisp: ‘The national middle-class discovers its heroic m iss io n : that o f inte rm ed iary . . . it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts o n the m asque of neo-colon ialism .’31 An d this can in d ee d become a dimension of popular revolt against the ‘new class*. T o re tur n t o K w ilu:
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Since Ja nuary 1964, th e ideo logy o f M ulelism preached in the Kwilu seems to have chan ged in at least o ne sign ificant respect. Greater empha sis has been placed on the extent to which the Congo and its workers and peasants have been exploited by the foreigners (who, to be sure, the doctrine continues to assert, have been aided and abetted by the present Congolese go ve rn m en t).. . . Belg ians, Americans, Portuguese, Dutch and Germans are accused of stealing ‘the wealth of the Congo’, ‘our peanu ts, th e fruits o f our palms, our cor n and our cotton . . . and the earth on which these are planted’, and of sending this wealth back to thei r ow n coun tries.32 Even w he n su ch a leade rsh ip cadr e assumes po wer a nd genui nel y seeks to guide the country along lines considered to be ‘populist’ in the present sense, the ambiguities already mentioned make it difficult to assess their activities. For such a leadership could be defen ding an im age o f a traditionally comm unal society a nd att empt ing to build an indigenous socialism on that basis; some African leade rs ha ve m ad e th is claim. Or i t cou ld be ral lyi ng gro wer s aga inst the threats and controls o f the inter national eco nomic syst em. Bu t the latter preoccupation does not necessarily involve concern about decaying traditional modes of social order or even about the degree of internal class formation possibly attendant upon the articulation of an individualistic pattern of development. Thus a leader in pursuit of development might find himself the grave digg er o f the traditional s ystem , subject to att ack s by what we might call ‘ ph ase on e p op u lism ’, ev en w hile articul ating an ideology which w ou ld earn h im the title o f a ‘phase two popu list ’ and the s upp or t, pre sum ab ly, o f p eo ple further remov ed, psychologically and soc ia ll y, from traditional ways. T h e spectre o f v aryi ng le vels of cons ci ousne ss again haunts any ready application of the term ‘populism’. Similarly the efficacy of the elite-mass distinction central to Fanon’s populist perspective becomes subject to further re-evaluation from a related vantage-point. It may well be useful to see the present leadership elite in many African countries as the inter m ediaries for n eo-colon ial econ om ic pres sur es and t o see k fo r so me of the roots of popular revolt in the reaction to that fact. But one must not lose sight of the realization, already suggested by our Bu gan da data, that th e social transformation f rom tra dit io nal c ommunalists to peasant individualists does not stop there. For indi vidualism has in turn tended to lead to rural differentiation, esp ecia lly in the m ore advanced are as o f Afri can countri es. A 1 3 9
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third level of popular consciousness is thus a likelihood as ‘wellto-do’ farmers so motivated may increasingly find themselves in alliance with a ‘new class’ of administrators and politicians, inter penet rati ng w ith them as benefici aries o f the existing syst em. Th e char acte r o f the ‘ p op ula ce’ m us t there fore be vie w ed dy na mi ca ll y. W it h tim e m any o f the m ore articulate p oten tial protest ors a gainst various stages of capitalist development may be absorbed through their own success (with others, needless to say, being totally dis placed) ; the nature and in ten sity o f ru ral pro test w ill be subj ect to great fl ux, d epe nd ent up on lags and spu rts in th e devel opment process. This invocation of a ‘third phase* of development is a further useful warning against any underestimation of the complexity of contemporary African societies, merely because they seem at least marginally less complex than many societies elsewhere. Even in pre-colonial Africa the decay of a village community remotely resembli ng ‘ primitive com m un ism ’ was fa r advan ced throu ghou t much of the continent. For example, ‘the formation of castes and the r ei nfo rce ment of the p ower o f the “ old m en ” w hich der iv ed fro m this evolution . . . co nstitute the ge ne sis o f an tagon istic so ci al classes.’ 33 A nd wh ere state sys tem s and sop histica ted pre-col onial markets had emerged this was even more the case. Similarly the impact of capitalism in conjunction with the colonial period has been r at her more sw eeping in this con nec tion tha n m any obse rve rs care to admit. . . . Modem exploitation occurs behind and through ‘traditional’ ten uri al a nd leg al f orms . . . the village i s situat ed at the end (or beginn ing) of a long line of increasingly commercialized relationships. Accu mulation of productive resources (land, cattle, exploitation of hired and family labour, usury, manipulation of credit, exercise of political power to economic ends, the deepening network of internal trade and trans port ation - all bear witness to the grow ing pressures o f the market on the ‘primitive community.’34 T h e various elements o f the ru ra l landscape referr ed to earl ier c an in this way b e furt her concretized, though , as P. J. Ha rding cog en tly observes, a fully adequate ‘rural sociology’ for Africa remains an urgent priorit y. One final ambiguity must be introduced relating to the nature o f the deman ds o f parti cipa nts in par ti cul ar instances o f p ro test; it
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becomes important to ask how conscious they are of the implica tions of their expressed discontent. It is legitimate to argue, as we have seen, that much protest has been stimulated by the impact of the cash economy at the heart of the colonial experience. It was observed that Y ou n g trac es ‘frustration at the level o f the mass’ in the Congo to this process, for example. But he also notes the quality of initial reactions: ‘Symptoms of the frustration broke in the widespread outcropping of syncretic religious movements. Th ese . . . in their millenial, apocalypti c visi on o f cha nge reflect th e conviction that the colonial system was impregnable, a permanent source o f hu m ilia tio n .35 W e allude d to th is at the sta rt of t his section; here it serves to underscore a familiar problem. There is often little ov ert aw areness o f the reas ons underlyi ng disru pti on o r mu ch so ph istica tion in the reacti on to them; the ‘c ash-nexus’ or the ‘international economy’ looming behind the immediate griev ances impinging upon farmers may well be lost to their view. Are such examples therefore populist, and if not, at what point would they become such? And at what level should this minimal awareness exp ress itse lf - that o f the lea ders hip, the mas s, o r both? With this and other queries in mind we may finally turn to Worsley’s work, but we shall find that he himself is rather loathe to confront them. As mentioned earlier, he not only identifies a ‘po pu list’ id eo log y as a key d im ensio n in contemporar y Af ri ca , but he takes that ideology to be an accurate rendering of the character of African social reality. Thus he cites at length the various state ments of African leaders as to the ‘classlessness’ and peculiar soli darity of African society. Of these leaders Julius Nyerere has been perhap s th e m ost eloq ue nt and m ay be q uoted as an exam ple: ‘We, in Africa, have no mo re need o f being “ converted” to soci ali sm th an we have of being “taught” democracy. Both are rooted in our own past - in the traditional soc iety w hich produced us. Modern Af rican Socialism can draw from its traditional heritage the recognition of a “ so cie ty ” as an exte ns ion o f th e basic family unit.’ 36 But the echoing of similar sentiments, of greater and lesser degrees of sop his tica tion , relating to a broad range of ‘ socialist’ issues i s an easy phenomenon to document. Worsley himself concludes: ‘Africa is its peasantry, subsistence producers or cash-crop pro ducers, but independent peasants. This is the basic fact about the soc ial stru ctur e o f th e new Africa n states . . .’37 This latter fact is felt to militate against relevant differentiation;
P O P U L IS M -IT
S NA
TIONAL
CHARACTERISTICS
those few slight differences are ‘non-antagonistic’, as Sekou Toure and o thers ha ve argue d. F or W or sley th e logic is th at , i n addition to the fortunate fact that ‘classes are only slightly developed’, ‘the major antagonisms arise between the indigenous population and foreign capitalist and trading classes. . . . And even where there are cl ass divisions am ongst the i n d i g en es , th e se are, in rea lity and not ju st as a matter of illusion, overridden by common solidarity vis-a-vis the alien e xp loit er .’38 ‘P o p u lis m ’ in A frica , a ‘ rur al i diom i n a modern world’, is thus an ideology which springs from these facts and reflec ts th e desire
o f su ch a po pu lace
for both
co nt inu ed
classlessness and opposition to international capitalism. M any diff icult ies w ith s uc h a form ulation en t on the
w ill be readil y a ppar
basis o f ou r earli er discu ssion ; the first
la ck of int ernal differenti
ation is
premise as t o
esp ecially su spe ct. By adop ti ng i t
Worsley misses two important phenomena. Firstly, he under estimates the drama, which is in fact often the tragedy and pain, o f the trans formati on from o f tra dit io nal involvem
‘su b sisten ce pr od uc ers’ w ith a we al t h
en ts to ‘ca sh-cr op pr od uc ers’ o f i ncr eas in gl y
indi vidual is t bent . T h is is a process still goin
g on , and very mu ch
a dim ension o f cert ain sort s o f ‘populis t* ou tbu rst. A nd he m is se s much of the potential conflict amongst the interests of those al rea dy ‘transform ed’ ; m ore a ccur ately, th is is a con flict bet ween the transformed individuals, the nascent agricultural ‘entrepre neurs’, and the semi-transformed, or marginal cash-croppers. In ot her wor ds, the representat
ives o f three d iff erent le ve ls o f develop
ment in the agrarian community find expression in both local and national arenas. His apotheosis of the co-operative as the ideal expres si on of ‘ the “ na tu ral G em ein sch aft” ’ o f ‘ the indigenou s society’ is , in such a sett ing, s om ew ha t sus p ec t.39 M y o w n res ear ch on c o-o perat ive s in Tan zania, a relati vely un rev olu tionized societ y in economic te rms, hints a t the exten t t o w hich the m ore econ om i cally liberated farmers can turn these institutions to their advan tage at the exp ense o f their less ‘aw ak ene d’ ass ocia tes.4 0 In ad dition as regards many sorts of growing differentiation the co-operative f or m o f market ing and credit distribution is ob vio u sly at bes t a neutral agency. The danger for socialist aspirations of certain of these as pect s of the ‘ po pu list’ per spec tive is there fore th at it d iverts at te nti on f rom t he question o f ‘ the m ode o f pro ducti on* b est su ited to r eal iz ing socia li st g oals , in favour of p ursu ing a w ill-o f-th e- w isp of pre sumptive sol idari ty w hich , even in Africa, has all too like ly fled
142
AFRICA
Similarly, Worsley’s invocation of the spectre of ‘international capitalism’ is excessively schematic. Certainly he vastly overesti mates the degree of awareness and the uniformity of response of the ma ss of the A frican po pulace, even among those m ost p lu gge d into the international economy. And he provides no conceptual tools with which to differentiate the activities of leadership cadres throughout Africa in their responses, though the range of possible ‘bargains’ that can be struck between such leaders and the external economic and political forces impinging upon them has in fact been vas t. T h ere is no need to extend the discussi on, for such f ai l ures are of a piece with the general inadequacy of an approach pitched on too high a level of generality and thus seemingly incapable of fully spanning the realities of uneven development in Africa and the many ambiguities in the relationships between leaders and led which we have cited. The difficulties experienced by so interesting a scholar as Worsley in working with the concept of ‘ po pu lism ’ sh ou ld again serve to sen sitize the r ead er to the amount of pre-th eorizin g necessary if so potentiall y woolly a fram e of reference as the ‘populist’ one is to prove of any utility.
4
PO
PU
LISM
AND THE ASPI
RATION F
O R
SOLIDARITY
This paper in its attempt to provide basic data, a survey of the literature, and some critical apparatus is already overlong. A final dim ension grow ing o ut o f the preceding discussi on m ust t he re fo re be mentioned rather more briefly. Yet it is important to note that whatever the weaknesses of the populist framework as a description of reality, ideas that may be called ‘populist’ serve wide-ranging purposes as political rallying-cries, both for those in power and for those in pursuit of power. The major aspect of such ‘populisms’, whatever amalgam of emphases upon the ‘will of the people’ and the ‘defence against capitalism’ any given example may represent, is the stress upon solidarity and the unity of vast sections of the populace that it provides: a ‘populism’ is thus a creed most attractive to leaders. In very many cases the stress upon solidarity will represent neither the real situation of the mass of the people, nor their views of that situation, as we have seen. Rather it will represent an aspiration to make a particular view as to the characteristics that unite people prevail over any M3
POPU
LISM
- I T S
NATIONAL
CH AR AC TE RI ST IC S
continuing awareness of the elements that divide. Instead of assuming solidarity to be the actual norm, therefore, it is wiser to look to the tensions between various elements and various per spectives as defining the dynamic of any so-called ‘populist movement’. In so far as a populist ideology may thus represent the aspira tions of people leading a particular African movement or state, it can be put to a number of uses. Here we move into the difficult region o f ‘inte n t’ and as m en tion ed pre viou sly one o f the mo st tort ured qu estions w ill be to assess th e sinc erity o f key ac tor s wh en they advance such ideas. In the African case we can perceive, in the first instance, a real measure of le aders hip in their use o f t hese notions.
s elf - d ec ep t i o n among the
T h is was, to some ex
t en t, a
legacy of the anti-colonial struggle. It was then as easy for the leaders, as for subsequent scholars, to overlook the diversity of elements constituting their movements and to subsume them within the analytical frame of misleading rhetoric. Nyerere him self has pointed this out succinctly:
Uh uru
provided a lowest
comm on denom inat or f or peop le w ith a w ide variety of vi ews as to what the future ind ep en de nt state sh ou ld look like.4 1 It seems proba bl e t oo that m uch of the rh etoric of ‘ A frican soc ialism ’ - wit h its emphasis upon the automatic carry-over of traditional communalities to a modern Africa and the undifferentiated front to be prese nted t o a r at her hosti le international eco no m ic env ironm ent came rat her easily to th e lips o f a leader ship fresh to pow er and hot in pursuit of neutralism and a distinctive ideology. It was only subsequently that the rather grimmer realities of induced internal differentiation and continued economic pressure from the outside began to demonstrate that choices would be rather more complex. Nyerere, for example, has moved from a rel ia nce upo n social ism as an ‘ attitu de o f m in d ’ to b e un derw ritten aut omati cal ly by t he co ntinuing imp act o f t he tradit ional env iron ment, to a clearer statement in the recent ‘Arusha Declaration’ on socialism and self-reliance that it is also an ‘ideology* to be lea rned a nd sustained.4 2 An d this has led in T an zan ia to a grow ing emphasi s upon the role o f the edu cati onal system as a n instrum ent for social ist education and to c ertai n structural reform s. T h is sort of populist mode of thought exemplified by the creed of ‘African Socialism* in a good many of its specific embodiments does have a continuing legacy for those in power, however, and tends to
144
AFRICA
bring with it the same limitations that we saw in our discussion of Worsley: choices concerning the internal economic structure, as for example those relating to the modes of production to be fostered and encouraged, are blurred and subtle questions as to the costs and benefits for future social structure and national selfdetermination of various forms of possible compromise with the international market-system are set aside. Solidarity is socialism, and real social trends which may be working against meaningful solidarity are lost to view. Other leaders are rather more conscious of the loss of focus encouraged by the high-level of generalization of the populist framework. However, as Halpern’s earlier statement suggested, it can then be transformed into an aspiration for solidarity useful to th e i nteres ts of p ost-colon ial elit es - this is
i nte r este d, mani pulativ e
populism. For it has been mentioned that a populist vision can divert attention from internal contradictions; used consciously, it may thus become a most conservative force, even a cynical cover for continuing privilege. Growing differentiation either between the elite and mass or within the rural community itself, as well as subtle compromises with international capital, can be masked behind a rhetoric of homogeneity and national interest. This has in fact become the underpinning for a number of self-indulgent one-party regimes; the manner in which emergent military elites, now so prominent a force in many African states, have found this appeal to the solidarities of the countryside attractive is also strik ing, in sp ite o f their ab sence o f interest in socialist as pir ati ons, t hei r m ost com pr om ised po sition vis -a- vis external c apital ism,43 and their seeming reluctance to indulge in democratic experiments. Colonel Afrifa, prominent in the Ghanaian military leadership, captures something of this note in his recent book in commenting upon pre-coup days: . . . perha ps people who lived in Accra or vis ited Accr a wo uld not have felt the suffering of the people who lived in the rural areas. Accra is organized in such a way as to give an impression of happiness and affluence; there were new streets and new lights, while vast areas of this country were planted with misery and suffering. I spent all my leaves at home on our farm, seeing and thinking about the helpless condition to which our people had been reduced. I became convinced that Nkru ma h had failed the nat ion.44
H5
POPU
LISM
-
IT S NA TIO
NA L
CH AR AC TE RI ST IC S
And the extrapolation of similar themes and rationalizations for ‘post-liberation’ society has followed apace. Where ‘populism’ becomes the official ideology of states, more nuanced tests than ever are necessary to assess the degree of correspondence between its pretensions and the actual state of the rural masses. T her e is one fi nal po ssible u se o f ‘p op u lism ’ wh ich mu st be m entione d all too briefl y here. F or ‘p op u list’ argum ents an d v oc ab u la ry that stress solidarity can b m aint enance of
e m an ipula ted for e nds beyond m ere
pow er by en scon ced elit es. T h ey can al so be us ed
as part of a de vel opment str
ate g y d esign ed to m axim ize t he ch a nc e s
of economic break-through in a poor country and, therefore, even be intended to work for the well-being of the masses themselves. Th ere is m uch scepticism
abou t th e ca pacities o f a c api ta li st r o u te
to development, a decision in favour of ‘betting on the strong’, to ens ure sweep ing eco nom ic succ ess in the rur al sect or o f ba c k wa r d societies; where so many need awakening to the potentialities inhere nt i n a new w ay o f life, p rem ature d iff eren tiati on m ay mere ly confront the vast mass with a local political environment mani pulated by ‘kulaks’ and thus sap their interest and initiative. This is already a factor be reckoned with in Africa. On the other hand, forced march methods seem equally unattractive. The alternative, as Wertheim suggests, may lie in ‘betting on the many’, rallying the people ‘through organization and intensive education toward eff ici ency a nd self-relian ce’. 45 T h is is n ot a n ap pro ach th at assum es sol ida ri ty, bu t one that aspires to it
and w orks to attain
it. T h er e ar e,
in fact increasingly fewer African regimes that seem willing to choos e to implem ent such a n option, f or it m us t invo lve some attempt to exemplify equality and independence in a convincing manner; in addition, l ike mo st ‘ p op u lism s’ , suc h an aspi rati on carries its share of familiar ambiguities when brought up against comple xi ti es of the Af ri can context wh ich w e h ave seen . I f i m ple mented aggr ess ive ly by a sincere elite it is ju st po ssible , how ever, that it c ar ri es a promise o f progressi ve results b eyo nd that o f more romanticized versions postulated upon pre-existent harmony and presumed egalit arianis m.
146
AFRICA
Notes 1 A ckn ow ledgem col l eag ues i n D ar sc i ous , i n the w
ent:
I w ou ld li ke to t
es S alaam
for assi
riti ng o f this pap
Il i f f e and G iov a n n i A rrigh ment a r e m y ow n.
hank
a num ber of
st ance, both
er, bu
t parti
consci
cularl
i. N eed less to say, al
f ri ends
and
ous and uncon-
y R oger M
urray, John
l er ro rs o f f act or judg e-
2 L loyd Fal l ers , ‘ Po pu l is m and N ati ona l i sm ’, IV , Comparati ve Studies in So ciety and History, N o . 4, 447 (Jul y 19 64) . 3 Peter W orsley, The Thi rd World(Lon do n, 1964) ; Giovan ni Arri ghi , ‘Bl ack
and W
h it e P op ulism
pres ent ed t o the P 4 Da vid Ap
i n R hod esia’,
olit ical Scien
ce sem
unp ubli shed se
i nar, D
ar es Sal
The P olitics of M odernization(Ch
ter,
m i nar
pap er
aam , M arch icago,
1967.
196 6) , pp.
2234. 5 M anf red
H alpem
The P olitics ofSocial Change in the M iddle East
,
and North Africa(Pri
nceton,
1963) , pp . 29 0 1.
6 D .A . Lo w , ‘T h e A dven t of Popul i sm i n Buganda’ , IV, Studies in Societ y andHistoryN o . 4, 424 (Ju ly 1964) . See alComparative so D av id A p t e r , ThePo litical Kin gdom in Uganda (Princeton, 1961). 7 In a sim
il ar ve in A p ter
act i on, i n the foll
ow ing term
to con fl ict an d b it terness and a text
new
qu ota o
m ust a p ply
speaks of populis
m , that
i s ‘ the
s: ‘T h u s thwarted, populi
in the pa
f grievances.’
st w as sim
ply pro
T h e cri t i ci sm of Lo
eq u ally t o such
a regret
vided w
w w hich f
tabl e exam
Peo ple’
sm w hich
had
in l ed
it h fr esh f uel ol l ows i n t he
ple, a s i t se ems t o me,
o f reif icati on . 8 C .C .W rigley L . Fa ll ers
, ‘ T h e Ch an gi ng
(ed. ),
TheKing's Men Conferenceapers P , 1953.
o f So cial Research, 10 A p ter , op. ci L o w , op.
can Farm
ers i n B uga nd a’,
East
Buganda
’, i n
60.
Afri can
Ins t i t ut e
t. , p. 193.
ci t. , p. 4 43.
12 T h e cl assi c t ext here
i s, o f cour se , Th om as H od gkin’
in Coloni al Africa-, w h a te v e r h ow eve r, this w
i c St ruc t ure of
(Lo nd on , 1964 ), pp. 59
9 C .C .W rig ley , ‘Afri
ix
Econom
il l certa
r e v is io n s
inly stand
o f e m p h a s is
the test of t
ime
s
m ay
as an excepti
Nationalism p rove
u s e fu l,
ona ll y f i ne
contribution. 13 Joh
n L on sda le, ‘Ru
ral Resi
stance
and M
ass Poli
ti cal Mo
bil iz ati on
A m o n g s t t h e L u o o f W e s t e r n K e n y a ’ , p a p e r d e liv e r e d a t th e C o n fe r e n c e o f the Ea st A fri can A cad em y, S eptem ber History of Western Kenya (f orthcom i ng). 14
L ion el Clif
tur al Im
fe, ‘Na
and the Reacti
prov em ent i n T an gan yika D
delivered at the M akere
ti on ali sm
Ea st A fri can
re, D ecem
ber 19
15 M arti n K il son, M ass., 1966) 16 Ibid
ee al s o h i s
on t o Enforce
ur ing t he Coloni
Insti tute of Social Resear
A Political d Agricul-
al Peri od’, ch Confere
pap er nce,
64 .
Political C hange in a W est Af rican Stat(Cam e
, p. 179.
., p. 183.
17 Ib id.,
1965; s
p. 186.
1 4 7
bri dge,
PO P U L IS M -IT
S
NATI
ONAL CH
A R AC TE R I S TI CS
18 Ibid., p. 189. 19 Ibid., p. 192. 20 There is, of course, reason to be uneasy with this dichotomy between ‘elite’ and ‘mass’ itself; though suggestive, it is probably not nuanced enough, particularly as regards the category of ‘mass’, to catch gradations among the populace which can be important for many purposes. The distinction is central to the term ‘populism’ as used by Kilson. Yet one might have liked from him some rather more detailed evidence about involvement and participation, especially in the local instances he cites, bef or e b ei n g alt og et he r sat isf ied w it h his use o f it. 21 Richard Sklar, in his book (Princeton, 1963) is another scholar who has specifically used the term ‘populism’, though without definition. Thus he describes the Northern Elements Progressive Union in northern Nigeria, a party of marginal economic groups (mainly small traders and craftsmen), as populist on the basis of its ideology, which presents a radical demand for extended democracy and social reform. Its opponents, the ruling Northern People's Congress, is
Nigerian Political Parties
an ‘elitist’ party, dominated by chiefs and wealthy bourgeois interests. Unfortunately the former group presents the paradox of being a relatively unpo pul ar ‘populi st movem ent’. T h e N P C , b y m anipulati ng both tra ditional and ‘populist’ values, has retained a considerable grip on the rural masses’ loyalties, even eliciting their quite active support. Added to this there is the attendant difficulty of measuring the sincerity of protestations of N E P U leaders s o long as the y, unlike the ir ri val s, remai n out of power. Despite the valuable nature of his account, one wishes Dr Sklar had confronted some of these possible ambiguities in his discussion (and his definitions) more explicitly.
ThePoli Damned tics in he t Congo African Studies Bulletin
22 Frantz Fanon, (Paris, 1963), pp. 90, 94, 123. 23 Crawford Young, (Princeton, 1965); Herbert We iss , as rep ort ed in I V , No. IV, pp. 89 (December 1961); J. Gera rdLib ois, ‘T h e N ew Class and Rebelli on i n the Congo’, , 1966 (London). 24 Ren6eC. Fox, Willy de Cra emer, and JeanM arie Ribeaucourt , ‘ “ Th e Se cond In depende nce” : a Case Stu dy o f the K w ilu Rebellion in the Congo’, VIII No. x, 78 (October 1965), pp. 78, 96, 103. It is also true, as these same authors observe, that the ideology and organization present in the Kwilu was rather more explicit and refined than elsewhere in the Congo. The domi-
SocialistRegister
Comparative Studies inSociety and History,
nant characteristic of much rural radicalism is often ambiguous indeed. Crawford Young, also speaking of the Congo (op. cit., p. 231), captures an important note: ‘But the oppressive, omnipresent system had to go. No more taxes, no more cotton, no more censustakers, no more vaccinations, no more identity cards, no more army recruiters. Whether such a happy world could exist was, of course, beside the point.’ Another importan t ex amp le of somet hing very lik e an outcro ppin g o f postindep enden ce ‘populism’ may well be, paradoxically, Dr Banda’s Malawi. According to Rev. Andrew Ross in an unpublished paper (‘Tribalism or Counter Revolution in Malawi’), Banda has been able to rally the masses (though
148
AFRICA
particularly the often illeducated local political leadership groups and the oncedisplaced traditional chiefs and headmen) against the more educated and welltodo ‘new class’ represented by his exMinisters now in exile, and has consolidated his position on that basis. 25 Martin Kilson, ‘African Political Change and the Modernization Process’, I No. 4, p. 426. 26 Ibid., p. 435. 27 Arrighi (op. cit.) cites one excellent example with a ring familiar to students of North American populism but certainly to be differentiated from many other forms of rural radicalism in Africa. From the Rhodesia Front’s news bulletin 20 March 1964, ‘The Smell of Treachery’ : ‘T h e world w e live in is in a pr etty me ss. And at the root of it all are pressure grou ps in hig h finance — big dealings in big mone y. It is no secret that when Southern Rhodesia was first opened up, the big financiers were there, alwa ys on the alert for a good investment. To da y the names of the individual financiers have changed. The smell of money has not. The financiers are all there in the ring . . . and it seems unlikely to worry
Journal of Modern African Studies,
Newsfront,
the contestants if the referee, in the person of the common man, gets hit on the head in the course of the struggle. . . . The traitor is the man who safeguards investment at the expense of his country’s economy.’ 28 Barrington Moore, Jr, (Boston, 1966), P 5 °S . 29 Kilson, lists a number of interesting examples of rural outbreaks across Africa taking place at various perio ds (pp. 6 0 6 1, 1 1 0 1 1 ) ; in general this remains a relatively uncharted area of research. 30 Young, op. cit., p. 230.
Social Origins of D ictatorsh ip and Democra cy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World Political Change in a W est Af rican State,
31 Fanon, op. cit., p. 124. 32 Fox et al., op. cit., p. 108. 33 X X X , ‘T h e Class Str uggle in Africa’, I No. 9, p. 30. See also C lau de Meil lasso ux, ‘Essai d ’interpretation du phenomene econo mique dans les societes traditionalles d’autosubsistance’, (December i960). For an excellent bibliographic introduction to the problems of class in Africa, B. Verhaegen, (Brussels 1965). 34 P. J. Harding, review of Worsley’s in (Summer 1965) 35 Young, op. cit., p. 230. 36 Julius K .N ye re re , ‘ Ujam aa: the Social Basis of African Socialism’ , in W.H.Friedland an d C.G .Rosberg, (Stanford, 1964), p. 246. 37 Worsley, op. cit., pp. 1623. 38 Ibid., p. 165. 39 Ibid., p. 165. 40 John S. Saul, ‘Agricultura l Politics in Tan zania ’, in Brett and Bel shaw, (tentative title; forthcoming). 41 See Juli us K.N yere re, (Dar es Salaam 1966).
Revolution
Cahiers'Etu d des
Africaines
Bibliographic sur les
Classes Sociales fri enque A
The Th ird W orld, Views
African Socialism
Politics and gri A cultural D evelop ment Free dom and Unity 149
POP ULI SM - ITS NAT
IONAL
CHARAC
TERISTICS
42 Th e Ar us ha De clar atio n a nd T A N U ' s Pol icy on Soc ial ism and S elfReliance (Government Printer, Dar es Salaam, 1967). 43 For a useful perspective on this phenomenon, see Roger Murray, ‘M ilitar ism in Africa’, 39, N ew L e ft R evie w (July-August 1966). 44 A .A.Afrifa, The G hana Coup (London, 1966), p. 95. 45 W . F. Wer th ei m, ‘Betting on the St ro ng* in his co llec tion o f ess ay s E ast- W est Par al le ls (The Hague, 1964), pp. 276-7.
PART TWO
CHA
PTER
SIX
POPULISM AS AN IDEOLOGY D o nal d M ac R ae
I W hen o ne is in volve d w ith ideolog y one is at once bese t wit h pe rils, particularly th e dan ger o f being m isund erstood . For o ver a century ideologies have been regarded as epiphenomena by sociologists and political scientists. As such Marxists have ‘unmasked’ them, Paretans treated them as the verbal derivations of non-logical sentiments, Durkheimians used themofasgiven clues to the social struc ture and specific social solidarity societies, Freudians psycho-analysed them, and so on. Anyone, like myself, who takes ideologies seriously and in their own right is thought of as an unworldly idealist, or someone so crazy as to believe in the A l l m a c h t der G ed a n k en - thou gh in so ciety and pol iti cs the re are many crazier things in which serious men can and do believe. Nevertheless I do not accept the omnipotence of thought; nor do I accept its insignificance. Herearticulated I m us t confess to p uzzlemideas ent. Aabout s a sociologi st I hav e fai clear, and operational social structure. I rly have a much less clear understanding of culture, though I hold that one can establish certain propositions about it and its relations to so cial str ucture - for exam ple, that culture is usually s trong a nd continuous, massively dense, at points of disjunction or weakness in social structure. But I have no ontology of ideology. Indeed the phenomena that we call ideological seems to me diverse not only in their srci ns - which o ne would expect - but in t he ir fun ct io ns and their species. On ly w hen w e command a much bett er the ory of culture and a more rigorous sociology of politics and religion can w e hop e fully to understand and assess ideologies. But t o ar gue that 1 5 3
POPUL
ISM
- IT S MEAN
IN GS
until this consu m m ation h as b een achieved nothing shou ld be said is clearly false. If we are to make sense of populism we must treat it as, though not only as, an ideology. It is to do violence to all experience and the data of research to deny ideology a role of its own in the political and social action of men. People who criticize those who take ideology seriously often object that any given ideology is not unitary, not logically consis tent, not clearly defined, and is plastic in its interpretation or am biguous in the guidance it gives to action. Of course; what else? Nor is it fatal to the existence and importance of, say, populism as an ideology that it is composed of more primitive ideological themes, any more than it is an objection that it can constitute a complex element in the structural analysis of some yet more com plex sy ste m . It seem s to m e that , for exam ple, w hile M aois m is not populis m, yet pop ulism is an i m portant elem ent in M aois m - a far more i mportant el em ent, too,
than it ever was in
Stal inis m .
2
When we talk of populism we think in the first place of imperial Russia and the late-nineteenth-century United States. We may in West European history discern a kind of proto-populism in the En glish Peasa nts’ R evolt and th e Jacq ueries1 o f the fourt eenth century, or in the Bundschuh and the peasant wars of the Refor mation. Nevertheless, and although before we have done we shall go back beyond the European middle ages, populism is typically exemplified in modern Russia and America. That is to say it is not p ri mar il y a phen om enon o f the m ain stem o f European his to ry. It is , howev er , com pounded from elem ents o f though t and modes of apprehending the world which are quite essentially part of the development of classical and Western Europe, and which have been transformed in their new homes. How far what we call populism is ideologically similar or even identical in the America of Cl eve la nd a nd M cK inley an d the Russia of Alexander II and III we will consider later, just as we shall look at some of its most recent ma nifestat ions and exp ectations. L et us begin, where one might expect, w ith Rousseau. W hatev er Rousseau may have intended, and he intended very different things a t di ff erent times and places , th e w orld for lon g u nderstood him as a pri miti vis t - one w ho foun d virtue in the m ost dis ta nt,
154
PO P U L IS M A S A N
IDEOLOGY
the most socially elementary past. Primitivism is a recurrent theme in many cultures. There is ancient Greek primitivism, Chinese primitivism in Taoism, etc. Now scholars have argued that to read Rousseau as a primitivist is to be mistaken2 and that the srcinal argument of the D iscour s sur V or ig ine d e Vi negal ite . . . (1:755) is a double one which we shall meet in a more elaborate form in Mikhailovsky. On the one hand, the theme is developed, men are capable of an indefinite progress of knowledge, under standing and institutional power, but on the other this is accom panied by an increasing estrangement of man from his fellow men and from his true nature. We are not to return to the age ‘When wild in moods the noble savage ran’. (Certainly Dry den would not have expected u s to do so , how ever touchin g ci vil iza tio n f ound the pathos of the noble savage!) What we have to do with is a kind of modified primitivism, a healing of the breach between men and their nature b y s im plic ity, spo ntan eity, and ele mentary, asc etic, and largely agrarian virtue. In all this we draw near to very ancient and profound intima tions of human thought. There is the idea that once there was a good , a sacred ti m e - and I us e the word sacr ed del ibe rat ely .3 It was a time of simple, spontaneous order. It was close to, intimate with, the sacred, life-renewing soil. It was the first world, redolent o f Eden and of th e ‘garden o f the wo rld’ , the vi rgin Ame ri ca n West .4 A u r eu s h an c v i ta m i n ter r i s S atu r n u s ag ebat - it is impossible to
talk of this vision of the farmers’ lost paradise without Virgilian echoes. But it is necessary to remember what is implied in the word ‘sacred’. Populism is endowed by the idea of the sacred farm with a religious intensity and fervour, but the sacred is also the ‘other’. The idealized farm involves a possible hierophany; on it one is in touch with the underworld of dead ancestors, the actual maternal earth, and all is under the divine sky. There one lives in a holy, ritual, cyclical time, immune in its revolutions from the
corruptions of real historical time, change and decay. But such feelings and aspirations are bought at the price of unreality. The embattled farmer gains strength, perhaps, from intimations of this kind, however little he articulates them. But the facts of his life are the facts of labor improbus lived in general under the threat of the vagaries of the seasons and disease, and more specifically by the movements of his markets, of armies, of the growth of cities. Populism, then, is primitivist, but it is a special primitivism.
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The good time which is to be restored is that of the peasant com m un ity or the village o f stur dy y eom en . It is no t tr ibal soc ie ty that is longed for, but an agrarian g e m ei n s c h a f t . This component of po pu li sm m ay be eroded or transform ed in th e ‘ thi rd worl d’ and rep la ce d by ideas o f t he g ood tim e before co lonial ism - f or ex am p le the ideals o f a perfect tri balism or vill ag e dem ocracy in W est A frica and India. T h es e a re natur al d ev elo p m en ts: the ru ra l myths ma y have b egu n in form s sp ecifi c to E ur op e an d it is their vi rt ue r ather than the ir exact co n ten t that is tran sferred to th e alien his tori es and po li tics o f new
societies in Asia, A
frica and, n o doub t, La tin
America. With all this goes a related ideological item. Professor I. Berlin def i ned po pulism simp ly as ‘ the b elief in the value o f bel onging t o a gro up or cul ture’ .5 For th e d iscussion engaged, B erli n’ s definition is suffi
o f H erder o n wh ich he w a s
cient. T h e k ey wo rd is ‘ bel ong
ing’. Populism is against ‘rootlessness’. In Russia it values frater nity based on locality; in America it values both fraternity based on locality and manly indep end ence. T h e ideal peas ant i s, of course, not the ideal yeoman, and in this lies a real ideological dive rgenc e i n the deve lopm ent o f the tw o m ost typical a nd i mpor ta nt populi sms. But befor e w e consider the
im plicati ons o f thi s we
m ight well t urn back to Herder. In my terms, although he contributes at least one essential item to populi sm, Herder was not a pop ulist if only b ecause he was no t a primitivist. This may sound surprising, but Herder believed in the unique virtues of e ach and every sp ecifi c soc iety, not o nly arc h aic ones. Innovation as such is good in Herder’s analysis, what is ba d - cf . Rouss eau - is only the soci al exploitat ion o f the manua l or intellectual labour of others. But he does stress belonging, parti cipat ion i n som e folk-spirit or cu ltu re ; if there is no F av or i tvolk yet everyone needs to be implicated in a society, bound to all its mem bers, direc tl y s peaking to t hem , in order to b e fu lly human. And whatever is true of Herder, all populism does value this fraternity far above liberty. From this fraternity and this primiti vism it is an easy step to intolerance, suspicion, fear of betrayal, and xenophobia. More important still is Herder’s belief that society is older, better and ultimately stronger than the state. Populism produces social and po liti cal movements rather than continuing highly-struc ture d par ti es - a them e se parat e f rom m y su bject, for it involves
1 5 6
PO PU LI SM
AS AN IDEOL OGY
histor ical and structural analysis beyo nd th e reach of ideolo gy -an d one reason for this is that populism is so social, so convinced that the political does not really, fundamentally matter as compared with the community. Being a-political in ideology, it sees politics as bound up in a single apocalyptic and restorative need; not as an ongoing necessary activity. Populist ideology is after all, yet fallible anotherand attempt to escape from the burden of history. H enc e co m es th e conspirator ial element so stron g in th e Ame ri can tradition and much post-colonial populist ideology. If I may paraphrase Professor Hofstadter, one is bound to be disillusioned if, like the Americans, one founds a nation on a claim to perfection and yet aspires to progress. The fact that more people in propor tion h ave lived better in the U .S . A. since 1783 t han e lse wher e is not enough. Nothing can fully come up to such claims and such hopes. T he reasneve r was aputs republic of yeoman fa rmerproduct s, li ving of h ap pily. Indeed Hofstadter it, ‘The characteristic American rural society was not a yeoman or a villager, but a har assed little businessman who worked very hard, moved all too often , gam bled w ith h is land, and m ade his way alone.’ 9 This disjunction between image and reality proved hard to bear. And not dissimilarly the Russian peasant after emancipation in 1861 fo un d hars h - or h ad it found for him - the di sjun cti on b e tween his circumstances and either the idealized mi r or the pro mised progressive Russian future. (I think it an error either to underestimate the communication, however odd, of some items of general European ideology to the emptiness of Russian peasant communities under the old regime, or to forget the richness of the cultural sub-soil in which these ideological elements took root.) Taxation demanded a command of cash, the zem s tv o required a command of politics and administration, and for both he was unprepared. Russia had a special, a sacred destiny. What more natural than that the dissatisfactions of both lands should be ex plained in term s o f usurpation and conspiracy - forces which a re essentially a-historical? And all the time towns were growing, machine industry and bankers’ money becoming more dominant. Whether or not there was an a bso lute loss o f p owe r there was a loss of actual or anticipated status. The mobile townsman, the unpredictable, untraditional, imp erm anen t str anger - the Jew, the European, the b anker, t he heretic: these provided the usurpers, the conspirators, the enemies 157
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of the true republic. They controlled the markets. They were the restrictive masters of gold and credit. (Hence the association of pop ulism w ith cu rrency reform , in flation, and all kinds of monetary gadgeteering.) If they were swept away all would be restored. But they could not be swept away. Thus arose the apocalyptic fantasy world, full of sadistic elements, holocausts, and retributive punishments on a cosmic scale of the kind to be found in the novels of Ignatius Donnelly. A conspiracy against the absrcinal and integral virtue of the farmer which can be remedied by a miraculous reform of currency or credits and/or which will be overc ome by cond ign wrat h and co sm ic p u n ish m en t; these to o are items in the ideology of populism. They are easily associable with racialism and an equal hatred of the foreign poor and the foreign ri ch. T h e for ei gner, too, m ay b e the Easterner (in A merica ) or th e W est erner (i n R u ss ia): i.e. h e can b e an ‘internal foreign er’ . O r he may be a gen uine forei gner, b eyo nd th e p oliti cal b ound aries of th e state. Isolationism suits the conspiracy theory as well as the apol it ic al ideology o f pop ulism . U n tuto red ag ra ri an vi rt ue can only fail through subversion or the sinister magic of the incomprehensible alien. From this we can derive two further items in the constellation o f themes making up the po pu li st i deo logy. T h e fi rst of t hese i s that the po pu list is justifi ed in w hat I ha ve ca ll ed an ‘ asym m etry of civic principles’. By this I mean that, faced with conspiracy and usurpation the populist can demand the highest principles in the beh avi our , moral and poli ti cal, o f others w hile b eing a bsolved h im self (unti l the conspir acy i s destroyed) from suc h st andards. T h is is , fi rst ly , because th e thr eat is so great a nd s o e v il; seco nd ly, because what is attacked is sacred and embodied in the perfect, absrcinal vi rtue o f the f ar mer . M eans, then , as in m any ideologies, need to be adjusted neither morally nor proportionally to ends. This is common enough. What is not so common is the antiDarwini sm o f both Russi an and Am eri can po pu li sm . Both predi cate that the best are not the fittest to survive unless enabled to do so . by som e apocalypti c act of rest orat ion. T h e victors in society will otherwise be those who are inferior to the truly virtuous and admirable. The town will tread down the wheat. Populist econo mics, with which I am not here concerned, are essentially physiocr at i c. T o defend them the struggle f or ex istence m us t be a bate d an d tr ansf ormed. Social D arw inism, Sp encerian ism - so infl uential
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POPULISM AS AN IDEOLOGY
in Russia - jus tifyin g the existing order, the trium ph of t he t rium phant, the worth of the ruthless fittest. The timeless farmers’ and peasants’ republic is and must be anti-Darwinian. If progress is interpreted in Darwinian terms, then populism has to be in favour of change as restoration of a ruined order of society, but otherwise anti-progressive. It is radical and, in its fashion, also reactionary. 3
T h e th ing th at see m s to m e m ost typical of populi sm in a way is its theory of personality. This is a social theory, powerful, consistent, and with deep historical roots. It is a genuine theory, not just an ideological item. Of course most populists could not articulate it, yet without it populism is not comprehensible, and to impute it to those who could not express it seems to me quite consistent with the evidence and representative enough of a situation that we encounter, mutatis mutandis , in all ideologically based movements. Indeed, one can most easily be possessed by an ideology if one is unaware o f it . This theory of personality incorporates elements we have as cribed to Rousseau and Herder. The social analysis which under lies it derives certainly from Adam Smith’s W eal th of N at ions and possibly also from Ferguson’s Civil Society of 1767. It can be sum me d up in a phrase o f the lat ter - the divi sio n o f labour in society fragments the human character. Now neither Smith nor Fer gu son wa s a p opu list, but if w e turn to N . K. Mikhai lovsky (1842-1904) we can see a path that could lead to a representatively po pu list con clu sion . Mikha ilovsky, as it happens , is a serious figure in th e h istory o f sociology. T h e ten volumes o f his wr iting s contain a great deal of real interest, much that is outdated, and some non sense. His study of the role of the intelligentsia, for example, excel lently anticipates M an nh eim ’s sociology o f knowl edg e. His di scus sion of love is mawkish and intolerable. His capacity for verbal system-making is unsurpassed even in more recent sociology.7 The theory that concerns us runs as follows: in simple societies there is a paucity and a uniformity of institutions. Individuals in such societies are competent to fill many roles: they are ‘manyfaceted’, and therefore various, realized and integral personalities. In complex societies individuals are fitted to an advanced and complex division of labour. Their personalities are dominated by 159
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thei r do m inant occu pa tional role. E ach individu al is de pe nd en t on a web-work of specializations equivalent to his own. People are therefore unrealized, fra gm entar y and on e-sid ed per sona li ti es. Th is is bad. T o rem edy th is situa tion ‘tru e’ prog ress - not S pe nc er ian soci al evolution is m ov em en t to a socie ty o f soci al u nifor mi ty w ith a ri gorously lim ited div ision o f l abour. T h is w ill r es ul t in the development of multi-faceted personalities, at once integral and various, and men will no longer be unavoidably estranged from each other. (The modified primitivism of this is clear.) To a sociologist this sounds like a rather odd, even perverse, gloss on Durkheim’s D ivision of L ab our in S o c ie t y. In fact both Mikhailovsky and Durkheim were thinking about classical prob lems of social thought in the form in which these problems had been given them by H erbert S pen cer. Bu t desp ite the dif fe re nc e in inodes of expression this is what all populists believe. Populism is not about economics, politics or even, in the last resort, society. It is about personality, and about personality in a moral sense. Popu lism claims that the individual should be a complete man. Com plete men, living ideally in independent agrarian virtue, would agr ee one with o ne another. T he ir insig hts w ou ld be sound, heal thy, bound to app rop ri at e piet ies . T he ir jud gem en ts w ould be fr ee b ut would coincide. Their society would be essentially co nsensu al and uniform.
The paradigmatic man of populism is free of any burden of alienation: like his relative, man under communism, he has eva ded a ll the consequences o f A dam ’s fa ll . U nlike his comm unis t cousin, however, he is fixed, static, engaged on no Faustian quest to conquer al l na tur e. B ecause he is perfect he is free - an d popul is m uses the word freedom as one o f i ts refe rent s - but because he is perfect this freedom is realized in uniformity and identity of character with his fellows. His freedom, then, is not to be dif fer ent or t o change. Each individu al will is th e righteo us wil l, an d t he sum of these ri ghteous w ill s is the general w ill o f t he com munity. Moral consensus rules, or, in different language, society is and should be a self-righteous moral tyranny. To attain the goal of the yeoman republic American populism cal le d on the aid of governmental intervention, and no t ju st o n such issues as free silver. Usually this intervention was envisaged as tempor ary and di rected to wh at I have called ‘ the restora tion’ - but then nothing is more permanent in politics than the temporary. Both i n Americ a and Russia i t was understoo d that th e restorat ion
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GY
could not take place without allies, and there was more than lip-service in the reach of American populism towards the Ameri can working men (though not towards the new, alien, cheaply labouring immigrant). And Russian intellectuals believed in the desirability of a similar kind of alliance. But the urban industrial worker is seen as subordinate thethe virtues of thepersonalities, soil, of the yeo man and the peasant. These to are veridical and spontaneous, simple, and good. From them all others should learn; on them all others should be modelled. As Mao puts it, ‘The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant, and without this understanding it is impossible to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge.’8
4
Populism, although it combines items in its ideology from many European intellectuals, has itself not been intellectual. It is salu tary sometimes to see things from an unfamiliar perspective. In popu lism w e have, in H ug o’s ph ra se , ‘ L 'ar br e v u du c ote des rari tie s’. T h e ideo logy coalesces in periods of absol ute d eprivat ion - after the general eco no m ic crisis o f 1873, f or example - or of the relative deprivation of rural populations. What could the farmer do in a new world of railways, large banking, urbanization and industriali zation? What could the peasant do with his emancipation in the face of taxation, the cash-nexus, and the gigantic technological and economic transformations of late imperial Russia? Agrarianism is always prone to a conservative utopianism, and this is as true of the Gracchi as of John Ball, as of populism. I do not suppose that there has ever been a genuine English populism, bu t from W illiam Co bb ett to G. K. Chestert on there have bee n odd, sporadic English and Irish populists. Cobbett is a very com ple te case, and h is early experience of the youn g Ame rican republic should not be forgotten. His utopia was in the past, it was a yeo ma n id eal, it harked back to Ca tholic, m edieval Engl and - and for Cobbett to have idealized Catholicism is in itself surprising. He was a currenc y cra nk. H e wa s a xenoph obe of sorts - bankers were bad to Cobbett; foreign bankers worse. But his influence was not as a populist, but as agitator, democrat, and journalist. Daniel O’Connell after the success of Catholic emancipation turned to land sch em es for Ireland o f a pop ulistic kind . Feargus O’Conn or,9 161
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w ho q uarelled w ith O ’C on ne ll as he did w ith everyone, t ried (and in part succeeded) in producing populistic land schemes for the Chartists before 1848, and so on. Indeed that Ireland did not pro duce a full- fledged po pu lism - as distinct fr om populi st ic themes tha t contin ue thro ugh D e Valer a to th e p resent - is a parad ox of European history. But industrial England after the mid-nineteenth century could hard ly be ex pecte d to dem onstrate a r ea l pop ul is m the sort of thing that gave the People’s Party of the United States over on e m illion votes in 1892 and led direc tly to the ‘ cross of gol d’. The populisms of William Morris or Chesterton are intellectual, aesthetic, the ideological dram-drinking of the middle class. T her e is no parad ox in a utopia b eing con serv ative : ut opia mu st be elsewhere, and that elsewhere can be a restored, ideal past as well as a new future. Indeed it can easily be both. In populism were combined a rebellion against the alienated human condition, the idea t hat i nte gral personality w as m aim ed by the social di vi si on o f la bour, a be lief i n the sacredness o f the soil and tho se wh o ti ll ed i t, a be lief in qua lit y o f status o f a ll culti vators, a faith in belong ing t o a local, fixed, virtuous and consensual community, and a belief that this virtue could only perish by usurpation, conspiracy and the working of active, alien, urban vice. Its essence is romantic primitivism. It is therefore profoundly a-political, and no basis for a sustained political party as distinct from a congerie of social movements. Its programme is a programme of restoration (often the rou gh revenge on the alie n and /or soph isti cated) o f the ver it ie s o f the soi l. It g oes beyon d dem ocracy to c onse nsus, and it sa cr if ic es the freedom it proclaims in the interest of a moral uniformity. It calls on the state1 0 to inau gura te the re storation , bu t it d istrusts the state and its bureaucracy and would minimize them before the rights and virtues of local communities and the populist individual. Primitivism must be in some measure anti-intellectual. It would be idleLet forme metherefore to pretend that not distinguished find agrarian utopias repulsive. turn to Ia do recent student and defender of American populism. Professor Norman Pollack argues the case that populism was an interaction of the Agrarian with the social criticism of industrial labour and urban int ell ectual s, accepti ng industri alism. ‘T h e threat was n ot on ly su b sistence living, but the destruction of human faculties . . . the machine was being made to exploit rather than serve man Clearly, Pop ulism w as a pro gre ssive so cial fo rc e.’ 11 Pr ofe ssor
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Pollack in his book makes a good case. Puzzlement, dismay, need, generous sentiments are illuminated in his pages. To me the ideo logy of populism remains a poor, if significant, thing. What is more populism is alive in the modern world, very often in company with nationalism, sometimes in amalgam with both nationalism and marxism. In fact a final judgement on populism is as yet impossible. We can, however, usefully approach populism through the gate of ideology. It at first seemed to me a lackwit idea to think of defin ing pop ulism and po pulist m ovements primarily in terms of an ideological identification. But surely we will automatically and correctly use the term populist when, under the threat of some kind of modernization, industrialism, call it what you will, a pre dominantly agricultural segment of society asserts as its charter of political action a belief in a community and (usually) a Volk as uniquely virtuous, is egalitarian and against all and any elite, looks to a mythical past to regenerate the present and confound usurpa tion and alien conspiracy, refuses to accept any doctrine of social, political or historical inevitability and, in consequence, turns to a be lief in an instant, imm inen t apocalypse mediated by the charisma of h eroic leaders and legislators - a kind of new Lycu rgus. If with all this we find a movement or a short-term association for political ends to be achived by state intervention but no real, continuing serious political party, then populism is present in its most typical form. The populism of the late twentieth century has not, I think, to any very important degree been communicated from either Russia or America. Rather have items of the European thought world been independently spread and re-combined to form various indigenous populisms. In these certain of the ambiguities of the older populisms have been compounded with both primitivist and progressivist elements. Race (cf. N eg r i tu de) and religion (especially Islam, but also Buddhism, millenarian Christianity and Hinduism) have been added to the mix of archaic virtue and exemplary per sona lity. Agrarian p rim itivism is a diminis hed force - though in In dia it appe ars to flo ur ish .12 Con spira cy and usurpation are con flated in the various theories about neo-colonialism and the actions of the CIA. The ‘asymmetry of civic principles’ has become the norm of populist ‘direct action’. Spontaneity and integrity are praised, but now they are particularly identified with the young, 163
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so that the ideal you th (a f am ili ar figure in m yt h ) has l argely replaced the yeoman and the untutored peasant as a cult personal ity. M odern m arxis m in its lurch towa rds th e ‘yo un g M arx’ has become populistic. There is populism in the consensual concerns and the diffuse a-politicism of the ‘New Left’. Ideological items separate and re-combine. Those involved in populism are old and powerful. Certainly, as President McKinley or Tsar Alexander II will not return, neither will the absrcinal populist ideology. But populism continues, and so do its consti tuents. They represent ancient failures, hopes and fears. They are not without a genuine poetry. They are largely devoid of a prin cipl e o f re al it y, but then their pu rpo se was to con sole m en in the ir real discontents and act as a charter for undefined but grandiose pro je ct s. In ideolog y realit y can be sing ular ly irrelevant.1 3
Notes the
1 But Jac que rie that of 1358 is certainly les s populist, for all it s fer ocious antiel itism, than the Eng lish revolt. A ll pop ulists, one might note he re, hate and distrust lawyers — wh eth er th e gu ardia ns and interpreters of feudal charters or of loans, mortgages and the documents of finance.
Essays in the History of Ideas,
2 On this point see A.O.Lovejoy, reprinted New York 1962: Essay II. 3 The concept of the sacred I employ derives in part from R. Otto, but mainly from M.Eliade, New York 1959, and his London 1954. 4 See Henry Nash Smith, reprinted New York 1957, and consider also J.D.Hicks, , New York 1931,
The Sacrednda the Profane, The Myth of the Eternal Re turn, Virgin Lan d, The P opulist Rev olt passim. Encounter, Vol. XXV, July and August 1965. 5 I.Berlin, ‘J.G.Herder’,
If I understand Professor Berlin correctly, he said in conversation that whi le m y acco unt o f He rde r in thes e pa ges is acc ura te as to th e lett er, ye t in spirit Herder must be accounted a populist. 6 Richard Hofstadter, New York, reprinted i960, p. 46. 7 There are accounts of Mikhailovsky in English in J.F.Hecker, London 1934, Pt 2, Ch. VIII; J.H.Billington, London 1958; S.V.Utechin, London 1964, Pt VII. 8 London 1967, p. 65. 9 See A.R.Schoyen, London 1958. 10 Not merely in financial matters or in connection with land: the
The Age of Reform,
Russian Sociology, halovskyand R ussian Populism, Political Tho ught, Quotati onsfromChairma n MaoTse-Tu ng, The C hartist Challenge ,
MikRussian
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inter alia,
American populist platform involved nationalization of rail, telephone and telegraph services. n N.Po llac k, Cambridge, Mass., 1962, p. 12. 12 Race is not so new, of course: there was a strong ‘AngloSaxon* racist strain in American, and Slavonic racism in Russian populism. In religion it is perhaps worth remarking that ‘cargo cults’ in the South Pacific are a kind of protopopulism the ‘cargo’ being an ideological equivalent of currency or credit gadgeteering. 13 T h e writer must apologize that the exigencies ofhis personal life have prevented him from any consideration here of agrarian populism in the Balkans and East Europe, from an analysis of agrarian primitivism in Ireland and India, and from an account of the quite erroneous but very important imputation of a national populism to the French peasantry by republicans including Gambett a in the latter stages of the Franco Prussian war. This last is instructive in that it raises questions of the communication of ideology and its penetration below the levels of an £lite.
The o Ppulist Resp onse ot Indust rial Am erica: Midwestern Populist Tho ught,
CHAPTE
R SE VE N
A SYNDROME, N O T A DOCTRINE: SOME ELEMENTARY THESES ON POPULISM P e te r W il es
Rumania? My country’s contribution to philosophy is the immemorial wisdom of the Rumanian peasant. Rumanian philosopher at international congress
I T o ea ch his own defini
ti on o f popu li sm , ac cording to
the aca de mic
axe he grinds. Thus the specialist in Russia wants an intellectual, left wing definition, while the specialist in North America wants to keep it unintellectual and comparatively right-wing, etc. My own axes, so far as I can identify them, are that of an interested pa rt y wit hout spec ial know ledge o f a ny o f the particular
popu lis m s
discussed in this book, and that of the only contributor who is an economist. I am also by specialization a Sovietologist. Certainly it is the lack of special knowledge that emboldens me to generalize. T o me, populi sm is any cre ed o r m ovem ent based on the follow ing majo r p rem iss: vi r tue r eside s in the sim ple people , who are the I hold that ove r w he lming major ity , an d in the ir co ll ect iv e tradi tions. this premiss causes a political syndrome of surprising constancy, albeit with now more, now fewer, socialist overtones. This syn drome is listed in section 2. Naturally no actual case is pure, i.e. contains every item in the list. In section 3 I discuss the principal exceptions and problems, especially Russia.
A SYNDROME, NOT A DOCTRINE
2
T h e follo win g thin gs, then, tend to follow from the major premiss. 1 Po pu lism is mora listic rather than programmatic. Ends are not held to justify means, the actual measures asked for may be varied very much. Logic and effectiveness are less valued than correct attitude and spiritual make-up. 2 T h is mea ns that unusually much is demanded of leaders in respect of their dress, manner and way of life. Many wear peasant dress (W ito sz, To lst oy ). Belaunde wear s Inca dress. W.J. Bryan was to a degree exception al even in the U S A , a ‘regular guy’. 3 Po pu lism ten ds to throw up great leaders in mystical contact wit h th e m as se s:1 Belaunde, Cardenas, Bryan, Maniu, Nye rere. Without such leadership it is peculiarly hamstrung, in comparison with other movements. 4 Pop ulism is in each case loose ly organized and ill-disciplined : a movement rather than a party. 5 Its ide olo gy is loose, and attempts to define it exactly arouse derision and hostility.2 6 Pop ulis m is anti-intellectual. Even i ts intellectuals try to be anti-intellectual. It should not surprise us that, thus declasses , they crop up as leaders; for in the same way many communist leaders are bourgeois. When quite isolated from the masses, populist intel lectuals form a self-denying ideology of vicarious populism (3/B), wh ich differs in many ways from a move ment with a large following. 7 Pop ulism is strongly opposed to the Establishment , and to any counter-elite as well. It arises precisely when a large group, becoming self-conscious, feels alienated from the centres of power. This alienation may be racial (2/22) or geographical (Canada, U S A ) ; it is a lways socia l. Populism is thus pro ne to conspiracy theories ( ‘nous sommes tr ahi s\ ‘we were ou tsmarte d’), and is capable of violence. 8 But thi s vio len ce is inefficient and short-winded. It would be difficult to ima gine its continu ance after the main populist dema nds were satisfied. It is not glorifi ed or erected into a princip le (Cf. 3/D). 9 In p articular popu lism avoids class war in the Marxist sense. Though certainly class-conscious, it is basically conciliatory and hop es to convert t he Establishm ent. It is very seldom revolutionary. Perhaps the medieval peasant revolts were the last instance of that:
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these were undoubtedly proto-populist movements. The last of su ch rev olts in R ussia ca m e in 190 5. It is f rom then o n tha t proper populis m becom es a m ass-m ovem ent i n Rus s i a. 10 P op u lism is, like all oth er m ov em en ts, corr upt ed and bourgeo isif ied b y su cce ss. N o t on ly p ow er, also respons ibi li ty corrupts. M ov em en t i s easie r than go vern m ent. But since it i s s o u n s op h i sticated and lackin g in id eo log ica l stab ilit y, th is dege nera ti on comes w ith u nu sual an d trag ic spe ed . T h is is esp ecially tr ue of pre-war Balkan populism; perhaps less so of the contemporary Canadian and Peruvian versions. 11 Ec ono m icall y, the I dea lty pu s is a small co-ope r ati ve. What does this word pr ecisely m ean? T h e essen ce o f co- opera ti on i s that the o w ners ar e private p eop le, no t th e s ta te ; each ow ns a s har e to which there is an upper limit; and each contributes something besides capi ta l. T h is con tribution m ight be purcha si ng t he pr od u c t (co nsumers * c o -op s), su p p lyin g th e raw m ateri al (f ar me r s* co- ops ) or labour ( prod uce rs * co -op s). T h e c o -op necessarily f uncti ons in a market; it is incompatible with a communal economy, since it is by definition owner-managed. C o-operation is ne ither capitalist or socialist, although we migh t call a very small, voluntary, one-family co-op the one and a very l ar ge , legall y obli gatory co -op the other. T h u s a C hinese peopl e s com m une is c le arl y soc ial is m , w hile in the U S S R and e a s t e r n Europe the vari ous perm it ted form s o f sm all co-o p (notably i n ag r i culture and domestic housing) are constantly being perverted for pri vat e pro fi t. Bu t w e m ust ex pe ct bo un dar y li ne s to be uncl ear. Co-operati on is a thi rd social form , valid along side the other two th at have hogged so much of the limelight. Its essential relation to populism is obvious in Eire and Scandinavia; it gives the move m ent i ts very ti tl e in Saskatc hewan (C o-opera ti ve Com m onw ealt h Federation), and its cult-object in Russia (the m i r ) . Even in the U S A and Alber ta co-oper ati on w as st il l very st rong .3 12 T h e co-op is li kely to be a marginal enterprise, con sisti ng o f peop le w it h li tt le c apit al. It is also li kely to be in d ebt. I f co operation is still merely an ideal, and the individual still operates alone as an independent peasant or craftsman, these likelihoods become virtual certainties. So deflation threatens the profits of the enterprise, and simultaneously increases the real cost of its debt service. Populism has therefore almost always demanded an expansionary monetary policy. Another factor inclining it this
168
A SYNDROME, NOT A DOCTRINE
way is the populist attitude to government: vigorous government, helping the people, is an excellent thing, but it must not be too detailed or powerful vis-a-vis the individual. Monetary policy fits this bill perfectly. For right-wing populists (Alberta, USA) infla tion is all in all; for the left wing (Russia) of course it is only one item among many. Thus the Narodniki did oppose Count Witte’s clamber on to the gold standard (1896), but this was not the centre of their interest. 13 Fi na nc iers , then , especially foreign financiers (2/22), in variably figure in the populist demonology. Not only are they rich, members of the Establishment and somewhat aristocratic of man ner; they stand for deflation. Their reasoning is drawn from a world co m plet ely foreign to th e populist menta l make-up; i t seem s like so much m umbo-jum bo.4 LarBut ge cap italis ts, eng aged ‘produ ctive’and enterp rise, come off14 better. large enterprises areincomplicated depersonal ized; they presuppose a proletariat (see 3/C below). Small capi talists, then, are still better, being only unacceptable to left-wing populism, e.g. the Narodniki, the CCF before 1936. 15 Po pu lism can be ur ban. Bou nd as it is to tradition and small enterprise, it will be unlikely to support urbanization. But just for th is reason it may well make very many recru its in cities, espe cially from recent migrants. Also, with its respect for the common man, it will or lightly ill ofpopulist the urban masses.There Artisans as wellnot as reject peasants make think excellent material. are plenty of very small masters, and of opportunities for co-operation even in modern cities. Traditional thinking is also extremely com mon. Urban populism is characteristic of Britain. Richard Hoggart ( T he Use s of Li ter ac y ) presents us with the whole syndrome; Moral Force Chartism and the general society of nineteenthcentury Birmingham were also fairly pure examples. Physical Force Chartism was populism ur banize d-, it was a creed for recent migrants. But in the former cases populism srcinated from within cities, and had its roots elsewhere than in rural nostalgia. The Labour Party (note that it is not called socialist) counted among its srcins trends that can only be called urban populism. These trends are now winning out over the state socialism contributed by the Webbs, who were profoundly anti-populist. Leasehold en franchisement, an anti-creditor, pro-small-man measure, is a per fect example of urban populism. The Lloyd Georges, father and 169
PO PU LIS
M -ITS MEA
NINGS
daughter, fit so ill into the British party system because they are singularly pure populists, like so many in the rural Celtic fringes. 16 W here it aff ects the m selve s, po pu lists wan t the sta te to be helpful rather than strong; notably in agriculture (2/12). But they are pragmatic about the use of the state elsewhere, and would not object to its being very strong. T h u s the nationalizati on of ba nk s is an almost univer sal dem and, and N or th A m erican popu li sts ha ve supported all sorts of state-owned developmental measures that an unprejudiced European would call socialist, and indeed all sorts of nationalizations other than that of the land. 17 Popu li sm opp oses social and eco n om ic inequ ality pro duce d by the institutions it does not like. But it accepts the traditional ine qual it ie s due to t he way o f life o f its ow n co nstituen cy. Comp le te equality among peasants is not one of its aims. However, populist intellectuals are often motivated by sympathy for the very poor; e.g. the Narodniki, the Hungarian village searchers (3/B). 18 Being opposed to the Estab lishm ent and to taxati on by a government it does not trust, populism in opposition opposes the military Establishment in particular. Foreign policy is always iso la ti onis t. B ut this is not the same as pa cifism : be ing sim ple-m inded and traditional populists can be very chauvinistic if pushed. But as strategists and as diplomats they are short-sighted and shortwinded. 19 Being tradi ti onal, po pu lism i s religious, bu t it op po ses t he rel ig iou s Establi shment. It tends stro ngly to sectarianism (Alberta, Russia ). 6 Pop ulist intell ectuals, h ow ever, m ay be atheistic. After all, most intellectuals are. 20 Popu li sm abhor s science and techno cracy. T h u s W . J. Bry an prosecuted in the Scopes Trial, Tolstoy hated science, etc. 21 Populism is theref ore fund am entally no stalgic. D islikin g the pre sent and the i mm ediate f uture, it seeks to m ou ld th e further future in accordance with its vision of the past. But this by no means prevents given populist measures from being humane and eff ect ive: U S bimetal li sm w ould have be en,® Scan dinav ian and Irish agricultural co-operation is. 22 Populism show s a strong tend ency to m ild racialis m : the good com mon people ar e of diff erent ance stry from the bad Es tab lishment. Sometimes this belief is mythical or nearly so. Thus the Level le rs a nd D iggers propoun ded the theory of the N orm an yo ke : the seventeenth-century En gli shm an, w ho se traditi ons were
170
A SYN DRO ME,
NOT A DOCTRINE
democratic, was being exploited by a Norman aristocracy with a feudal ideology. Sometimes the racial distinction emphasized is perfectly correct at least as a fact, though this must not condone its use in politics. Sinn Fein attacked the English ‘garri son’; Cardenas, Haya de la Torre, Belaunde were all spokesmen of the Aztecs or Incas vis-a-vis the Creoles; the Iron Guard was anti-semitic; many Narodniki were anti-Jew and anti-German (cf. 2/13) . In each case wealth was indeed in the han ds of the group attacked. W ith less just ificatio n o f even a purel y factual kind, N orth American populism has been anti-semitic (Father Coughlin, William Aberhart, Ezra Pound); this was the ‘fashionable fascism’ of the 1930s (cf. 3/D). 23 Th ere is a range of pop ulisms, from the pre-industrial, anti-industrial ‘peasant’ strain to the affluent industry-tolerating, ‘farmer’ strain. The former was stronger in Russia (even after 1905) and in India under Gandhi. To such populists affluence is unthinkable and the advantages of industrialization are imper ceptible. Nor are they wrong: in both countries half a century of industrialization was or is required before a significant number of peasants benefit. No wonder they are closely connected (3/A). The latter, ‘farmer’ strain is best exemplified in North America. One is tempted to call it less socialistic, and certainly it is so as regards the land and the nature of the farmers’ co-operative. But in relation to the towns, Saskatchewan and North Dakota in the 1930s were very socialist (3/A, B). What it certainly is is less mystical, and less moralistic. 24 Popu lism is not to be though t of as bad.7 So widespread a human phenomenon is bound to contain its quota of evil, and certainly this particular one has more than its fair share of the absurd. But particular populist measures are very sound (1/21); Tolstoy, Belinski and Cobbett were good people: Bryan, Chernov and Belaunde were democratic politicians in undemocratic periods. Only, perhaps, social democrats can show so comparatively clean a moral record. 3
All descriptively useful definitions are frayed at the edges. Framed so as to coincide with the natural divisions of the real world, rather than with logical constructs, they will and should fail to cope with existing exceptions.
PO PU LIS
M -ITS ME
A NI N GS
A T he overwhelm ing appare nt excep tion is Rus si an po pu li sm . The Narodniki were not the first populists in point of time. They came hardly any earl ier than th e U S p op ulists, and long after th e Chartists, who themselves came two centuries after the Levellers and D igg er s.8 N or are the ir ideas , for all their src inality and b ril liance, in the longer run of very great historical importance. The Narodniki no do ubt prepare d th e peasants m orally for co ll ect ivi za tion, but they did not influence the Soviet government’s methods or motivation in this matter, let alone any other aspect of Soviet life. Their anti-industrial philosophy has been rejected by the under-deve loped world . T he ir on e great legacy, Mahatma G andhi ,9 has been rejected even in his own country.The Russians are thus neither a prototype nor an archetype. If the concept of populism is to have general meaning and application it is the Russians, and not e very one el se, wh o m ust b e fit ted u pon the Procru stes’ be d of definition. T h e n ineteent h-century Narodn ik intellectuals w ere par ti cu la rl y peculiar. With the twentieth-century Socialist-Revolutionary Party there was a partial reversion to populist norms. The fundamental difference is that the Narodniki were the only populists in world his tor y t o operat e in a quasi- total itari an state. T h e y could not for m a lo ose , democra ti c, public, mass m ovem ent. T h ey even advo cat ed revol uti on - li ke so many Ru ssian contem poraries. For the same reason the bolsheviks departed from the socialist norm. One result was that both parties consisted largely of intellectual elites, practising a hermetic creed. This is not absurd for socialism, but for populism it is almost a contradiction in terms. For intellectual populism see 3/B. Although they called themselves Socialist-Revolutionaries, and were affiliated to the Second International, the Russian populists were hardly socialist in the twentieth-century definition of that word. In the nineteenth century Proudhon and Rodbertus called themselves socialist, and were accepted as such by many, though today nearly every educated person would accept Marx’s defini ti on of them as petty-bourgeois. T h e w ord ‘Socia lism ’ did not necessarily imply state ownership, let alone central administra tion. The Narodniki had no clear picture at all of the economic forms to be aimed at. But the single institution on which they insisted, the traditional m i r that they wanted to preserve until ‘socialism’, was blatantly co-operative, and loosely co-operative at
172
A SYNDROME, NOT A DOCTRINE
that. The mi r was far less tight than the kolkhoz, and gave far more scope for private initiative. Repartitioning was uncommon. As to nakidki and s k i dk i , the adjustments of family holdings within the village to changes in the size of particular families and to townward migration, they were indeed universal, but in no way socialist. They were egalitarian, their object was to keep capital per head constant - wh ich we have seen to be the quintesse nce of c o-opera tion. It is utterly wrong to call socialist a farm organization that leaves the cropping plan and the whole cost and revenue of the crop to individual management, and permits the purest peasant capitalism (no repartition, no nakidki or sk i dk i ) in all questions of livestock. A socialist might well support the mi r (Marx did) ;10 but such support would not be evidence of his socialism. Anti capitalism is by no means enough. It is not e ven right to call R ussian populism a stage of socialism, a path whereby a large rural society gradually approached socialism. For while the Narodniki were definitely left-wing, and would have preferred, after much distaste, pure socialism to pure capitalism, N ar odnichestvo was not the last stage of Russian populism. Of the Socialist-Revolutionaries one would have said a priori that such people, with either co-operative ideas or none, would face a truly socia list revolu tion by splitting. A nd so they did11 - with an anti-socialist majority. Co-operation, to repeat, is a third way. North America presents the closest relation between socialism and populism, but it is of quite another kind. This area has never had a class-conscious proletariat. For the proletariat for the time being has always largely consisted of the latest distinct wave of immigrants. Bound by racial or national ties to each other, and correctly perceiving that by hard work and abstinence many of them could become capitalists, politicians or professional men, the imm igrants have always refused to see themselves as a class. Nor of course i s any particular wave of immigrants for long a class. It spreads into all classes, but largely retains its cultural and racial cohesion. Of course there has always been a large proletariat, but it has consisted o f the least success ful o f each previous na tional group plus most of the latest. Class solidarity does not grow in such a congeries. But without class consciousness there is no serious socialism. Fantasies of individual enrichment, after the example of the culture-heroes of one’s own race, continue to bedazzle the individual proletarian in defiance of all statistical probability. *73
PO
PU
LIS
M -ITS
ME A N I N G S
Only today has the latest proletariat, the poor Negro, rejected racial solidarity and the hope of advancement. Hating successful Negroes and integration, this group has rejected ‘Americanization’ and begun to feel both as a race (towards whites) a n d as a class (towards the Negro bourgeoisie). It is the first true proletariat on the N orth A m eri can con ti nen t - and it is s oci al is ti c. This explanation of the absence of a North American proletariat is the merest cliche. I repeat it here merely in order to show the contrast with the farmer. For it should not now surprise us that the far m er has b een the l ar g est mass b as e fo r N or th A m er ican socia li sm .12 First, the farmer is racially homogeneous (or, to include
the Old South, the farmer with political power is racially homo gene ous), i.e. h e i s o f Germ an ic srcin and Protestant reli gion. Al so he is not a recent imm igrant. H e is an U r-Am eri kaner, in no n ee d o f nat ional sol idari ty. H is e nem y is the banker and urban Congr es s man, also Germanic and Protestant. So the farmer is, and has been ever since Shay’s Rebellion, a truly class-conscious man. Of course he is also a raci st if need b e : he slaps do w n the N egro an d smell s out the Jew. B ut m ost often he does n ot need to be . Being a capitalist, the farmer is not a revolutionary. But he is not prejudiced either: he simply wants society arranged for his ow n benefi t. ‘ Ca pitali sm or co-o pe ra tion for m e ,’ he says, ‘ accor d ing to my ta st e, and soc ial is m if need b e f or you - under my con trol.’ T o the N or th Am erican f armer, socialism has oft en been a viable an d respec table al ternati ve to m on etary reform provi ded it did not touch himself. In the 1930s socialist governments in this sense of the word took pow er in Saskatche wan (cf . 3/B ) and North Dakota. O nly historic al ch an ce kep t them ou t in A lberta1 3 an d South Dakota. B
Narodnichestvo
was unusual, we have seen, in being a move
m ent o f popu li st intel lect uals alone. T he re h ave be en o ther i solat ed intellectuals: Richard Hoggart (2/14); the Hungarian village sear chers; Jean-Fran5ois Millet, the French painter (‘The Angelus’, ‘The Gleaners’). They all differ from each other, as intellectuals w ill , but al l may be d escribed as vicariou s po p ulis ts.1 4 Since Narodnichestvo was the only all-intellectual movement it would be foolish to generalize from it. But there is obviously very little room for its ideas in ordinary populism. The Narodniki were an elite, they tried to systematize, they rejected religion, they
*74
A SYNDROME, NOT A DOCTRINE
accepted science (thus violating ‘rules’ 2/5, 6, 19, 20). In accepting the major premise they implicitly proclaimed their own worth lessness; and this became schizophrenically explicit in the utili tarian philistinism of Belinski and Tolstoy, the suicidal innocence of the ‘Going to the People’ (1874). There is a curiously exact parallel to the Narodniki in the early his tor y o f the C C F . T h e founders o f the C C F we re convinced and o p en soc ialist s. So m e o f their ear ly p ropaganda had Marxist over tones, some of them came from quite extremist groups in the U K an d th e U S A .15 U nlik e the Narodniki they did no t have to invent their movement or call their social base into being: the price of grain and the populist traditions of Saskatchewan did that for them. But as people with a capacity to organize (though hardly int elle ctu als ), th e fou nders of the C C F impose d the ir socialism on their farmer followers. They openly demanded the nationalization of everything, in cl udin g the land . It will be no surprise to the reader that with success came moderation. The word ‘socialist’ never did get into the party’s tit le . So cial Credit nex t door in Albe rta seemed to show a more electorally successful and yet more capitalist way, etc. The nation alization of the land was quickly abandoned, and that of most other things followed. But this is not at all to say that there is no place for intellectuals in an ordinary populist movement, or that its ideas, slightly dif N ar od ni che stvo, are not also worked out by ferent from those of intellectuals. It follows that there is no difficulty for populism as an id eo lo g y in the new Africa n states, w hich indeed a re elitist in their structure, but whose ideology need not make this clear and may indeed be designed to obscure it. In its vagueness, it leaves an ad mirable amount of room for diplomatic manoeuvre, and of course p ro vi d es a goo d lo gical basis for exclud ing opposition and pluralism. T h e t w o roles o f the intellectual may be illust rated by a compari son with fascism. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the lonely crank,
was the founder-forerunner. Joseph Goebbels, the service intellec tual, was the technician of an established ideology. In just this w a y th e N aro dni ki, for all their personal f ascina tion and originality, had to be only precursors. It is merely their bad historical luck that they were precursors of something that failed. This vicarious intellectual populism is much more noble and left-wing than ordinary populism, which expresses the actual 175
PO
PU
L ISM
-ITS
MEANINGS
sen tim en ts o f the pe op le. T h er e is m ore nati onal is m, c apitalism and general prejudice in the latter; it is theoretically based on the go od ne ss o f th e p eop le, bu t actua ll y on the people. Th e former is also theoretically based on the goodness of the people, but actually on goodn ess. C ompare Poujade with To ls toy. C It is also difficu lt for po p u lism to be prolet arian. Tradition al thinking is less common among proletarians than artisans. Their work is subject to large-scale discipline, which effectively contra dicts th e m ajor prem iss. A lso the y are prone and m ore indifferent to
to techn ocr acy (2/19),
m on etary po licy. N o n e the l ess it is fair to
cal l the m od ern, d e-so cia lized Br iti sh L abo ur Par ty se mi - po pu li st ; and it is certainly based on a factory proletariat. The US Democrats (3/G) are also largely proletarian, and semi-populist. D
Th ere is very m uch po pu li sm in fasc is m . T he most perfect
exam ple is the R um anian Iro n G uard,
w hich w as in es se nc e a
populist movement that went fascist because of the large number o f Jew s i n Ru m ania, and in Europe at
bec au se it w as the fashionab
the time . T h e referenc e to fashion is n
le thi ng to be o joke. Fas ci sm
in its day was the ‘in’ thing, the wave of the future. It was widely and clum sil y imitat ed by m ov em en ts that lac ked its prec ond i ti ons , j u s t l ik e p a r l i a m e n t a r y d e m o c r a c y . T h e m a i n t h i n g s th a t d if fe rent i ate it f rom true po pu lism are eli tism , the cult o f vi ol en ce , the rejection of religion and the demand for obedience to the leader. Contemporaneously with the Iron Guard, fascist elements appeared in North American populism. William Aberhart was a thoroughly authoritarian personality, but too deeply steeped in parliamentarism, non-violence and above all religion to be called even a proto-fascist. But the same cannot be said of his followers F i i h r e r p r i n zi p , the closed mind and the in the 1935 election: the violence were frighteningly presen t am on g th em .16 O n the anti semitic element in North American populism cf. 2/21. Prisoners of a moderate doctrine, the many totalitarian populists have found it impossible to proceed from attitude to action. For in b et ween m ust c om e b elief - in som ethi ng strong and impossi ble . Communists and fascists have such beliefs, but even the wildest populist only wants a state grain elevator, a low rate of interest, a high pri ce o f wheat, a land ref orm or a dead T sar. T h es e are finite
ai ms; more ove r hum an freedom
w ould su rvive their attainment. 176
A SYND ROM E,
NO T A DOCTRIN E
In particu lar we mu st guar d agai nst a scho ol of U S historio graphy that traces M cCa rthyis m back to ni neteent h-centur y Nort h Am erican po pu lism . T ha t o f the 1930s, as we have seen, was highly prone to conspiracy theories and anti-intellectual hatreds, and akin to fascism. From Jews and bankers it is but a step to Harvard men and communists, and the connection with McCarthyism is plain - tho ugh that m ovem ent had al so de ep ro ots among the South Boston Irish. But in the less civilized and less educated North America of the nineteenth-century populists, especially the Populist Party pr op r em en t d i t , did not stand out. Rather the con trary, where everyone was intolerant and social anti-semitism was the norm the populists cut a rather creditable figure, at least in K an sa s. 17 E In thi s contex t w e mu st consider one very special case of popu list r ac ism : that of the Southern Un ited States (peak period around 1892). The people, as we have seen, are a good race, and their exploiters are naturally thought of as a bad one. But what of an ‘inferior’ race, even more oppressed than the populists’ own con stituency? There is nothing in the logic of populism to compel a uniform reaction to such a situation, except that since ‘the people’ are good their prejudices must surely prevail. At first Southern populism treated the Negro as a political, if not a social, equal. ‘It is alt ogeth er prob ab le’, writes C. V ann Woodward ,18‘that during the brief Populist upheaval of the ’nineties Negroes and native whites achieved a greater comity of mind and harmony of political pur pose than ever before or since in the South.’ But it did not last long. T h e hero of Woodw ard’s thesis - that Jim C row did not immediately follow the Redemption (of 1876) or suggest itself to the South ern w hite mind as in evit able - is the Georg ia populist Tom Watson, who protected a Negro supporter from a lynch mob in 1892. Bu t th e same man, when later the Negro vote turned against him, supported a constitutional amendment excluding the Negro from the Georgian franchise, and went on to make racist propa ganda in his own publications. His opposite number in South Carolina, Ben Tillman, went through no pro-Negro phase. It is my impression that Woodward overplays his hand at this point: the Southern aristocracy has a very slightly better record of oppo sition to Jim Crow, and of experimentation with other approaches to the free Negro. 177
PO PU LIS
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ME A N I N G S
F Socialism is m uch mo re distant than f ascism ; a s ca n be se en from those quintessential socialists Marx, the Webbs and Stalin. But Lenin admitted a large influx of Narodnik and indeed populist ideas and manners. He has been followed by other communists, notably Aldo Gramsci and Mao Tse-tung. G W e should be very hesitant to app ly the term pop ulist to th e new regimes in Africa and Asia. Their leaders are extremely elitist, and use only the rhetoric (cf. 3/B). But there undoubtedly exist pockets of pure populism in Asia and Africa, much as in Canada and Britain. H Affl uent pop ulism i s at least not a contrad icti on in ter m s: the unalienated folk society moves on ever upwards, avoiding gross inequalities of hereditary fortune. Lyndon Johnson, by srcin a Southern populist, is in no sense hypocritical in wishing to be ‘the President of all the People’, and in promising ‘the Great Soc iety’ .20 H e do es, h ow ever, rat her detract from his p opu list ima ge by bei ng a multi- m il li onaire - although he did make t he money himself. 4
These people and movements, then, are populist, and have much in common: the Levellers; the Diggers; the Chartists (Moral and Physi cal Force ); the Narodniki ; the U S p op ulists; the SocialistRevolutionaries; Gandhi; Sinn Fein; the Iron Guard; Social Cred it in Albe rt a; Cardenas; Haya de la To rre; the C C F in Saskatchewan; Poujade; Belaunde; Nyerere. T h e li st i s a lr ea dy long bu t st il l very incom plete. N o histori an can neglect the concept as a tool of understanding.
N o t es
1 This is not the same as the fascist Fiihrerprinzip; see 3/D. 2 An exception is the obsessive schoolteacher William Aberhart of Alb ert a, wh o forme d Soc ial C re di t st ud y grou ps eve ryw her e. A fu nd amentalist preacher, Aberhart was, at least, very far from being an intellectual. 3 The most leftwing type of cooperation is communitarian, where the means .of consumption are also collectivized: the kibbutz , the Russian and
178
A SYND ROME, C hin ese co m m un e. Po pu li sm (no tably w 4
NO T A DOCTRINE
has only hi
C on fus ion
ari ses , how ever, in pop
m ana ged m on ey is good b
u t i ts actual
and pa per m on ey , infl ation is extrem sary acc
st ori cal connec ti ons with t hes e
ith the fi rst two).
om pa nim ent o f banks. S
ulist
m inds s inc e the i dea
m anagers
ely diff icul t, bu t banke rs a re a neces-
o the ide al popu
abo ut thr ou gh an ab un dan ce o f preci ous metal ( introd
uction
o f paper m
perfect pop
on ey was
uli st, W il li am
of
ar e bad. W it hou t banks
bi metal li sm, Bryan
actually r
C ob be tt (U
li st i nf l at i on i s brought
es i st ed by that
). T h e
ot her wis e
K , ear l y ni net een th ce nt ury ), who
w a n t e d b o t h a l o w e r r e a l c o s t o f d e b t s e r v ic e a n d a g o ld c u r r e n c y . M o n e y is not an easy subject, and such confusions are natural. 5 S ocial C
re d it a s a m ass m ove m ent ori ginat ed i n Aberha
Prop hetic
B ibl e Insti
tut e.
success am
on g the sec
ts .
Narodniki
The
had their greatest popular
6 T h o u g h the m onetiz ati on o f si lv er by one country driven
m ost o f t he gold
repe ated,
it w o uld
sti ll hav e raised t
na tiona l reserves. It w suit. T tual sn
h is w o uld
out o f that country, as
ou ld also
ob be ry th at has p
al one would hav
the Repu
hav e prom pted other depressi
reven ted a fai
e
bli cans ti rel ess ly
he w or ld’s stock of
ha ve alleviated the great
rt’ s Calgary
bank and int
er-
countri es to fol low
on. It i s mere i ntell ec-
r as ses sment of
bi m etal li sm b y
econ om ic his tori ans. 7 I ow e this and secti
on 23 to Prof. Frank R
Co l lege . C f. al so W alt er T . K . N ugent,
andall
of Sarah
Law rence
TheTolera nt P opulists,Chicago
1963.
8 The Chartists consciously imitated these groups, even reprinting their pamphlets. 9 Who learned his populism from Tolstoy. 10 C f. his l ett ers t o Vera Z
asu li ch,
11 T o be p reci se, fi rst over the wa 12 W i th ackno
1881. r and then over
wle dge m ent s t o S .M .Lips
et,
the bols hevik s.
Agrarian Socialism, Ber-
keley, 1959. 13 F o r the o pen A lb e r t a , c f.
J. A
1959
F or the
op. cit
., C h . 1 .
con troversy on m
. Ir v in g ,
w ho le area of these f
14 I ow e this
phrase and m
15 L ips et, op. cit
onetary ref
orm versus
soci al is m i n
The Social Credi t Movementin Albert a, Toronto
., pp . 25,
our con
ti guo us ter ri to ri es cf . L ipset ,
an y of t he ideas
here to Prof . Gellner.
104 .
16 Irv ing , op. ci t. 17 N ug en t, op.
ci t.
New York 1957, p. 46. The St range areer ofm JiCrow ed hiC s populi sm f rom L i ,Tachao , whom t he Bol she vi k R evo luti on inspi red t o the s tud y of Navodnichestvo. C f. M auric e Meis her, Li Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism, H arvard, 1967, ch. 4. 18
19 M ao acquir
2 0 A m uch
m ore dem
his pr edeces sor,
w ho
ocrat ic s logan than t
was perhaps the sec
he eli ti st ‘ N ew Fronti ond
er’ of
U S pres ide nt ( t he ot her
b e i n g W i l s o n ) in 1 5 0 y e a r s w i t h o u t a t r a c e o f p o p u l i s m in h is m a k e u p .
179
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE SOCIAL ROOTS A n g u s S t ew a r t
Three major strategies present themselves in the study of populism. We can view it (i) as a system of ideas; or (2) as a number of discrete historical phenomena; or (3) as the product of a certain type or types of social situation. Each of these approaches is relevant but it is the third which is the most illuminating. The unity of populism does not lie in a unity of content of the ‘pro gra mmes’ o f t he variet y o f pop ulist m ovem ent, hist orical and con te mpor ar y; qu it e the re ver se. T h e u nity lies in a unity o f sit uations. The analysis of populism requires that those situations in which it ap pe ar s be broken dow n into a num ber o f rel evant dim ensions. The unity that is populism may then be demonstrated to lie not in the particular details of a series of specific situations but in the recurrent pattern of an ideal type of social relationship. This method is particularly necessary in the case of populism since the situation in which it arises means that populism lacks ‘srcinali ty’ of ideologi cal content. A cert ain sha pe lessn ess in ideas and organization is inherent in populism. Recruiting as it does from people who reject formal intellectual doctrine and formal o rganiz ati on, it i s not surprising that do ctrine an d or gan ization should lack delimitation and discipline. The consequent amorphousness makes generalization difficult, but itself provides the basis for another generalization. Populism emerges as a response to the problems posed by modernization and its consequences. These problems are most importantly those of economic development and of political authority. In this context, Edward Shils has pointed out that it is possible to view populism as *a phenomenon of the tension between metropo li s and provi nce . . .’1. T h is ten sion is th e prod uct fo 180
THE SOCIAL ROOTS
differential development, the retarded state of the ‘provinces’, both objectively (in terms of power, cultural influence, etc.) and subje ct iv el y (in ter ms o f per ceiv ed threat to interest, status, values, etc.). Populism derives its particular character from two such tensions. It springs both from the tension between backward countries and more advanced ones, and from the tension between developed and backward parts of the same country. In the real world, these two tensions of course overlap and interact. In the following analysis, the ‘external’ aspect of the populist response refers to the fact that a necessary condition for the emergence of populism, both as an ideology and as a movement, in any society has been contact with forces and ideas associated with higher levels of development than those to be found in the soc iety prod ucing the respon se. T h e ‘internal’ aspect of the analysis is in terms of the different positions and reactions of different social groups within a country i n and to th e proce ss o f mode rnization. One must of course recognize that the whole notion of what is ‘one co un try ’ is no t at all clear or determinate at the sta rting point of the process of tension between the developed and the underdeveloped. It crystallizes in the course of this tension and is connected with it.
EXTERNAL FOCI
Pop ulist m ovem ents appear in societies and soc ial gr oups which a re and have become aware of being peripheral to centres of power. In the ‘external’ perspective, the social action that forms the basis of the populist movement may be viewed as motivated by an i nd ir ect confrontation with problems of economic development. It is the fact that this confrontation has been indirect which makes populist movements distinct from other types of social movement. Populism has emerged when ideologies and movements which more directly confront industrialization and its consequences have come to be regarded as alien or inappropriate or both. Thus, in its ‘external’ aspect, Russian populism is the response to a variety of West European socialist doctrines; in Peronism the pattern is extremely complicated, with s uscep tibility to populistic n ationalism follow ing u pon a rejecti on of socialism, syndicalism, and anarchism on the part of the mass base while the elite of the movement was influenced by Italian fascism. 181
PO PU LISM
-ITS
ME A N I N GS
In the nineteenth century Western Europe provided the major ultimate point of reference, in particular for the Russian populist movement. Prof esso r Venturi has emp hasized th e degree to whic h the Russian populists viewed their proposed reforms as a response to the problems of economic development as these emerge in W este rn Eu rope.2 Similar ly, a num ber o f writ ers, nota bly Professo r Hofstadter, have drawn attention to the Anglophobe and isolation ist elements to be found in North American populism, although the ‘external* referent is clearly of less importance in this case.3 In this century, both Western Europe and the United States have been the source o f the ‘dem onstration effec t’.4 T o those indigenous elites upon whom this effect has its greater impact, it has the dual form of an exposure to the analyses and controversies about the pattern of economic development in the West and the experience ofr the practical consequences economic ness f or thei society, in term s o f its invoof lvem en t inbackward a n increasingly world-wide econom y dominated b y the interests of the industri all y advanced societies. Associated with these problems of economic development are problems of eroded legitimacy. Populistic mobi lization represents attempts to revitalize integration on the basis of ‘tradi ti onal’ values . Initially it is tho se w ho com po se the m ov e ment who are to be so integrated; hence the stress on moral and social regeneration which one universally finds in populist pro grammes. But in the long run it is a technique of national integra tion. This attempt may come from those who wish to change the structure of society or from those who wish to preserve it and their position in it which they see as threatened. For a very large group of countries in Asia and Africa mobilized by W est ern Europ ean i ntervent ion, this involvem ent m eant colonial status (this means that by Western Europe in this context one denotes, with few exceptions, Britain and France). Where the U nited Stat es was the focus, notably i n the case of L atin Am eri can societies, this was not necessarily the case. But the situation is complicated here by the fact that Latin American societies have typicall y had se para te f oci fo r the two elem ents o f their dem onstra tion effec t. W hile econom icall y and therefor e frequen tly p oliti cally their exposure has been to the United States, culturally many of them have long and intimate links with European, particularly Iberian, thought. This complication is paralleled in the case of the West European group by the very different experiences 182
THE SOCIAL ROOTS
subsumed under ‘involvement’ in the case of the British and French colonies respectively.
POP
ULISM
AND
NATIONALI
SM
The single exception to the pattern of populism ‘inheriting the legacy’ of other ideologies and movements is that of nationalism. In spite of the internationalism which has been and is part of the ideology of a number of populist movements, populism is a kind of nationalism, the distinguishing feature of populistic.nationalism being its equation of ‘the nation’ and ‘the people’. In a populistic phase of the drive for national independence, great emphasis is laid upon mobilizing ‘the people’ as an essential part of the struggle. In the imagery of populistic nationalism ‘the people’ are ‘the simple folk’. In practice, ‘the people’ will frequently be those social groups which form the mass base of the movement (the descamisado, etc.). T h ey are the va nguar d and the we apon of pop ulistic nationalism. In such nationalism, there is a proliferation of organizations embracing all aspects of social activity (trade unions, w om en ’s association s, y outh groups, etc.). T his organizational network may be extended and intensified when the populistic nationalist movement comes to power. It is equally characteristic of governmentally directed populistic nationalism (Peronism). By its orienta tion toward s th e peo ple at least in theory, and its involveme nt of the people at least in aspiration (activation is more important than par ti ci pati on in this context), populistic nationalism may be distinguished from other nationalisms chiefly characterized by economic policy and/or cultural ethos. Whether or not nationalism assumes a populistic form depends upon a variety of factors. Of particular importance is the level of economic and political development in the society which is subject to the colonial or tutelary status; the consequences of that status for the social structure (which are inextricably interwoven with the intensity of the colonial involvement); the manner and agents of the initial movement for independence or for some alteration in the colonial statu s qu o, and the response of the colonial power to this movement; the absence of an integrated elite; changes in mobility, upward or downward, of key strata who provide the core as against the mass support for populist movements. (The direction of mobility is an important determinant of the different varieties
PO PU
L ISM
-ITS ME
ANINGS
of populistic nationalism in terms of attitudes towards the state in its present form, etc.) The first stage of nationalist movements in colonial territories, for example, has frequently taken the form of limited demands on the part of professionals recruited from the upper and uppermiddle classes for access to certain higher status jobs within their society, particularly in the administrative structure. In the second stage such accommodatory demands are rejected and the nation alist movement assumes a more militant form, in the later stages o f wh ich attempts are ma de to m ob ilize th e ‘p eo p le’ as a p ol iti ca l for ce. O f part icu lar hi storical imp ortan ce in stim ulating this popu listic consciousness were the Russian Revolution and the example of Gandhis m.5 The degree to which this populistic consciousness is institu ti onali zed or i s m erely an ep hem eral or sub sidiary part o f any p ar ticular movement is dependent upon the particular configuration and dynam ism o f the variabl es al ready listed. In the case of Indi an nationalism, for example, in spite of the importance of Gandhism as an e xam ple f or other colon ial and im perial territori es, the pres ence of large elements from the upper and upper-middle strata in the nat ional is t elite resul ted in the in stitutiona lization o f the m ove ment into what di Telia terms ‘a multi-class integrative party’. As he poi nts out, t his is the m ost m oderate o f all po ssible populi st varieties, ‘so much so that it is even doubtful whether the term “ popul is m” ca n be ade quatel y applied to [it].’ ® T h e dang er of creating a spurious category of populist movement is avoided if one recognizes that populist nationalism is not uniform. A parti cular combination of historical and structural factors will set the pa rame te rs for its dev elopm ent in p arti cular type s o f sit uation. In certain circumstances, for example, populism may be merely a cr uc ia l pha se i n the st ruggle f or nati onal inde pe nd en ce. T h at in de pendence having been achieved, consciousness of marginality to centres of economic power declines and means of integrating the newly independent society, other than populistic mobilization, are attempted. This pattern is particularly typical of anti-colonial movements where the aim is above all the withdrawal of the metropolitan power. In a second type, populistic nationalism characterizes regimes rather than movements. In some cases this characteristic may represent continuity in that the regimes concerned represent the
184
THE SOCIAL ROOTS
institutionalization of movements of populistic nationalism. In other cases, how ever, there will be no such c ontinui ty in that regimes will themselves initiate movements by the manipulation of the sym bols o f pop ulis tic national ism. In the con tex t of im perialism in th e c ontem porary w orld, emancipation f rom economi c and political domination is increasingly the potent ‘external’ cata lyst for the po litical activity of a varie ty of social g roups. In par ticu lar, native bourgeoisie seek to replace foreign by domestic control and development of the economy and by the same process to in crease their power vis-a-vis other groups in the society (e.g. agrarian interests, the army, the Church). In these circumstances, such bourgeoisie will frequently attempt to win support by an ideology of populistic nationalism.7
P O P U L IS
M
AS
A
RESPON
SE TO ‘CR
I SE
S
O F
DEVELOPMENT’
As noted above, the ‘internal’ aspect of the analysis of populism is in terms of the different positions and reactions of different social groups in and to the process of modernization. Subsumed in the ‘process of modernization’ are the beliefs of various social groups as to how development might best be achieved and their views as to the likely effects of alternative patterns of development. There is no single criterion of ‘best achievement’ operating within these beliefs. Populist movements may therefore be viewed as responses to a variety of crises of development. Important among these crises are (a) the decision to industrialize and how, and ( b) the current or anticipated consequences of industrialization. (a) T h e dec ision to industrialize or that indust rial izat ion/ modernization is a desirable goal to be reached as rapidly as a variety of obstacles and competing criteria permit, may itself be sufficient to produce a populist response. Either of these decisions may be made by particular social groups, either as a result of the frustrations produced by the backwardness of their society (‘the demonstration effect’) or of those produced by the lack of oppor tunities for their particular groups within their own society. Al though these decisions are stimulated by contact with more eco no m ically advanced soc ieties, it in no way follows t hat they i nvol ve a further decision to imitate t he pattern o f development and cur rent 185
PO PU LIS
M -ITS
M E A NI NG S
situation of these societies. More frequently the reverse position has arisen in which populism as both ideology and movement has focused upon a desire to avoid just such an eventuality. Russian populism is an example of a populist movement arising from the Western European demonstration effect, leading to the desire to industrialize but the not result at the cost of creating thoseinsocial conditions which had been of industrialization the West. The populi sts sa w the tra dit io nal pea sant institution s - the obschina and the mi r - as provi ding t he organiza ti onal forms b y mea ns o f which Russia might pass from semi-feudalism to industrial socialism, while by-passing the horrors of capitalistic industrialization. ( b) Populist movem ents as a response t o the current or antici pated consequences of industrialization: once the process of in dustrialization is under way, the differential development of the industrial and non-industrial sectors of the economy may create conditions conducive to the emergence of a populist movement. These conditions may arise at widely different points on the con tinuum leading to the fully industrialized society. A number of Latin American societies, for example, fit a pattern of social de velopment in which there is an established industrial sector but in which modernization is largely blocked by powerful social forces desiring to maintain the statu s q u o * (The division between these forces, linked to foreign interests, and the new industrial-entre preneurial bourgeoisie ( bur g uesia na cion al) is a key factor in the dev el opmen t of Lat in Ameri can pop ulism - outstanding ly in Argentina.) Much further along the industrialization continuum are those movements which are a protest not against backwardness but against the pace and pattern of the modernization process. Typical of such movements are the populist movement in the Un ited Sta tes of the 188 0s and 1890 s and the pra ir ie mo vem ents of Canada.9
THE ‘
JANUS
POPULI
ST
QU
AL
M OVEM
ITY*
OF
ENTS
It is thei r ch ara cte r as responses to dev elop m en t ‘crise s’ wh ich give s populist mov ements their par tic ula r ‘Janus qu ality ’. T h e exposu re to modernization of the societies in which these movements arise may be direct or indirect; that is, they may possess an industrial sector or they may experience colonial/imperial status and the 186
THE SOCIAL ROOTS
demonstration effect; or both. Populist movements are based upon a belief in the possibility of controlling the modernization process and they share ‘a common characteristic of a search for a synthesis between the basic values of the traditional culture of the society [in wh ich th ey oc cu r] and t he need for modernization’. 10 However violent the changes achieved or envisaged, the populist ideology will be continuous with important elements in the ‘traditional’ culture. T h e sy nt h esis w ill therefore be a particularistic one in the case o f each m ov em en t. A t th e tim e o f the emergence of the populist movement the traditional culture will frequently have been exposed to considerable disruption and the framers of the populistic ideology will often be arbitrary and opportunistic in their selection from this ‘traditional* culture. It is the fact that the synthesis seeks to integrate around traditional values a society ex posed to but not necessarily p a r t o f social change that makes it a common characteristic of the populism of Guinea and Senegal and of that of Poujade. The ‘exposed-to/part-of’ distinction refers to the fact that potential recruits to populism are mobilized by but do not yet participate in social change, since in their pre-populist state they lack an ideological map to direct their actions. It is the encounter between ‘traditional’ cultures and structures already affected by social change and ‘non-traditional’ cultures and structures w hich prod uces the var ian ts of popul ism. Typic all y, t he
traditional society producing a populist movement has been an agrarian society. But populist movements are not simply peasant movements. In those cases where they have been largely agrarian protest movements, they are distinguished from peasant move ments by the fact that, unlike the latter, the elite of the populist movement is recruited from a different social group than the mass following . A po pu list m ove m ent may move in the direction of peasantism in those cases where the elite of the movement, having attained its immediate goals (national independence, status recog nition, etc.), dissociates itself from core populist support and becomes increasingly conservative. But populist movements may equally find their early vital sup port in urban contexts, recruiting their mass following from a large number of recent migrants from the countryside (the out standing example here is Peronism). In these cases, where such an urban element is important, it will not however be the sole basis of the movement. Populist movements srcinating on an 187
PO PU LIS
M -IT S M EA N IN G S
urban base will seek to channel rural protest, fusing urban and rural in the coali ti onal char acte r typical of populist movements. In underdeveloped societies the need for reformist groups to find a potent political base produces the developmental pattern to wh ich H ugh Seton -W atson has drawn attention .11 In th e fir st stage the movement is composed solely of small groups of intellectuals lacking any mass support and in many cases seeking to convert the whole of the ‘educated class’ to their point of view. In the second stage the movement grows in size with the recruitment of supporters among the urban workers. But in an underdeveloped society the latter are too few in number to provide an adequate power base. In the third stage, therefore, the movement seeks a large-scale mass following by attempting to channel the discon tents of the rural society. This drive to mobilize the peasants may or may not be successful, depending upon a variety of factors. Import ant among these ar e the p olicies and stab ility of th e g overn ment and th e degree o f instabil ity in th e rur al society. A n example of this pattern of development is Russian populism. In rela tively more developed cou ntries, the urban base o f rece nt rural migrants may predominate in the populist coalition. The cohesi venes s o f such a coali tion may be eroded in a variety of ways. The differentiation of social structure may provide one or other, or both, of the major bases of the mass support for the movement with alt ernat ive and more effecti ve mech anism s for advan cing their political demands. Alternatively, the dynamics of the movement rather than changing structural conditions may be viewed as the eroding factor. In the process of institutionalization, for example, the elite may come to rely increasingly heavily upon one rather than another of the wings of mass support; or having attained its political goals, the elite may dissociate itself from the populist movement and shift the major focus of its activities into other spheres, usually economic. The urban wing of the movement is likely to become self-contained and autonomous. Thus, following the fall of Peron and the further development of the Argentinian economy, Peronismo was modified into a quasi-labour movement. This modification resulted in the loss of part of the party’s ‘rural and typically po pulist fo llow ing ’,12 mak ing it difficult for th e party to win elections. (The Indian Congress Party and the Mexican P R I are major exa mples of a p atte rn of con servatism increasingly 188
THE SOCIAL ROOTS
characterizing parties which have come to power partly as a result of their basis in a populist movement.) In developed societies, the urban wing of the typical populist co al itio n w ill norm ally have achieved an inde pend ent organization and ideology as an industrial working class, and the bourgeoisie will cease to provide anti -statu s qu o groups seeking the formerly desired coalitional mass base. In these circumstances, there will be a growing tendency for populist movements to be farmer’s move ments and for coalitionary moves to come from them. The over tures made by the mid-western populists to the nascent labour m ov em en ts in the U S A o f th e 1890s was probably the first example of this pattern13 Populist movements arising in developed societies will normally only attract support from other marginal groups (e.g. the support given to Poujadism by small independent busi ness). ‘Crisis situations’ may on occasion increase the importance of such movements. The major example here is the rural support gi ve n to th e na zi m ov em en t.14 Bu t here also the po litical impotence of populism in a developed society was illustrated by the failure of the populistic element of nazism to achieve its aims. When the nazis came to power, those ideological elements which were an exp ress ion o f p op ul ist g rievanc es were rapid ly eliminated.16 Certain structural conditions for and precipitants of other types of social movement are equally useful in the analysis of populist m ov em en ts. 16 Li ke o the r mo vem ents , p opulist mov ements seek to re-form the existing social structure. The level of reconstruction they env isage - that is, w hether they a re ult ima tely reformist or r evolu ti onar y mo ve m en ts - is dependen t upon a variety of factors. Im por tant am on g th ese is the degree to which it i s possible for any group to modify social norms without calling into question the values of the society. In Tsarist Russia, for example, this was not the case and the inflexibility of the government and its failure to mobilize the peasantry led Russian populism in a terroristic direc tion. In the colonial societies of Africa, the inflexibility of the auth orities led to disillusion with moderate demands within the status quo. There followed an intensely politicized nationalism which found expression in populistic consciousness. The structural and particularly the ideological features of any given populist movement are noticeably affected by its relation to earlier movements of social protest. As noted above, populism is 189
PO PU LIS
M -ITS
ME A NI NG S
frequently a characteristic of the second stage of social protest movements in traditional societies. But in both underdeveloped and relatively advanced societies, populist movements find a mass following among those who have engaged in earlier forms of protest. In Russia, for example, the populists sought unsuccess fully to recruit a following amongreligious/millenarian the sects of the Raskol,17 and a number of writers have depicted movements as precursors of nationalist movements, many of which have a populis tic form.18 T he ideology o f man y pop ulist m ov em ents con tains a rejection of European institutions and culture (particularly parliamentary democracy) as structural and cultural characteristics alien to the indigenous society. This is analogous to the reversal prophecies to be found in ‘cargo cults’. The ‘availability of means to express grievances’ is an important determinant not only of the reformist any given populist movement but alsoor ofrevolutionary the pattern ofcharacter develop of ment of the movement. American populism, for example, was the inheritor of a series of earlier protest movements, the emergence of whi ch was mad e possible by the politi cal and social stru cture o f the United States in the nineteenth century. But the same structure made the creation and maintenance of a third p a r t y very difficult. If the frustrations arising at various points in the development process, t oget her with the responses o f governm ents to expression s of these frustrations, are important general determinants of the emergence of populist movements, a variety of factors may preci pitate that emergence or accelerate the development of an already existing movement. In the case of both Tsarist Russia in the nine teenth century and the imperial powers in this century, defeat in war was of m ajor import ance in the em ergen ce and acceleration o f particular populist movements. In the case o f Am erican popu lism, economic depression was the main precipitant. In Latin America, very rapid urbanization and a ‘revolution of aspirations’ create ‘a dis posa ble mass’ which can be m obilized in a p opu list m ov em en t.19 Th e abov e is a s tat ement of conducive but not suffi cient cond i tions for populist movements. Why are movements p opu li s t rather than communist, purely nationalist or social-democratic? Reinhard Bendix has pointed out the degree to which ‘local conditions, his tor ical an te ce den ts , ac ut ene ss o f . . . c ri si s, and . . . intensi ty o f . . . orga niz ational dr ive’ are determinants o f the dire ction o f radicalization.20 Recog nizing the importance o f this spe cific-co nfigu ratio n
190
THE SOCIAL ROOTS
caveat , certain social relations do appear basic to the emergence o f pop u li s t movements.21 In particular, there exists a social rela
tionship between two groups, one of which is peripheral to the economic power of the other (‘metropolis’ and ‘province’). Two such relationships are superimposed upon one another. Within the society in which the movement occurs, the social group or groups w hic h p rovid e the elite o f the movem ent are mobili zed by exposure to a more developed society. But of equal importance is the mobilizing effect of powerful groups within the host society to which the members of the movement feel peripheral. To close and reverse the gap, the populist movement desires modernization or, in the case of developed societies, a restructuring of the economic and political system. It seeks to achieve this by integrating the society around traditional values, and a resolution of the tension inherent in this situation is sought through the ideology of the movement.
FU
NC
TION
S O F
IDEOLOGY
In an excellent paper on ‘Ideology as a Cultural System’, Clifford Geertz has argued that we can and should regard ideology as a ‘map of problematic social reality’, which has the possibility of making an otherwise incomprehensible situation both under stan da ble and signi fican t.22 T h e individu als who believe i n the ide olo gy may do so from a varie ty of motiv ations , subsume d under the categories interest or st r ai n. Whichever the case, the ideology derives its power from a powerful symbolism. ‘ . . . [The] head-on clash o f literal me aning s in ideo logy - the iron y, the hy perbole, the overdrawn antithes is - provides novel symbolic fra mes against which to match the myriad “unfamiliar somethings” that, like a jo ur ne y to a stra nge coun try, are produced by a transformation in po litic al lif e. ’23 The Janus quality of ‘the populist situation’ is reflected in the populistic ideological synthesis of traditionalism and modernism. The beliefs contained in populist ideology have the dual function of ‘solutions to critical dilemmas’ and ‘mobilizing agents’. The nature of the synthesis reached in any particular case will depend in part upon the level of development of the society. The variant of populist ideology to be found in many of the new states of Africa and Asia stresses modernization but sees it occurring on the 191
PO PU LI SM -IT S M EA NI N GS
basis of indigenous forms which will prevent the disruptive consequences of modernization in the West. In societies having li ttle o r no industrial sector, th e p easant prob lem will be a t the foref ront of the populist programme. In th eory if not alwa ys in pr actic e, popu lism seeks to organize social recons truc tion around traditional institutions of the ‘people’. The Russian obschina, the Mexican ejtdo, the Peruvian allyu and the African village, all such variants of peasant communal ownership and activity have figured prominently in the ideologies of their parti cular populist movements. The stress on these forms is both prac tical and polemical. It facilitates integration by emphasizing ‘continuity’ (much more alleged than real) with traditional forms while the stress upon communitarian forms also serves to differen tiate the indigenous institutions from those of the ‘external’ alien society. Parallel to this stress is an emphasis upon the special quality, the ‘ uniqueness’ , of the identity, culture or current situation of the society which has produced the movement. Unlike the Slavophils, the Russian populists did not emphasize the uniqueness of the Russian character. But they did argue that the institutions of Russian rural society gave Russia the possibility of a special path to industrialization. Similarly, an emphasis upon uniqueness of identity is found in the concept of ‘negritude’ and the A pr ista Indo-Am erican personality . The ‘solutions’ offered by populism frequently depict the stress situations in which the movement’s followers find themselves as arising fr om co nspirac ies o f one sort o r another. In un derd evelo ped societies, the conspiratorial agent is commonly a colonial, ex-colonial or imperialist power, although the indigenous representatives of the sta tu s quo will also be included. In some cases, the argu ments presented do amount to a very accurate analysis of the structural determinants of the situation in which the group or society finds i tself . In other cases, there is a stress up on calculated maleficence and xenophobia, containing fascist elements. Both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ variants of populist ideology extol the ‘virtues’ of rural society and its inhabitants and attack the ‘vices’ of urban life, espeially the corrupt, acquisitive nature of its in hab itant s. T h e egoistic individualism of urban socie ty is contrasted with the rural combination of independence and recognized com munal obligation. 192
THE
SOCIAL ROO
TS
Populist movements are not anti-state either in ideology or in practice. What they do oppose is the state in its present form, in particular ‘parliamentary politics’. The techniques devised by many populist movements to circumvent the need for ‘political talking shops’, combined with the charismatic or quasi-charismatic leadership which frequently characterizes such movements, clearly create a fruitful ground for increased statism at a later stage. The opposition to parliamentary politics may rest upon a variety of grounds. In underdeveloped societies it may be argued that the homogeneity of the social structure precludes this type of gov ern m ent.2 4 In both un derd eveloped and developed so ci eti es the argument is also frequently found that existing ‘parliamentarystyle* regimes merely create artificial division in the community and perpetuate the domination of the politicians which they spawn. The functions of populist ideology as solutions and mobilizing agents underlie the widely remarked eclecticism of its varieties. An extremely important influence upon the character of these varieties is the task of mobilizing and organizing individuals who because of their economic situation and/or novel social situation are politically marginal. The principal examples here are peasants, small farmers and rapidly urbanized masses. To recognize this mobilizing function is not to suggest that populist ideology is totall y devo id o f con ten t and m eaning . It mu st a nd wi ll co rres po nd to the critical situations in which the movement’s followers find themselves and will do so the more specifically where the mass base of the movement is genuinely homogeneous.
ELITES
The crises of development noted above are expressed in the frustrations not only of peasants and urban masses who com pose the mass following of populist movements but also in those of a variety of groups wishing to initiate modernization and/or ind ustr ializatio n or, at a later stage, to cont rol its form and dire ction. Di Telia has suggested that the elites of populist movements are characterized by ‘some sort of status incongruence’, that is, ‘their status level varies markedly according to the values with which it is measured (economic strength, traditional prestige, ethnicity, education, politica l inf luen ce, foreign srcinated valu es, etc.)’ .25
*93
POPULISM
- IT S MEANINGS
Among the sources of incongruence he suggests are classically the situation in which education outstrips economic growth. As pre viously not ed, this situati on ha s b een an extrem ely frequent source of populist elites, producing as it does those groups of intellectuals and/or students who are frustrated and humiliated by the back ward nes s of the ir soc iety . Exam ples of this situation ar e ninetee nthcentury Russia, twentieth-century Peru and a substantial number of the new states of Africa and Asia. Other situations suggested by di Telia are those in which there occurs a war-induced growth of industries. An anticipated return to peace-time conditions threatens the position of a new industrial group leading it to provide the person nel and finan cial supp ort vita l to the emerg ence a nd success of the subseq uen t pop ulist movem ent. The major example of this pattern is Peronism. Alternatively, the growing economic insecu rity o f traditionalist gro up s (small far mers, for example) will create the potential source of populism, as in Poujadism. Finally the undermining of the relatively high status of traditional white collar groups by economic development and particularly by the creation of new stra ta of hig hly paid s em i-sk illed workers is conducive to the emergence of an anti-status quo elite.
DEVELOPMENTS
The particularistic determinants suggested by Bendix, to which ref ere nce has been made above , preclude generalizations abou t the pattern of development of populist movements but the following possibilities appear of particular importance. Populist movements constantly face the threat of erosion, either by losing their impetus or by being transformed (or assimilated) into movements of a dif ferent type. Populist movements which are basically protest move ments are threatened by the anti-institutional, voluntaristic char acter of grass-roots populism. Government-initiated movements may de cline with changes in thes e govern me nts (either of direction or personnel). In those underdeveloped societies where the popu list-movement regime, represented by the single party, is the expression of substantial social homogeneity, two major develop mental alternatives arise. If and when development occurs the party may move in an increasingly monolithic direction to control those for ces c rea ted by social di fferenti ation. T h e ‘anti-p oliticking’ attitudes and the ideological stress on homogeneity which 194
THE SOCIAL ROOTS
characterize populist movements are obviously possible sources of various forms of authoritarianism. Peter Worsley has drawn atten tion to the totalitarian potential inherent in some underdeveloped societies, while recognizing the counter-variable of traditional soc ial stru ctur e an d th e unp redicta ble role o f political will.29 However, in the course of institutionalization and/or response to economic development, populist-movement parties may not move in any increasingly dir ig iste direction. They may become increasingly conservative, raising the possibility of a new populist movement arising. The coalitional basis of the movement may be und ermin ed wh en the elite or one o f the wings of t he ma ss follow ing finds that economic development has provided it with the goals it sought (in the case of middle-strata elites, for example) or, alternatively, demands policies and organizational forms divergent from those formerly believed to be appropriate (the case of a wor king class gro win g ou t o f an urb an mass, for e xample).27 In developed societies, the marginal nature of populism’s poten tial follow ing makes the coming to power of such mo veme nts m uch mo re un like ly. In su ch a case as that of Alberta, particular historical factors - here th e d epression and the Second Wor ld War - may enable a populist movement to achieve and retain power. But in developed societies, generally, it is much more probable that when conditions occur which do favour the coming to power of a populist movement, it will face stronger competition and/or the threat of absorption into a wider movement.
N ot es 1 Edward Shils, ‘ T h e Intellectuals in the Political Development of the New States’, XII, No. 3 (April i960), pp. 329-68. 2 F . Venturi, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, i960.
WorldPolitics, The Rootsof Revo lution,
The Ag e of Reform, Obstaclesto Changein Latin America,
3 R. Hofstadter, Vintage Books, 1955. 4 See e.g. the discussion by T. S. di Telia, ‘Populism and Reform in Latin America’, in C.Veliz (ed.), Oxford 1965. 5 C f. Shils, op. cit. 6 op. cit. p. 57 seq. 7 See R. Deb ray , ‘Problems of Revolutionary Strategy in Latin America’ , No. 45, September-October 1967, for a discussion of the phenomenon in some Latin American countries.
New Left Review,
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MEANINGS
Debray emphasizes the degree to which such regimes are in reality precluded from pursuing their goal of national independence by the fact that to do so involves measures directly contrary to the interest of those witho ut whose acquiescence the regime cannot persist. 8 See e.g. S.Andreski, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966, ; also A.P. Whitaker and D. C. Jordan, The Free Press, 1966. 9 See e.g. R.Hofstadter, op. cit., pp. 23 13 0; J. R .H ic ks , C. B. McPherson, University of Toronto Press, 1953. 10 R. Lowenthal , ‘T he Point s of the Compass’, in J. H .K a ut sk y (ed.) John Wiley, 1962. 11 H. SetonWatso n, Methuen 1964, pp.
Parasitism and Sub version,
passim in Contem porary Lat in America, Revolt,
Nationalism
ThePopulist
Democracy in Alberta,
Political C hang e in Underdeveloped Count ries, Nationalismand Communism, 74 5
12 T .S .d i Tel ia, op. cit. 13 See N . Pollack, Library, 1966, especially Chapter 3.
ThePopulist Re sponse tondus I trial Am erica, Norton FromDemocracyto Nazism, Big Business in the Third Reich,
14 See R.Heberle, Louisiana State University Press, 1945. 15 See R. Schweitzer, Eyre and Spottiswood. 16 See e.g. the discussion in N.S me lse r, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. 17 F. Venturi, op . cit., C hapter 4. 18 P.Worsley, MacGibbon and Kee, 1957, and E.Hobsbawn, Manchester University Press, 1959. 19 See T.S.di Telia, ‘Monolithic Ideologies in Competitive Party Systems’, 1962, Vol. III.
Theo ry of Collective
Behaviour,
The Trum pet Shall Sound , Primitive Rebels,
Trans, of the Fifth Congress of S ociology ,
20 See R.Be ndi x, ‘ Social Stratification and Political Powe r’ , in Bendix and Lipset (eds.), Free Press, 1956. 21 Worsley has advanced some interesting propositions regarding the nature and development of competing ‘isms’ in creating conditions conducive for populism. The late and limited development of socialist parties and the of orthodox nationalism favoured communism and a populistic nationalism. Orthodox ‘Western’ communism with its stress on the role of an industrial proletariat had little or no relevance to the situation of underdeveloped societies. See Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964, Cha pter 3. 22 Clifford Geertz, ‘Ideology as a Cultural System’, in David E. Apte r, The Free Press, 1964. 23 op. cit. p. 64. 24 Cf. Worsley, op. cit., pp. 13064. 25 op. cit., p. 182. 26 op. cit., p. 204. 27 See di Te lia , op. cit., for a short discussion of the transformation of movements into labour movements.
Class, Status and ow P er,
depassement
The Th ird W orld,
Ideology and Discontent,
naciona lista popular
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R NI NE
POPULISM AS A POLITICAL MOVEMENT K enn eth M i nog ue
T o tal k o f G han aian or C hine se p opu lism looks a t first like ta lking of Spanish champagne; it’s plausible, but there ought to be a law against it. The ‘champagne’ in this case consists of two brief historical episodes in Russia and America. They were almost con tem po ran eou s; they presented them selves as movement s a gainst establi shed p ow er by or on be ha lf o f lit tle men livi ng on the land; and both place d gr eat em pha sis upo n th e ‘ peop le’ as the op pr es se d agents o f future chan ges. A s ev eryb ody reali zes p erfe ctl y w el l, the y were radically different ex perien ces, but they did hav e i n com mon a name { nar od ni k being translated as populist) and one or two suggestive an alogies o n w hic h an edifice o f theory might be cons truc te d. What has followed parallels the wine industry: new products have crowded in under the established name. Contemporary usage, without much in the way of theory, seems bent on developing the term. O ur bu sine ss is in a sen se a juridi cal on e : shoul d we leg itimize a general con cept o f populi sm? T he conse quenc es of m aking a mistake on this issue would be to create one more incoherent fi eld o f academic inquiry. I
I HOW
TO STUD
Y A
MOVEM
ENT
W e may b egin w ith a hypothetical pr opo sition: if p opu li sm i s a movement, it is a certain structure of feelings which convinces people that they are part of something greater than themselves, and which generates both ideological thought and political institutions. To understand the movement, then, is to discover the feelings which moved people. The only way we can do this is to look at what they said and did. 197 0
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But here arises the first difficulty. What people do may be inter preted in a variety of ways, and what they say they are doing is necessarily little more than a part of the story, specially presented with an eye to putting the best face on things. ‘A danger almost intrinsic to intellectual history,’ writes Norman Pollack, ‘is that ideas will become divorced from their setting and be viewed in iso lati on .’1 Our primary materials are histo rical; ou r aim is to bu ild up some kind of general theory of populism. But if we are not historically aware, the moral and political assertions of populists will allo w us to draw any conclusions w e like - for the asserti ons of men in a movement are commonly no more than convenient ju sti fic at ion s sn at ch ed ou t o f th e air. T h e y ca n n ot b e ge n er al iz ed at all. To avoid this mistake, we must distinguish carefully between the r hetor i c use d by m ember s of a movem ent - which may be randomly plagiarized from anywhere according to the needs of the moment, and the i deolog y which expresses the deeper currents of the movement. This is easier said than done. But we need this distinction to understand why, for example, Ameri can populi sm has been taken a s, on the on e han d, an ancestor of the current rad ica l R ight2 and, o n th e oth er, as ‘th e c on scie nc e of the social order and its chief protagonist’.3 The American populists may be found using the language of sel f-rea lizat ion, o f cl ass str uggle, o f the rights o f man - all current vocabularies in American politics. But if we take all of this rhetoric at its face value we shall begin to draw some odd conclusions. It is, I would judge, by attending merely to the rhetoric of populism that Professor Pollack arrives at the conclusion that marxism and populism were ‘totally independent systems of thought’ which arrived at the same understanding of a capitalist system which was fundamentally the same on both sides of the Atlantic. This is too intricate an argument to examine in detail; but I can indicate what I mean by citing a populist passage which Pollack uses as an in stance of populism rising above conspiracy theory: ‘We are often asked why we are continually fighting the bankers, to which we reply that we are not fighting the bankers but the system and the political manipulators who have inaugurated and who are per petuating the system.’ 4 T h is is not m erely rhetorical in sty le; nothing in it rises beyond rhetoric. To describe the enemy as both ‘the system’ and ‘the political manipulators who have inaugurated and who are perpetuating the system’ is to back every horse in the
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race - and certa inly a world away from t he dogged theorizing of Marx. Indeed, the thesis stated in the very title of Professor Pollack’s b o o k - T he P opulist R espo nse to I ndustri al Ame r ica - is an illicit abstraction of populist experience. The American populists seem to have been responding, most immediately, to the concrete situa tion of rural poverty and low prices for what they produced. The actual causes which they set up as explanations of their unhappy circumstances varied widely: the gold standard, city manipulation, manipulation by foreign bankers, and so on. The point is that any m ov em en t w ill sel ec t its enem ies w ith an eye t o the ac quisition of allies; and to proclaim that they were reacting to ‘industrial America’ gave populists the possibility of alliance with other non-populist groups in American society such as city liberals and urban socialists and anarchists. If we seek candidates which can be cov ere d by th e abstract formula ‘ that to which the American Populists were reacting’ then we shall find many possibilities in different fields and at different levels of abstraction. The student of an ideology must keep the fact that there are a plurality of ‘causes’ in the forefront of his mind; if he does not, he will un wittingly turn from a student of ideology into an ideologist. This is a danger to which even the most experienced writer is likely to suc cum b. Pro fessor Pollack exemp lifies it when he falls to writing: ‘T h e iss ue at stake was n othin g less than human dignit y— Indeed, Populism was more than a protest movement; it was a glorious chapter in the eternal struggle for human rights.’5 T h es e tw o difficulti es o f st udyin g a movement - generalizing its rhetoric a nd surr ende ring to its ideolo gy - are much less funda mental than a third, whose character we may illustrate from the history of nationalism. ‘Nationalism’ is a self-characterization which will give a certain grandeur to any kind of self-assertion by a large group. As a concept, it is convenient both to politicians (for it makes their actions respectable) and to journalists (for it provides a facile explanation of complicated events). But the cur rent confusion of nationalist studies in political science suggests that the academic inquirer should be wary of accepting the term, at least at its face value. For in the course of two centuries, a great variety of radically different movements have come to shelter under the broad conceptual umbrella of ‘nationalism’. Students of nationalism have consequently spent a good deal of 199
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energy in the business of trying to carve up the field so that some essential idea of nationalism might emerge. They have discovered a variety of types and ‘dimensions’ of the subject, but their failure is evidenced by the way in which these classificatory systems come apart at the seams in banal and uninformative generalizations. In spite of dist inguishing between li beral, i ntegral, occ ide nta l, oriental, authoritarian, democratic, etc., nationalism, political scientists are still reduced to remarks like, ‘In some cases, nationalism seems especially vigorous in an environment directly associated with economic progress, in others, by contrast, it has its greatest support among social groups menaced by economic development.8 Now it seems to me that, if unwarily generalized, the concept of populism will end up in no better condition. It is, to adapt Thurber, a naive little concept, but we ought not to be too amused at its presumption. For, if we allow it to run away with us, we may soon be asking ourselves whether populism is essentially left- or right-wing, fascist or egalitarian, forward-looking and pro gress ive or ba ckward- looki ng and nos talgic .7 A n d th e at traction s o f this road will be clear to us if we remember that we are already equipped with such ramifications as liberal populism, neo-popu lism, legal and revolutionary populism. What then can we do? I can see three possible levels of develop ment: ( a) We mig ht dissol ve the phenomena wh ich nom inate them selves as populism into a general world of movements and ideolo gies. A good deal of what historically is found as populism would then be re-allocated elsewhere. We might observe, for example, that the intellectual leaders and followers of Russian populism were about as rural as a transistor radio. They were a set of urban people with a romant ic belief in the auth enticity o f peasan t feeling, and in the destiny of the unique Russian collectivist customs mi r )
(especially the are largely to bringtofor a new kind o f progressive society. These populists be th explained as middle-class roman tics with poli tic al incl inati ons - those who chose (wh at then seem ed the only possibility) the peasantry as the historical agent of their reformist aspirations. Once a new theory (sc. marxism) and a new candidate for historical destiny (sc. the proletariat) emerged, they were off on another tack. These people would give a very curious weighting to any gener ali zat ions we m ight make about an ‘essent ial populism*. But as creatures of an ideological world, we may well
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make very g ood sen se o f them - for jus t so long a s the y a re not irredeemably pinned down as populists. I propose to discuss this theme further in section 3. ( b) Se con dly , we m igh t take popu lism, on it s own le vel , as a wides prea d ph enom enon . T h is m ight be do ne by ge ne ra li zi ng some of the problems which agitated the populists and seeking their analogues in other areas of the modern world. Sir Isaiah Berlin has argued that the central preoccupation of the Russian populists ‘is not without acute contemporary relevance’. Referring to the slow er tem p o o f ind ustr ialization in va riou s‘ und erde ve lope d* countries, he remarks that ‘it is Populist ideas which lie at the base of much of the socialist economic policy pursued by these and othe r countries tod ay ’.2* 8 A n d w e h ave see n Professor Pol la ck c ast ing the American populists in the role of critics of capitalism and industrialism in general. I have already argued that I believe that any simple attempt in this direction would leave us with an interesting but untidy field of studies, similar to the academic condition o f nationalism. Alternatively, however, we might a tt emp t to draw out the log i ca l implications of the contrast between the countr y and the city - the contr ast to which populis m owes i ts cla im to be d istingu ishe d from dem ocracy a nd so cia li sm. I prop os e to explore this possibility in the next section. (1c ) T hird ly, in d esc en din g or der o f gene ral it y, the re is an indisputable place for historical studies of particular movements which seem in som e way - no rigor ous ge nera l ide a i s invol ved - to be populist. Intellectually, this is the most respectable kind of acti vity; but I take it that our bias is to treat historical studies as ‘raw material’.
2
THE L
O G IC
OF
URBAN AND RU
RA L
What kind o f ide olog y w ou ld w e expe ct the count ryma n a s suc h to produce? Ideologies resolve themselves into an account of the struggle between two moral forces. The situation of the country man immediately suggests that these two forces must be that of city and country. For the countryman belongs to a complicated soc ial system , th e m ost pow erful part o f which is invisi ble to him hidden behind the walls of the city. What he produces has the immediate and v isible charac ter o f foo d ; what he gets - pr ot ec ti on and organiz atio n - is m ediate and invisible. T here is no di ff ic ul ty
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in understanding that countrymen have commonly regarded the city as an alien and hostile force. How may we characterize the countryside? It is generally poor and in debt.. This may not be always so, but the conviction that it is so will be a part of the equ ipm ent o f any agr ari an ideolo gy . Su ch an ideology might be expected to indulge in overheated fantasies of t he lu xury (and sinfulness) o f city li fe. T h e p roduc e o f the cou n try is the basis of civilization (for everyone must eat) and yet it does not obtain the st anda rd of living to which the coun try producer is entitled. By contrast, the city (which rapidly merges in the mind with the state) exploits the peasant and overcharges for the ser vi ce s - prot ect ive a nd burea ucr ati c - wh ich it su pplies. As with any ideology, so here the contrast must be made in moral terms. The countryman works hard and his way of life is 'natural* because it is close to the soil; by contrast, the city is a consumer, almost a parasite, and lives by ‘a sub-section of the brain called cunnin g '.9 Further, all ideologies have grown up into a modern world of his tor ica l awar ene ss; the contr ast mu st therefore inv olv e processes. The city now comes to 'stand for’ the process of industrialization and the capitalist system, which dehumanizes man; and the coun try may be taken to ‘stand for* the old humane values whose resistance to the current evil will save mankind from corruption. This much we may say without bothering in the least with his torical examples. It is not very much, but logic alone will not take us very much further in this direction. We may develop the ruralurban contr ast by adding a n importan t historical p o in t: that th e countryside has largely been dumb throughout its history. It is dumb in t he same sor t of way as the prole tari at is dum b - for the simpl e reas on that art icul aten ess is m ono polized by the o p p os itio n ; a speaking farmer is half way to the city, just as an intellectual pro letarian is no longer a pure spokesman of his class. This is one important reason why populism is, even among ideologies, a notable plagiarist, making do with scraps of doctrine and images largely acquired from other, better established attitudes. But what other questions will the logic of the peasant situation answer for us? One important distinction between ideologies is the issue of voluntarism and determinism. Is the present (bad) situa tion the resu lt of wilful policies o f bad men, or of the unw illed workings of a bad system? If agriculture is taken as the custodian 202
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ENT
of all human values, then we might expect a determinist answer; but in fact we find voluntarist strains in both American and Russian populism. Again, any attempt to turn the urban-rural dichotomy into an ideology immediately involves us in abstraction, primarily the moral abstraction of exploiters and exploited. Such abstraction destroys the srcinal contrast, for the city itself contains many who must be included in the class of the exploited; as a result, populism will tend to become assimilated to other socialist ideo logy . T h e A m erican po pu lists saw this perfectl y well, an d pu rs ue d the logic of their beliefs far enough to claim that they stood for the exploited worker as well as for the impoverished countryman. Such fait hful con sisten cy allow s Pollack to inter pret the Ame ri ca n populists as critics of capitalism in general; but the realities of the popu list m ov em ent prev ented any real al lianc e with la bou r o rg an i zations. It is at po int s like this that th e id eolo gy becomes a dis tor ti ng guide t o th e chara ct er of the m ovem ent. It is characteri stic o f ideolo gies to be bewitched by t he noti on of power. They alternate between dreams of appropriating the supreme power of the state for their own good purposes, and anarchist fantasies of banishing power from the world altogether. Both these attitudes are found among populists, and there seems to be no general reason why either should be considered ‘essential populism’. Nor are the means employed by the politicians of the movement dictated by logic. Perhaps the most instinctive reflex of the peasant in politics is a kind of j a cq u er i e , a violent but short lived revulsion against intolerable conditions; but as a historical theatre, the countryside has mounted the most diverse and spec tacular of productions, quite unrelated to ideological regularities. The Russian r as k ol after 1654, although a religious phenomenon, has been take n as a pe asa nt re actio n to urban c ulture .10 And the huge convulsion of the Tai’ping rebellion against the Manchus included (in its rhetoric) a high ly pro gressive-sounding pr ogr amm e o f industr iali zation. One interesting but misleading hint as to how we might gener aliz e popu lism is co ntained in a letter Eng els wrote to the Amer ic an populist Henry D. Lloyd in 1893. ‘It is only in industrially young countries like America and Russia,’ Engels wrote, ‘that Capital gives full fling to the recklessness of its greed.’u In the economic ally maturer countries of Western Europe, Engels is arguing,
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capitalism had already mellowed, and in mellowing, had drawn some of the r evolution ary potenti al ou t o f radical mo ve m en ts. Can we see populism, then, as a late type of response to the most naked kind of capitalist exploitation? I do not believe so. For one thing, this view ignores the capitalist element of the American populists themselves. Professor Hofstadter has pointed to the central paradox in the American position: ‘What developed in America was an agricultural society whose real attachment was not to the l and but to land value s.12 A n d in th e R us sia n case, populism was conditioned, not by capitalism, but by Western influences on the one hand, and Tsarist autocracy on the other. The moment capitalism began to develop strongly in Russia, many populists began moving into the marxist camp.
3
POPULISM A
S A M OV EM EN T
This brie f ex pl or at io n of the cont ras t betw een cou ntry and city - on which populism bases its p r i m a f a c i e case to be distinguished from other ide ologi es - app ears t o sh ow that th e fact o f an agr ari an envi ron ment canno t lead us t o any fruitful gen eral idea . L et u s n ow look at populism in the general context of movements and mass pol itics. First , a word on my use o f te rm s: I a ssu m e that m odern politics is a matter of movements and associations, the distinction be twe en them being the i ndividual ity o f the beh aviou r they involve. A movement demands that its members should surrender their individuality and become ‘vehicles’ of a cause; an association, by contrast, should be understood primarily as an alliance between indi vidu ali tie s. T h is is e asy to define, b ut d ifficult to us e in histori cal sit uat ions , since people exhibit both in div idu alistic an d ‘vehic u lar’ behav iour. I am also making the co m m on a ssu m ptio n - thou gh we shal l see t hat i t may ha ve to be dropped in th e case o f populism that every movement creates an ideology, which is the thought of the movement. Further, I am taking the common view that the modern wor ld was cr eated by the grow th o f indiv idu alist behaviour, which eroded custom and tradition. So long as peasants regard social relations as being natural and beyond human control, like the weather, movements will not arise. If despair does lead to con vulsions, they will be short and violent, like rainstorms. But in modern times, the replacement of traditional relations by com mercial ones has created a new situation: opportunities for
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enterprising individuals, dangers and despairs for the majority, who ar e too slow or too gen erou s to take a dvanta ge of t he decl ine of customary restraints. It has happened that the spread of commerce has been accom pani ed by the b elief that any man m ay e ngage in polit ics t o imp ro ve his situation. Hence the breakdown of tradition has been imme diately followed by the development of political movements. In many countries, politics is the obvious field in which an enterpris ing individual m ay m ake h is fortune. But for most of the f ol lo wer s, a movement is an attempt to compensate by solidarity for indivi dual disadvantage. I t is co ns eq ue ntly nat ura l that a lmos t a ll move ments unite in a moral criticism of individualist ethics; selfishness and opportunism are high on the list of movement sins. Hence m ovem ents are apt to be regarded (as Pol lac k rega rd s populi sm) a s a kind of conscience produced by an (individualist) industrial society. W ithin such m ove m ents , an id eolog y is a n engine for co nve rt in g burdensome in dividu al anxieties into the exhi la rat ion of bel ongi ng to a marching army. It is, of course, common for men to behave individualistically on some occasions, and to become part of a movement at others. This seems to have been the case with the American populists: ‘When times were persistently bad,’ writes Profes sor H ofsta dter, ‘th e farmer ten ded to rej ec t his busine ss r ole and its failures to withdraw into the role of the injured little yeo man.*13 Id eo log y is the tho ug h t o f a m ovem ent, and it out li nes the radical changes which the movement seeks to bring about. Conse quently, it has th e look o f a loose ly join ted - and not pa rt icul ar ly coher ent - ph ilosoph y, suitable f or dismemberm ent in to sl og an s to be used in politics. What I have said implies that ideologies are commonly held by the politically inexperienced, and that they are more prone to ir rat ion al fantasy even than other k inds o f politi cs. Ideologist s a re, as we have seen, peculiarly given to power-fantasies. ‘We have but to expand the powers of government to solve the enigma of the world’, remarks Ignatius Donnelly’s spokesman in his Utopia, Cae sar 's Column . ‘Man separated is man savage; man gregarious is man civilized. A highe r d eve lopm en t in society re quir es tha t thi s instrumentality o f co-op eratio n shall be h eightened in its power s.14 This concern with power is, of course, moralized: government must ‘do that for the individual which he can not successfully do
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for himself, and which other individuals will not do for him upon ju st and equ itab le te rm s’, w ro te Fra nk D o s te r . A n d G ov er no r Lewelling in a speech in Kansas City remarked: ‘It is the business of the Government to make it possible for me to live and sustain th e l if e of my f ami ly . . . It i s the duty o f gover nm ent to pro te ct the we ak, because the str ong ar e able to pro tect th em se lv es .’16 Th e actual ideol ogy of populism has few features wh ich d is tinguish it from the products of any other movement. Professor Hofst adter si ngles out five main them es, w ith an a pprop riate caution that such a treatment accords to the ideology more coherence and formal ity than it ac tuall y had.16 T h e first is t h e idea o f a gol de n age, which appeals to popular nostalgia. In this case, the golden age was located in the Jacksonian era, but the emotion of nostalgia and the idea of a golden age have a long non-populist history. The se co nd the me is t he concept of natu ral harmonies - that harm ony will reign among the producers once the exploiters have been removed. This, we may observe, was a common Enlightenment notion. Tom Paine’s well-circulated writings are largely a set of variations on thi s the me. T he thir d elem ent o f p op ulist ideolo gy is the dualist ver sion of the soci al str uggle. T h is, as I hav e sugg ested, is fun dam ental to the logic al st ructure of any ideo logy . T h e fourth is the conspiracy theory of history, to which all ideologies are prone. Marxism is the best example of an ideology which treats the evils of the world as necessary, but the temptation of volun tarism is revealed in the fact that even Marx falls at times to blaming the bourgeoisie, and his followers have been much given to sniffing out conspiracies. The fifth theme is the primacy of money, a notion almost monopolized by the American populists, but unl ike ly to become a fea tur e o f populism in othe r enviro nm ents. Th e emoti ons whic h const itut e the American popu list mo vem ent are no more distinctive than the thought. A dogmatic insistence upon simple explanations and easy panaceas would seem to be evidenc e for a widespr ead sense o f bafflement ex pe rien ced by p eop le caugh t up in p oli tical and econom ic con dition s th ey did no t und er stand. One man’s economic problems are merely baffling; they appear to be trivial so long as they cannot be fitted into a larger scheme. Once they become instances of the crucial moral struggle of t he t ime , they el eva te t he spir it. T h e simp le panacea evolve d by many populists (not without help from men who had a good solid interest in the matter) was bimetallism, which (it was hoped)
206
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AS A POL IT IC AL MOV EM EN T
would overcome the deflationary effects of the gold standard. One appropriate version of the reason for the dominance of gold was given by Mrs Sarah Emery. She attributed the Act of 1873 which demonetized silver to the corrupt influence of an agent of British capitalism called Ernest Seyd. Her prose demonstrates that special calling which some women populists had for embellishing the details of the conspiracy: ‘God of our Fathers! A British capitalist sent here to make laws for the American people. England failed to subjugate us by the bullet, but she stole into our Congressional halls and by th e crafty use o f gold, obtained posses sion of the ballot, and today American industry pays tribute to England, despite our blood -bou ght seal o f independ ence.’ 17 A con spira cy theo ry is to politics what animi sm is to science - a be lief in dete rm inatio n by spirits. It is a primi tive form of explana tion, andabout arisesthe from anxiety. People in movements anxious course of contemporary events. are Theparticularly American populists saw a steady decline from the sturdy rural values domi nant in Jackson’s day through the growing impoverishment of the masses i n their ow n time - an d even, in Caesar 's Column , down to a vision of mass misery in 1988. They were typical of members of a movement in experiencing a constant alternation between feelings of po wer lessness w he n th ey con templated the cunning r esourceful ness of millionaires and monopolists, and feelings of invincibility instilled by a sense of their own growing strength. The enemy was som eth ing h uge , and strong, and cunning; but in o ther moods, they cut him down in size to a few isolated millionaires and their hirelings. Their parallels and their vocabulary were often Biblical, and they looked forward to the decisive struggle. They were too much Americans to find salvation in terrorism; besides, they faced a quite different political situation from that of the na r odn ik s. Their hope was the ballot box, and they fought so that man should not be crucified upon a cross of gold. Such a crucifixion was a real threat because Commerce in a free market is risky; and populist egalitarianism is largely a hostility to the experience of risk. ‘Interest on money’, says Gabriel, ‘is the root and groun d o f the w orld ’s troubles. It puts one m an in a posi tion of safety, while another is in a condition of insecurity, and thereby it a t onc e creates a r adical distinction in hu man s ocie ty . . . Given a million of men and a hundred years of time, and the slightest advantage possessed by any one class among the million
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must result, in the long run, in the most startling discrepancies of condition.'18 It is ha rd to esc ape t he conv iction that th ese discrepa ncies were only resent ed because the populi sts were on th e wro ng end o f the m. Times had been bad, and the momentum of the movement carried it into the election of 1896, after which, as conditions improved and the risking got better, the American populists melted away very rapidly indeed. Here then, we have a movement with two significant characteristics: it disappeared very fast once conditions changed, and its ideology was a patchwork quilt of borrowed ele ments; indeed, to press hard on the terminology used in section 1, it didn’t have an ideology in any serious sense, merely a rhetoric. It did not put down deep roots, because there was little to grow at all - merel y a has til y constructed rationalizat ion o f d ifficult times, which could be abandoned once things improved. 4
POPULISM AN
D TH E THIRD W
ORL D
If this understanding of populism is correct, then the distinction betwe en t he count ry an d the city has bee n a red herring. Popu lism would appear to be the result of a collective awareness of dis advantage in relation to wealth; and in a modern context, wealth hap pen s to mea n indu str ial power. T h e poin t abo ut the location of populist movements is not that they are rural but that they are peripheral to economic power. It will be remembered that Chair man Mao has used the image of city and country to make just this kind of point on a global scale: that the world is divided into the industrial po we rs (U S A , U S S R , W est ern Europe , and J ap an ) and those who live on a village scale, which is the rest of the world. Similarly, it was the awareness of poverty whilst having to live by the rules of the rich city which oppressed the American populists. If we take this as our main premiss, what kind of picture of populism will result? The main characteristic of this kind of movement will be its ambivalence towards wealth and power. It will evidently be fasci nated by the glitter of industrialism; indeed it may have no alter native given such hard facts as a rapid population increase. On the other hand, the moral posture suggested by its explicit state ments will be critical o f industrial ism and al l its conseq uen ces. If these statements are taken at their face value, then populism will
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A POL ITICA
L MOVEMEN
T
appear to be a ‘penetrating critique of industrial society’, and any populist ideology might seem on all fours with highly complex posi ti ons such as liberalism
and socialism.
cr it ic ism o f ind ustr ialism w ill be little
In fac t, howeve r, t he
m ore than an expre ssi on of
reg ret at the p overty o f th ose in v o lv ed ; and th e ideology will
be t oo
inhibited by its mixed feelings towards industrial wealth ever to dev el op the coh erence o f the ideo logies from w hich it has b or ro wed its ammunition. This kind of movement is like a river, and its primary function is to keep people moving along the stream until they reach a bit of countryside that appeals to them; at which point, they will take off either into individualism, or into a movement of another kind. It s eems to m e that th e be li efs w hich have appeal ed to most ant i co l oni al i st m ovem ents h ave b een o f this ki nd. T hrou gho ut t he s ocalled Third World, the slogans we most commonly find betray an odd ancestry of liberalism, nationalism, socialism, anarchism, along with a few indigenous elements, but lacking the coherence which would make them worthy of study alongside marxism or li be ra li sm. B y contrast w ith es tab lished Eu ropean ideologi es, thes e beliefs have the look of umbrellas hoisted according to the exi gencies of the moment but disposable without regret as circum st an ce s change. A nd this s eem s e ntirely sen sible as a rea ct io n t o the alternations of despair and hope which the peripheral poor of an industrialized world must experience. They cannot afford to be doct ri nai re; pragm ati sm m u st be th e sin gle gu iding thr ead of t hei r behaviour. Nationalism has supplied them with a vocabulary suit ab le t o their self -assertion
exp ress ing their clai m to be unique
valuable, rather than simply indistinguishable fo r the i nevitable process
o f i nd ustriali zation.
an d
p r i t n a m a t er i a fit
Liberal ism has sup
plied them with many moral devices for coping with European overlords. And socialism provides them with guidance to the col le ct iv is t i nstitutions w hich the y in stinctive ly feel ar e most sui tab le to their early experiments with industrial life. I
thi nk, then, that w e m ay legitim ately rational ize the growing
te ndency to u se th e term ‘ p op u lism ’ to cover these m
any an d var io us
movements as a recognition of this particular character of political ideas in the modern world. Populism is a type of movement found amo ng those awa re of belon ging to the poo r peri phery o f a n indus tri al sy ste m ; in this sen se, it m ay b e taken as a reaction to indu st
rialism. But it is a reaction by those whose profoundest impulse 209
PO PU LIS
M -IT
S ME A NI N G S
may often be to industrialize: it is only if you cannot join them (an d until you ca n) t hat you at ta ck them. A nd it is this amb ivalence which accounts for the intellectual emptiness of populist move ments. There is one incidental advantage to developing the ideal of po pu lism: It would t ake ove r has much o f saddled the u nrew arding times. work with which the idea of nationalism been in recent T h e ex- col onial st ate s have made exten sive u se o f nationa list slogans and consequently been thought nationalists in something like the tr ad it io n of n ati onal is m d eveloped in E urope. Bu t n o on e has been very happy about this classification, since it is clear that the tribes of Africa and the ethnic skeins of Asia do not amount to nations in the European sense. To extend ‘populism’ to cover these many diverse situations would leave ‘nationalism’ with a relatively more coherent field, largely limited to European political experience, and obviously with much to tell us about the inner experience of pop ul ism. For what have most nati onali st m ovem ents been, if not reactions to an awareness of being on the periphery?
Notes
The Populist Response ot Industrial Ameri ca,
1 Norman Pollack, Cambridge, Mass., 1962, p. 10. 2 Richard Hofstadter, London 1962. 3 Pollack, op. cit., p. 2. 4 Pollack, op. cit., Ch. IV, esp. p. 77. 5 Pollack, op. cit., p. 143. 6 Raoul Girardet, ‘Autour de 1’Ideologic Nationaliste’ in Vol. XV, No. 3, June 1965: Special Number: The literature of nation-
The Age ofReform,
faise de Science Politique, Nationalisme et Nationalismes Contemporarains.
Revue Fran-
alism is replete with this kind of generalization. 7 Pollack, op. cit., Introduction. 8 See the Introduction by Isaiah Berlin to Franco Venturi, London (English translation) i960, p. xxix. 9 Ignatius Donnelly, Chicago, 1891. Quoted in George Brown Tindall, New York 1966, p. 112. 10 Nicholas Vaker, New York 1961, p. 24. 11 Quoted Pollack, op. cit., pp. 834. 12 Hofstadter, op. cit., pp. 412. 13 Hofstadter, op. cit., p. 47.
of Revolution,
The Roo ts
Caesar' s Column, A Populist Reader, The Ta proot ofSoviet Societ y,
210
PO PU LI SM
AS A
POLITICA
14 15 16 17
L MO VE ME NT
Tindall, op. cit., p. 114. Pollack, op. cit., pp. 17-88. Hofstadter, op. cit., p. 6a. Sar ah E .V . Emery, , Lansing 1888. Quoted Tindall, op. cit., p. 54. 18 Donnelly, quoted Tindall, op. cit., pp. 104-5.
Seven Financi al Conspiracies hich w a Hve n Eslaved the Am erican P eople
211
CHAPTER TEN
THE CONCEPT OF POPULISM P ete r W or sle y
Political science, for many decades, operated contentedly with a conceptual sch ema which contained on ly tw o major categories: political ‘ideas’ and politi cal ‘ins titu tio n s’. T o th is pair there has been more recently added, under the ill-absorbed influence of sociology, a third category: political ‘behaviour’. I consider this triple compartmentalization of the elements of political action as inadequate, both as regards the theoretical status of these elements as adequate categories taken singly, and as an overall conceptual schema. The conventional ‘history of ideas’ is even less helpful when we attempt to bring its conceptual resources to bear on a problem suc h as the pre sen t on e : the delineation o f what w e m ean by ‘popu lism’. The historian of ideas is interested primarily in the intellec tual pedigree of his chosen idea. All too often, he fails to make it clear whether the pedigree traced is one explicitly visible to the bearers of ideas themselves, or a line of descent imputed to them by historians, a ‘perceived’ pedigree as against an ‘attributed’ one. The inte gument of so ci al ac tio n - wh ether in terms o f the soc ial niche occupied by the producer of ideas, the varying channels through which ideas are communicated, or the varying contexts in whic h the y bec ome adopte d - is a matter o f subsidiary impor tance. The ‘history of ideas’, that is, is commonly quite unsociological. Our con cer n, here , is quit e the o p p o si te : th e relation ship between ideology and social (especially political) action. We must, there fore, concern ourselves with the milieux , agencies and channels of communi cati on within wh ich ideas are comm un icated . Bu t we must in ev it abl y - and much m ore i mportantly - rej ect th e assumptio n 2 12
THE CO
NCEP T O F POPU LISM
that ‘the idea’ remains unchanged throughout these successive contextual vicissitudes. Yet Platonism is not dead. It is commonly assumed that ideas can be isolated in some pure, srcinal, embry onic, or archetypal form (though it is not always clear which of these possibilities is being asserted, and on what grounds); there after, they are seen as being ‘taken up’, ‘translated’ into action, etc. It is suggested here, p er co n tr a, that ideas, in the process of becoming absorbed into successive cultural contexts, different from those in which they were engendered or have hitherto flou rished, n ot o n ly as su m e a different sociological sign ificanc e in so far as they will be differently used by being incorporated within new frameworks of action, but will also become modified qua ideas, since they must necessarily be articulated with other psychic furniture: pre-existing ‘interests’, cognitive elements and struc tures, affectual dispositions, etc., which are all part of the receiving The ‘srcinal’ ideas must intrinsically, therefore, be modified in the process and become di ffer ent i deas. Simply to isolate a similar body of doctrinal propositions, then, or even to compare those organizations which use the same label to describe their political ideology or to claim kinship with other movements, does not imply any necessary sociological similarity between the sets o f b eliefs wh en viewed within t he con text of action, or between su ch organ izations.1 T h us ‘subscri ption to a commo n milieu.
value system’, that famous functionalist concept, leaves unques tioned just what needs to be demonstrated: whether there is necessarily any connection between ‘theologically’ identical profes sions of faith and what different sets of men professing the ‘same’ beliefs actually do, and, furthermore, what interpretation, empiri cally, is placed upon these ‘common’ beliefs by the actors. To take the major ideology of our time, communism, as an ex ample, reference to the writings of Marx and Engels is universal in all communist organizations. But these texts are only one source of theory, and constitute only one element in the cluster of factors influencing policy. Not only do national considerations, r ai son d'etat, etc. constitute other sources of ideological variation, but there is always the intrinsic need to interpret the srcinal texts. Experience, ‘life itself’, the increasing remoteness of the world for which the srcinal writings were created, reflect themselves in the elaboration of later bodies of ideological writing which are added, vario usly, to th e srcinal texts. T h es e ‘diacrit ical’ addi tion s, whe ther
213
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ULIS
M - IT
S
MEAN
ING S
they be the writings of Stalin, Mao, Trotsky, Guevara/Castro, etc., in fact mark off different kinds of communism. One can no longer seriously write of Communism with a capital C; only of communisms, now as numerous as Christianities. When looked at from the point of view of internal organization, the structural and cult ural differences ar e so p rofo un d and various - as , s ay , bet ween C uban soci ety and S oviet - that we begin to see t ha t to spe ak of Com m unism is to idealize and universalize, to sta nda rd ize under sloppy common-sense labels what often, sociologically, needs to be distinguished. (Now that Chinese communism and Soviet communism are locked in conflict, the point is becoming clearer.) Indeed, the period when we could write of a unitary Com munism - the hi gh Stal in e r a - was sim ply a pha se when o ne variety, temporarily though effectively became institutionalized as prevailing orthodoxy. Today, by contrast, communism may even be only an addi ti on to a m uch wider bo dy o f revo lut io nary/ radi cal thought, as when Marx is added to Marti. The various meanings given to communist doctrine by underground guerrilla move ments; by respectable mass parties in France and Italy; by the apparatchiks of the second most powerful nation on earth; by China; by microscopic legal minority movements committed to parl ia ment ary change (as in B rit ain) - m u st all necessa rily mean that the ideas these organizations profess to share are not the same ide as by any means. Ex traordi naril y different th ing s are do ne in the name of the ‘ same' ide al s. T hu s, the same G od is com m on ly invo ked to bles s the pro tago nist s of both s ides in war. A t their most tenuous, such ‘common values’ are merely ideological legitimation, ra th er than seri ous ‘ gu ides to a ction ’ - as we shall fi nd for m uch invocation of ‘the people’ below. They may be quite unconnected with day-to-day ac ti on at al l, but m ay m erely have lip-service pa id to t hem, since they ar e unch all engeable t heological d ogm as, w hose re al signi fi cance is that of the M alinowsk l charter’ , legitimizing and validating the social order. ian But‘my no tho one logica seriously expects such myths to be closely connected with everyday social action; their place is almost in the transcendental. In any c omplex body of doct ri ne - such as a modern maj or ideo logy i s, or becomes over the ye ar s - there is inherently, too, am ple inconsistency, ambiguity, incoherence, contradiction, to enable the reader to read what he wants to read into those doctrines in the light of his social and psychological predispositions.
214
THE CONCEPT OF POPULISM
Even where orthodoxy is institutionally established, and clear ‘principles’ or authoritative definitions are available or insisted upon, this by no means precludes vigorous dispute as to what the ‘real’ meaning of these fundamental beliefs is. General principles, su ch as ‘from each acco rdin g to his means . . are what Selznick has called ‘unanalysed abstractions’: they have still to be turned into day-to-day policies (assuming that such ‘principles’ do in fluence policy at all). The relevance for action of such delphic and manipulable bodies of thought is thus highly problematic, always open to interpretation, and therefore liable to become a source not on ly of political argument bu t also of or ganized factional struggle. T o this degree, ev en the most clos ed of ideol ogi es co ntains wi th in it po ten tia l sou rces o f heres y and ‘deviatio n’, and it is not difficult for interest-aggregates to form and mobilize around these rival interpretations. The more strongly organized the political authority, the more, however, these potential latitudes will be reduced. Indeed, in most modern societies, the reader or receiver of an ideology is unlikely to b e a free, un tram mell ed scholar , reflecting over the merits of rival doctrines, and making his intellectual, individual choice between them. Life is not like an ideal nineteenth-century market, or a traditional scholar’s study. The ideology-receiver is likely to have the message purveyed to him, and interpreted for him, so that some interpretations are available, de rigueur, or required, and others nipped in the bud. Party propaganda machines are one crucial and normal type of channel through which this purveying and interpretin g is com mo nly d on e; the mass-c irculation newspa per and television, the typical and principal media of communication in modern literate societies. The extent to which such co-ordina tio n o f messa ges occu rs varie s em pirically : there may be e ven mo re controlled and systematic presentation of messages (e.g. by party instructors, agitators, public speakers, etc.). But to whatever degree p eop le’s p ub lic m inds are mani pulated, certa inly some for m o f information -filtering, and s om e degree o f regular and systema tic conditioning, are to be found. There is even, immanently, an irreducible inevitability that some degree and kind of selection will occur. But messages must also ‘speak’ to unmet wants, dispositions, and interests in th e p syches o f the heare rs.2 Th us the effe ctive impact o f a message by n o means s imply depen ds upon the inte rnal 215
POPUL
ISM -
I T S MEANI
NGS
logic of its intellectual structure or the coherence of its argument. It depends quite as crucially upon the skill and force with which it is communicated, the authority of the communicating agent, its relevance to the wants of what Selznick calls ‘constituencies’, etc.: in brief, the po w er o f a n id eo log y has as m uch to do with i ts social context as it has to the ‘pure’ appeal of a set of ideas. Indeed, our argument would suggest that such ‘pure’ appeals can only occur where w e r tr ati on ali tat (com m itm en t to som e o ve r -r idi ng do m inan t va lue) exists. B ut o n ly fana tics, s aints, t ot al ide ol og is ts, behave li ke th is. N orm ally, m ost m en operate with reference to w hat W eb er ca lled ‘sub stantive* , as aga inst purely ‘fo rm al ’ rationality. In the process of comprehending, then, the reader thus actively apprehends the messages aimed at him. He interacts with them, perceiving, selecting, evaluating, consciously and/or unconsciously, fi lt eri ng the m essage thro ug h co m ple x cultural screens i n t he p ro cess of internalizing it. Even in physical isolation, he is never socially isolated, for his perception of the messages he reads in the newspapers or takes in from television, and his responses to them, ar e socio-cul turall y con ditioned . M or e n orm ally, in addi ti on, h e has much m ore acti ve ag ents acting as fi lt ers be tw een him an d t he message. Even the m ost systematic, log ically ‘close d ’ ideologies, t he n, ar e , to this de gree, perm iss ive or op en -end ed . T h e degree of ‘ cl o sure* that exists is by no means solely the ‘internal logic’ that is in the ideas themselves, but is also a social ordering through which ideas are used instrum entally (e.g. bra in-w ash ing, teaching, shoot ing deviant s, majori ty verdicts, e tc.). T o speak o f ‘ the id eas’ of a mo vemen t, t hen, as if there were so m e au then tic Platonic id eal a nd unchanging form of them, is a distraction. Different receivers receive di ff erenti all y, and th ese differenc es are socia lly engendered and fostered, suppressed or discouraged. Any complex body of thought can therefore give rise —true, not to a n y conclusions-foract ion - but to an e norm ous range . Bu t if perfect system and cont rol ar e never achie vable, specific interpretations can b e ins titutionalized, can la st fo r a long time, and b e so backed by sanc tions as to effec tively submerge rival interpretations. So we have that form of Christ iani ty N ietzs ch e descri bed as the ‘ religio n o f sla ve s’ and the sardonic description of Anglicanism as ‘The Tory Party at pr aye r’; the rigid, neces sit arian m arxism o f Plekha nov or pre -191 4
216
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EPT OF
POPULISM
German social democracy; the opportunist marxism of Lenin or the institutionalized revolutionism of Cuba or China; the libertarian marxism of the ‘young Marx’, and the despotism of Stalinism. Producing and consuming a message may take place without any direct p hys con tac t wit h others or ‘physical’ social controls. Yet changes in ical p s y ch i c disposition are themselves intrinsically of consequence for one’s orientation to others. One is no longer ‘the same person’ after having been persuaded of a certain proposition: on e’s actio ns are he nce fort h lik ely to di ffer. Implications for subse quent action and interaction have been established. Changing one’s thinking, that is, is changing one’s behaviour. One behaves, as sociology and social psychology insist, with reference to norms, values, ends, goals, and other ‘ideal’ elements of social action. These, indeed, are p a r t of ‘behaviour’, not something outside it. Indeed, to emphasize his rejection of the concept of ‘mindless’ behaviour, Weber insisted on using a distinctive label: not ‘be haviour’, but ‘social action’. Men ransack the past to find legitimations for the present: they discover precursors, trace intellectual pedigrees, re-write history. T h e past, therefore, is constan tly changi ng. T o sear ch for the pure ‘srcinal’ systematic form of an ideology is therefore a labour of Sisy ph us . T h e hun t for distinctive, ‘ authentic’ conti nuiti es is equally illusory, since all complex thought is built of components which can be combined and re-combined (and further broken down) in an infinity of ways, so that no sharp boundaries (as assumed in talk of ‘systems of thought’) exist. If the search for srcins involves us in infinite regress, backwards in time, the search for pe dig ree s in vo lves infinite seepag e as we are led to fo llow Man’ s ingenuity in fitting his stock of ideas the one to another. In any case, since new bodies of thought are built out of earlier materials re- com bin ed in different ways, only rarely is any entirely new com ponent being added (though the re-combination may produce, in the whole, a new G est alt which is not simply the sum of its parts, and not to be found in any lower-level combination of such parts). The borders of such a complex body of thought as an ideology can never be sharply marked off from its neighbouring ideologies, since the ‘systems’ do not -pace mod ern s ystems theory in pol itical scie nc e - posse ss distin ctive boundaries which mark them of f
217
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ISM -
I TS
MEA NI NGS
clearly from oth er ‘systems*. I f no ide olo gy is ever so di st inc tive or srcinal, the n , w e m u st ex p ect to find that a l ar ge part of the elements we find in populism will also be found to occur in other ‘isms’, both in those which preceded modern populism and those which have co-existed with it chronologically. One crucial initial distinction needs to be made. The presence of common elements may be perceived by the actors, as when socialists and communists have commonly defined themselves as variants of one general political tradition. Alternatively, the pres ence o f com m on elem ents m ay be qu ite unp ercei ved by t he actors, but solely imputed by analysts. This latter situation directs our attention to one crucial difference between populism and commu nism, for example, since the latter is a subjective designation by communists (as well as their opponents), and not merely an analy tic al attribution. W he n actors see th em selv es as p art of a shared tradition or organized movement, or trace their ideological descent to a distinct source, e.g. a person or a book, or along defined li nes o f descent - a s com m un ists do - w e are plai nly dea li ng wi th a qu ite di ffe rent kind o f typo logizin g, based up on se lf -i dent if ic at io n and relationship to perceived reference-groups, from that which occurs when social scientists class together, under the rubric ‘populist’, movements which have no conception whatsoever of thei r m ovem ent as being o ne o f a fam il y o f such movem ents , or as being d escended from som e ancest ral pioneer or proto type. Typi cally, there has never been a Populist International, and many movements which others have labelled ‘populist’ have never them selves used any such label to describe themselves. They have not even bee n awar e t hat othe r - to u s - analo gous m ovements e v en existed; even less did they have any organizational contact with them. Populism, then, is not part of a shared, more inclusive tradition, as far as the subjective orientation of the actors is con cerned. Its typological status is solely an analytical one, and popu list movements are no more self-consciously part of a shared tradition than are, say, unilineal descent-groups or ‘stateless’ societies. North American populist movements, for example, had not the faintes t awarene ss that there were o ther m ov em en ts al re ad y long in exi ste nce thousands o f mil es away in Eu rope w hich would come to have that word attached to them, nor would Mid-West farmers have recognized any similarities between their own move ments and the Russian ones. Communist parties, p er c o n t r a , do
218
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CONCE PT O F POPU LISM
see themselves as part of a well-known international tradition with institutionalized interconnections: Cubans, Chinese, and Russians, and millions of others, are told that the polities they live in belong to a world-wide and historic community of thought and action. True, the word ‘populist’ was actually used, historically, by one of the m ost im portant No rth A meric an movements as i ts title ; othe r North American movements which we designate as populist, how ever , us ed n o such term. T h e tr anslat ion of the Russian nar odnichestvo has been rendered as ‘populist’, but this.very act of translation is itself an imputation, not a ‘neutral’ simple equiva lence (which translation can never be, since it has to use categories available in l angu age).3 It may well be, then, that to sp eak of popu lism as a genus is to assume what needs to be demonstrated: that movements with very different features, separate in time, space, and culture, do possess certain crucial attributes which justify our subsuming them consciously and analytically under the same rubric, ‘populist’, despite variations in their other characteristics. If such a term is to be used, we need to specify just what these crucial attributes are, and not simply assume that the arbitrary bandying about of a word implies any resemblances at all, sociolo gically speaking, between the activities to which it has become attached. Such resemblances may not exist. But since the word h as bee n us ed, the existen ce o f the ver bal smoke might well in dicat e a fire som ewh ere. Let us look, then, at the maj or hist oric specimens of those movements which have been designated populist, to see what, if any, common features there may be. If not, we may need to discontinue using the label. For the most part, scholars hitherto have not even regarded the question of the generalizability of the term ‘populist’ as constitut ing a problem at all, for most of them have been specialists who have used the term discretely simply to refer to those particular movements occurring within their special area and time-period. The main sets of movements in different areas for which the term has m ost co mm only - perhaps a rbitrarily - been used ar e ( a) the Russian nar o dni k movement of the second half of the nineteenth century (and some other Eastern European movements); (6) late nineteenth-century North American movements in the rural South and West; and ( c ) certain contemporary movements, and even kinds o f states, in non -com mu nist Africa , Asia, and Latin Am erica. 219
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A yet wider usage ( d) extends t he ter m not s imp ly to w hole org an ized movements, but to certain elements in organizations, move ments and ideologies of all kinds in which the notion of ‘the will of the people’, and the notion of direct popular contact with political leaderships are stressed.
AMERICANS
AND
RUSSIANS
I will not rehearse here the general chara cteristics o f Russian populism which have been described earlier in this book by Pro fessor Hofsta dter and Dr Wali cki. As far as Ru ssian Na rod nic hes tvo is concern ed, le t us merely note thes e pr inc ipa l fe a tu re s: it wa s a movement pri marily of inte llec tu als ; it drea med o f a ne w society based on the reinvigorated mi r (village community); it was antiTsarist, anti-capitalist, and revolutionary. Organizationally, apart from ‘going to the peasants’ in the ‘mad summer’ of 1874, its main manifestations were the Zem ly a i V o ly a movement and the sub sequent terroristic Narodnaya Volya, whose greatest success was the assassination of Tsar Alexander iv in 1881. North Amer ican populism was characterized b y : 1 a hostilit y to all those large-scale age nc ies w h ic h th e farmer saw as inimical to his interests as a producer and consumer; 2 a mor e dif fus e intel lectual and moral h os tility t o w hat the populists saw as ‘un-natural’ interference with a competitive and fair market-system on the part of trusts, monopolies, etc.; 3 a strong emphasi s on monetary re m ed ies ; 4 a belief in state acti on to r ight the se w ro n g s; 5 a primary soc ial base among the small, ind ep en de n t, bu t highly vul nerable, ru ral produc ers o f the So uth and W e s t; 6 allies among the fronti er miners, on th e bas is o f monetary rather than agrarian planks of policy; 7 early engagement i n politics, fir st, as an agrari an pressuregro up vi s-i -v is the establi shed parties, then as an independ ent political entity, first at state/provincial level, then at national (third-par ty) le vel; 8 ext ens io ns of the ideol ogy of m ob ilizing the ‘ com m on people’ to include the labouring poor of the cities (with no response to this hand of friendship from organized or unorganized labour). 9 It was pri mar ily to be found in th e frontier region s o f the Mid- and Far-West, particularly among wheat-farmers in Kansas,
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EPT OF POPULISM
Nebraska, Minnesota and the Dakotas; in the South, especially among the poor white cotton-farmers of Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina; and in the mountain states, notably among the miners of Colorado and Nevada.4 If significant parallels can be found in the ideas of the two major historical populism, then, are populism also massive divergen ces. In types organofizationa l term s, there Russian c ould scarcely be more different from North American. It was outstand ingly a movement of intellectuals, who idolized ‘the people’ (par ticularly the peasantry), and their institutions (particularly the mir ) , and were prepared to sacrifice their lives and their freedom in the cause of the people. But Russian populism was pre-emin ently an ideology about the peasantry, not one created by them, nor one rooted i n the p easan try. It prea ched learning f rom, bei ng gu ided by, the people, when everything in it was created by a segment of the urban intelli gentsia. North American populism, in contrast, was a mass popular movement o f th e farmers , p a r ex cel len ce. Unlike Russian populism, its spokesmen and theorists were not a very highly-educated intel ligentsia (for Russian populism includes amongst its progenitors such distinguished names as Herzen, Chernyshevsky, Plekhanov, and Bakunin, as well as the flower of a whole generation of the universities). The ideologists of the North American movements were drawn from the farming community itself. They were a local , not a national or cosmopolitan, intelligentsia, and included neither Herzens nor products of Ivy League universities. Rather were they, typically, editors of farmers’ newspapers, or, as com monly, preachers or sons of preachers, with fundamentalist non conformist backgrounds. They did not have to ‘go to the people’, for if they were not o f th e p eople - as many w ere - the y were living in their midst. T h e en em y identified by the tw o sets of populis ts - and the pro pos ed str ateg y for d ealing w ith that enem y - also differed. Of course, it can be held that both sets of movements, at a higher level of abstraction, were saying similar things. Both spoke of the ‘com m on m an ’, th e sm all producer - but t hey w ere very dif ferent ‘small producers’. Both saw monopoly, finance-capitalist industrialism, and irresponsible government, as the chief ob stacles to progress. The cultural inheritance from the past was the chief source of the major differences. These generated very
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different orientations to time. In Russia, the past was everything; the future, for the revolutionaries, an apocalyptic vision. In the United States, there was no past: the future was simply to be the pre sen t humani zed, rati onal ize d, and m ade m or e ju st. T h e fashion able dichotomy between ‘traditionalism* and ‘modernism’, useful eno ugh bu t s o over- str etch ed in m odern ‘theories o f d evelopm ent’ , is a s unhe lpf ul her e as it is in studies o f con tem po rary developing societies, for archaic Tsarist despotism might be ‘traditional’, but was rejected, alon g with ‘ m od ern’ capitalism. Y et th e pu re society, it wa s he ld , wou ld only come into be ing wh en the traditional com mune asserted itself at the exp ense o f the rejected - bu t equall y ‘traditional’ - state. Russian populism thus looked to some of the elements of the ‘traditional’ culture, but eschewed other levels and forms of ‘traditionalism’ fiercely, particularly Tsarist autocracy. Populism here was ‘anarchist’ in its denial of the state, but also ‘communi tarian’ in its reliance upon the imr, and looked to an intermediate level of soc ial o rganiz ation - th e m i r - as the corner-stone up on which the new social order could be built. It was, in consequence, much more communitarian than those individualistic forms of anarchism which celebrated the autonomy and self-expression of the individual, But variants of anarchism in which community was celebrated - e.g. the an ar chi sm of the Sp an ish pu eb los 5 - seem to cons tit ute a conc eptu al front ier region w h ich can eq ua lly m ean ing fully be labelled ‘populism’ or ‘anarchism’. American populism mis tru ste d the pe rsonnel staf fing the state, and th e w ay th e state was used instrumentally, but needed the machinery itself, and pro posed only to bring it under popular control; to make it respon sible rather than to eliminate it. Indeed, the whole system poli tic al machi nery, banks , industry, railroads, co rpo ratio ns - was to be reformed, not abolished or replaced. For the Russian populists, on the other hand, capitalism was an innovation which, they feared, would dissolve the traditional soli darity of the village, and, in the end, introduce inequality and class war to the count ryside . But the activities o f trusts, banks, and corp orations , which so preoccupie d th e N ort h Am erican populists, we re not i mpor tan t in t he Russia n cou ntryside. W her e th e A meri can farmer faced large-scale, corporate urban capitalism as an octopus extending its tentacles into the countryside from its urban bas e, the nar odn iks were more conc erned w ith p ett y ca pitalism in
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THE C ONCEP T OF POPUL ISM
its intra-village manifestations: the threat that differentiation, if unchecked, would create a class of kulaks at one end of the social hierarchy, dominating what had hitherto been an egalitarian com munity, and a class of landless proletarians at the other, the latter being faced with starvation if they stayed in the village, or with exodus from village society altogether, to the towns and to the new servitude of wage-labour. There are thus significant resemblances, and yet other dif ferences, between the attitudes of the intellectual Narodnik theor ists towards the non-village world, and those of the peasantry. The latter wished indeed to preserve their traditional autonomy, but there is little evidence of hostility towards the kulak. Nor did they conceptualize anything as sophisticated as ‘capitalism*. To them, the real enemy was the outside world, and its most patent and significant manifestations were the servants of the state, and not sim p ly t he b ig la ndo wn ers or the newer farming entrepreneurs. Both set s o f mo ve m en ts, certainly, concentra ted on the rural scene, where the majority of the population lived, and a singularly vul nerable part o f it - th e rural small produ cers. Both sets of move ments were also concerned with the challenge of industrialism, urbanism, bigness, centralization, and hierarchy; both tried to resist these tendencies, to decentralize socially, and (paradoxically) built up increasingly more centralized political organizations to carry thewhereas campaign. Both tried to establish socialmass base in the forward cities. But American populism had a arural base, Russian movements had nothing of the kind. In the event, the American movements failed in the cities; the Narodniks and their immediate successors had their only successes there. The American populists’ success in the countryside brought them to the point of trying to construct a nation-wide movement that would link farmers and Labour; the Russian populists’ failure in the villages led them to fall back on the city. North American populism, as we have seen, was not against capitalism, though there were powerful voices within the move ments which went beyond agrarian and financial reform. For the most part, however, it was classically laisse z fai r e to the extent that its members were petty farmers (petty by American standards, that is, where a ‘section’ of 640 acres was the standard unit of measurement of farm-size), who wanted a freer, more competitive, less trustified, market economy in which the producer, not those
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different orientations to time. In Russia, the past was everything; the future, for the revolutionaries, an apocalyptic vision. In the U nited Sta tes, there was no p ast: the futu re was si m ply to be t he p re se n t h u m an iz ed , ratio nali zed, a n d m ad e m o re ju s t. T h e fashio n able dichotomy between ‘traditionalism’ and ‘modernism’, useful enoug h b u t so over-st retched in m od ern ‘ theories of developm ent’ , is as unhelpful here as it is in studies of contemporary developing societies, for archaic Tsarist despotism might be ‘traditional’, but was reject ed, along w ith ‘ m od ern ’ capit ali sm . Y et the pu re so ciety, it was held, would only come into b eing w hen the traditi onal com m un e assert ed it sel f at the expense of the reject ed - b u t equa lly ‘trad ition al’ - stat e. Russian populism thus looked to some of the elements of the ‘traditiona l’ culture, b u t eschewed oth er leve ls and form s of ‘tradition alism ’ fierc ely, particularly T sa rist autocracy. Pop ulism here was ‘anarchist’ in its denial of the state, but also ‘communi tarian’ in its reliance upon the mir> and looked to an intermediate level of soc ial organizati on - the mir - as the corner-stone upon which the new social order could be built. It was, in consequence, much more communitarian than those individualistic forms of anarchism which celebrated the autonomy and self-expression of the indi vidual . But vari ants of anarchism in wh ich co m m unity wa s cel ebrat ed - e.g. t he anarchism of the Spa nish pu eblos 5 - se em t o con stitute a conceptual frontier region w hich can e qually m eaning fully be label led ‘ po pu lism ’ or ‘an arc hism ’. A m erican p opu lism m istrusted the pe rsonnel st affing t he stat e, a nd the w ay the state wa s used instrumentally, but needed the machinery itself, and pro posed only to b rin g it u n d e r p o p u lar co n tro l; to m ake it respon si bl e rather tha n to el iminat e it . Indeed , the w hole syst em political m achinery, banks, in du stry , railroads, corp oratio ns - was to be reform ed, n ot aboli shed o r replac ed. Fo r the Russian populi sts , on the other h and , capit ali sm was an innovation which, they feared, would dissolve the traditional soli darity of the village, and, in the end, introduce inequality and class war to the coun trysi de. Bu t the acti viti es of trus ts, banks, and corporat ions, which so preoccupied the N orth A m eri can pop uli st s, were not i m po rtant i n the Russi an count rysi de. W here the Am er i
can farmer faced large-scale, corporate urban capitalism as an octopus extending its t entacl es into the coun trysi de from its urba n base, th e narodniks w ere m o re co ncerned w it h p e tty capita lism in 2 22
THE CONCEPT OF POPULISM
its intra-village manifestations: the threat that differentiation, if unchecked, would create a class of kulaks at one end of the social hierarchy, dominating what had hitherto been an egalitarian com munity, and a class of landless proletarians at the other, the latter being faced with starvation if they stayed in the village, or with exodus from village society altogether, to the towns and to the new servitude of wage-labour. There are thus significant resemblances, and yet other dif ferences, between the attitudes of the intellectual Narodnik theor ists towards the non-village world, and those of the peasantry. The latter wished indeed to preserve their traditional autonomy, but there is little evidence of hostility towards the kulak. Nor did they conceptualize anything as sophisticated as ‘capitalism’. To them, the real enemy was the outside world, and its most patent and significant manifestations were the servants of the state, and no t sim p ly t h e b ig land own ers or the newer fa rming entrepreneurs. Both sets of movements, certainly, concentrated on the rural scene, where the majority of the population lived, and a singularly vul nerab le part o f it - th e rural small producers. Both sets of move ments were also concerned with the challenge of industrialism, urbanism, bigness, centralization, and hierarchy; both tried to resist these tendencies, to decentralize socially, and (paradoxically) built up increasingly more centralized political organizations to carry thet campaign. Both triedp opulism to establish base in t h eforward c ities . Bu w here as American had aa social rural m ass base, Russian movements had nothing of the kind. In the event, the American movements failed in the cities; the Narodniks and their immediate successors had their only successes there. The American populists’ success in the countryside brought them to the point of trying to construct a nation-wide movement that would link farmers and Labour; the Russian populists’ failure in the villages led them to fall back on the city. North American populism, we have seen,within was not capitalism, though there were as powerful voices the against move ments which went beyond agrarian and financial reform. For the most part, however, it was classically laisse z fai r e to the extent that its members were petty farmers (petty by American standards, that is, where a ‘section’ of 640 acres was the standard unit of measurement of farm-size), who wanted a freer, more competitive, less trustified, market economy in which the producer, not those
223
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NI NG S
who bat ten ed on him , would be sov ere ign ; in wh ich credit wou ld be readily available; and in which control over the crucial political centres of decision-making would lie also in their hands. They had no conception of a return to any Adamic ‘natural’, pre-capital ist economy. Apart from the very initial ‘colonization’ phase of establishing their farms, they had known nothing but advanced, large-scale, extensive, capitalist production for remote markets; those who ha d succ eeded had been v ery go od at i t : the y created the most effective modern agriculture the world has yet known. Yet to use the label ‘laisse z fai r e ’ is misleading, for these are ‘second generation’ laisse z fa i r e no tio n s: the y are refl exes sti mu lated by the basic fact of the domination of the market by the big economic enterprises. Their demand for economic liberation from the control of those inhibiting the free development of the factors of production (and thereby constricting the small man’s room for manoeuvre) was directed not against a traditional land-owning nobility, but against the modern trusts, finance-houses, etc. of the cities: against the institutions of mo de rn capitalism . Moreover, these independent commodity-producers who survived, to experi enc e bot h succes s and the even worse rigours o f perio dic depression, were not simply ‘petty-bourgeois’ individualists, as the whole history of the ir c omm unity life and institu tion s, and their soli darist political associations, demonstrate. Living on the frontier, tens of mil es at least away fro m the n ext co m m un ity, th ey had , in th e fi rst place, to practise mutual aid at some level simply in order to sur vive, in the early days especially. This is part of the nostalgia that seeps through the Western film into the consciousness of the city movie-goer. ‘Soci al’ coo pera tion o f this ki nd was th erefo re b y no means foreign to them, even if their ‘mode of production’ was quite private-enterprise. Strictly collective forms of organization, on the other hand, were virtually unknown.6 But frontier settlement was not always settlement by atomized families and individuals. The ties generated by a common lifesituation were often underlaid by pre-existing cultural ties imported into the frontier-situation, and thus deriving from a ‘presituational’ cultural community (this is also why Cooperstock writes of ‘prior socialization’ in discussing the Hutterites and kibb utzi m). Whole distr icts were settled by p eop le o f similar ethnic or ig in, for whom the com mon culture o f their coun tries o f ori gi n,
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THE CONCEPT O
F POPULISM
particularly the ‘transportable’ elements of language and religion,7 prov ided rea dy -m ad e ties around whic h new associations could be built. The older, ethnic culture provided a reference-point defining social identity and distinctiveness. Such powerful ‘com munal’ bonds were particularly strong where such communities had experienced religious or political persecution in the Old World. These latter settled together, and were sustained by com pu lsiv e ide olo gi es w hic h already contained a ready-made, prescrip tive social ethic.8 Moreover, the classic mythology of the heroic individual West ern entrepreneur-pioneer needs to be put into perspective, by examining what other agencies were involved in the extension of the frontier. One of the crucial ones was the state. True, men did shape their farms out of the wilderness with axe and plough, and some died in doing so; more failed. But the great settlement o f th e W est, and the break throug h subsequently to modern mech anized agriculture, particularly wheat-farming, was, overall, no affair of axe and plough. These pioneers went out with not incon sid era ble soc ial sup po rt - infrastructural, political, and military direct and indirect, from the state. First, they were virtually given the land itself, usually at some nominal price, via state action (e.g. the Homestead Act). The existing occupants of the land, the Indians, again, were removed for them, and herded into reserva tions State States Cavalry, R C Mby P ,the etc. ). N(in or the wasform agricofultthe uraUnited l adapta tion an d innovthe ation simply a matter of trial-and-error or some Social-Darwinist selec tion of those who adapted and innovated most effectively, for publicly-supported scientific organization, notably the land-grant co lleg e - focu sse d upo n agricultural scien ces and the pr oblems of the frontier farmer, sciences adapted to the physical conditions of the frontier and the socio-economic demands of market and pro du cti on cons train ts - were the mech anisms through which new and advanced agricultural niq ues devsuitable ise d, incrops a waywere in wselected hich no and smalnew l farm er - or eventech any su cce ss fu l larger far mer - could have done fo r himself. Through these colleges, too, modern farming practice was fed into the educa tion of a whole rising new generation; they were training institu tions, socializing the young people, and not simply ‘applied research’ institutions producing seed-strains and rotation-schemes. T h e allocatio n o f land to th ese colleges by the state thus constituted
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a powerful intervention by the state, which was thus able to mob ilize capi tal with little cos t or risk to itse lf, ju st as it aw arded land as a means of underwriting the drive of the railroads westwards. Quite early, then, the normality of the involvement of the state as an agency of development was a feature of the Mid-West/ prairie scene. True, there were many variations and vicissitudes, but the pioneer process, to put it baldly, was not simply one of the steady nibbling forward of self-regulating frontiersmen. The final rush to the west coast of what is today Canada, for example, took place following the thrusting through of the railroads as a part of macros copi c inter nati onal C anadian go ver nm en tal po licy 9 to k eep the Un ited Stat es out of what are now the prair ie provinces and Bri tish Co lu mbi a. T h e fundamental de cision-m akin g here was highly centralized, not the result of innumerable decisions by small pioneers. Farmers, then, were quite habituated to state action, which, moreover, was by no means necessarily read as inimical to their interests, as other ‘small men’ have believed profoundly, in other times and places. The social situation, that is, generated attitudes which the mere examination of ‘class composition’ or ‘size of holding* tells us nothing about. Sociological schematism of this kind is simply single-stranded, de-cultured analysis. Farmers, also, in consequence, were quite predisposed to use the s tate, and to org aniz e politi cally - w heth er at sta te/pr ov incia l or nat ion al/ feder al level - from the earli est days. G ive n th e so cial and cultural composition of the frontier and other backward farming regions, the small farmer could, with some justification, talk of ‘the people* or ‘the citizenry’, and mean ‘the small farmer*. A common market -si tuat ion, com mo n pr e-ex isting cultura l ties, often, and common enemies, all contributed to engendering a peculiarly strong sense of identity and solidarity, a ‘ communal * cl ass -c on sciousness that was not the s ecti on al class-consciousness of those who feel themselves to be an embattled part only, a slice or seg ment of a wider society made up of other numerous and powerful inte rest -agg reg ate s. For very f ew o f thos e w ho lived on the frontier or in other marginal regions were n ot farmers; m ost of those who were not, were, at one remove, highly dependent upon the farmers who we re thei r clie nts, neighbours, and cu stom ers. M ore than this, most of the farmers were s m a ll farmers, even if processes of dif ferentiation began early and went on inexorably, as they are still
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going on. All those who lived and worked on farms were, objec tively, and also felt themselves to be, set apart from those others who neither worked land nor lived in the farming community, but w h o liv ed ‘do w n Ea st’ on the profits they exact ed from the farmers’ labour. These latter, almost entirely, were physically distanced from the farmer, and therefore never interacted directly with him. T h ey did no t liv e in the front ier reg ions at all, but outside it : in the towns and cities, the state/provincial capitals, in Washington, Ottawa, and Wall Street. Hence class-solidarity did not divide the local community; class-consciousness was communal rather than sectional, and united the farmers. It was classically expressed, not in the sectional terminology of class at all, but in the more inclusive and reverberating name of ‘the people’. To the extent that this solidarity was rhetorical (for any social collectivity or category can be further broken down into sub‘classes’, and Western farmers were no exception), their solidarity was cu t across by ma ny o f the tie s wh ich we have already mentioned as binding together more limited communities; solidarity at the lower level representing separation at a more inclusive level. Thus co m m un iti es we re div ide d insofar as some men had larger farms than others, were wealthier or more successful, employed more labour, had machines, access to credit, etc. Other differences were cultural, rather than class differences: the ethnic mosaic of the settlement pattern, even within as well as between settlement areas. Differential allegiance to established political parties again divided them, to name no other divisive elements. A t first, i n ord er to avoid h ighligh ting such divisions , the attempt was made to segregate different areas of social life, notably to keep th e ne w farm ers’ organizations ‘non-p olitical’. They were, of course, analytically, political organizations. What this meant was that members of farmers’ organizations would be allowed to retain their affiliations to political par ti es , and thus avoid any clash of loyalties as between party and farmers’ organization. The common interests of the people as far mers were claimed to be separable from their other, more general and more private, interests as political animals. As long as the farmers’ demands were not very radical or extensive; as long as they were confined to particular, largely economic, demands, and did not cohere to form an overall programme; as long as, negatively, they involved no rejection of the policies and philosophies of the major parties or of the constitutional order,
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farmers and politicans could follow in classic lobbying procedure, buying and selli ng support and favo urs. B ut ‘ eco no m ic’ issu es, and ‘political’ and ‘social’ issues, cannot be kept apart in neat com partments as easily in political life as they can be in some kinds of (bad) social theory. For the reasons outlined above, third-party political irruptions were built-in to a relatively homogeneous social structure with int ere sts very di ff ere nt fr om th e rest o f the coun try, as an end em ic, rec urr ent , chronic politi cal phen om eno n. W he n thir d- pa rty agra ria n movements did take root, they were inevitably, also, mass move ments that cut across conventional political orthodoxies, both of ideas and of constitutional and organizational forms such as the oscillation of ‘in-party’ and ‘out-party’. With overwhelming maj orities, for instance, the extreme situation was to be reached in which formal opposition was condemned to permanent minority impo te nce , and pa rl ia men ta ry govern m ent-an d-op pos ition becam e inoperable and meaningless. Professor Brough Macpherson has described for us one classic right-wing form of prairie populism, the United Farmers of Alberta, which had two-thirds of all seats in the Alberta legislature from 1921 to 1934, and its successor, Soc ia l Cr ed it, w hich wo n eighty-n ine per ce nt o f th e seats in 1935, an d st il l re ig ns t oda y. T hou gh Social Credi t succ essfu lly m on op o lized the political life of that province, it was nevertheless obliged by Federal constitutional obligations to operate within the formal framework of parliamentary government-and-opposition. Mac pherson therefore labels this a ‘quasi-party* system: not ‘nonparty’, because institutionalized opposition and other (albeit vestigial) manifestations of ‘party-ness’ still persisted (and were not spontaneously ‘abolished’ through the total evaporation of sup port); and not ‘one party’, where legal opposition is abolished by political fiat, because the party in power was so pre-eminent that it had no need to proscribe other parties (and further, could not, because it was not an autonomous state, but part of Federal Canada).10
CONTE
M PORARY
THI
RD
- W
OR
LD PO
PU
LI
SM
Th is degre e of pre- emine nce, bas ed on overwhelming popular sup port, or, as often, the result of entirely ineffective and fragmented opposition on the part of minor parties, effectively eliminates
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all rivals without necessarily resorting to force or repression. It bears close resemblance to a much more recent phenomenon, the d om inan t n ationa list m ass-pa rty ‘inheritor’ par ty- sta te in con temp orary Africa and A sia, and to certain Latin America n an alogu es. T he se ar e the third major cluste r o f movem ents to whi ch t he l ab el Th e Thi r d ‘populist’ has commonly been applied. In my book W or ld 11 I de scr ibe d t h e p rincip al features of this var iant of popul i sm as follo w s: 1 he p rop ositio n that soc io-e co no m ic cl asses are not the crucial social entities that they are in developed countries. They are held not to exist, or to be vestigial remnants of colonialism or ‘feudal ism’, or to be merely incipient (and with social engineering, can be prevented from emerging). The class struggle is therefore an irrelevant conception.
2 T h e major anta gon isms are thos e between the soci et y a s a whole (the ‘nation’) and the outside world, particularly the ex-colonial Powers, but also a n y Power or bloc which seeks to directly control or decisively influence developments in AfroAsia/Latin America, in accordance with the claims from such outside Powers that their ideologies have universal validity, relevance, and applicability. These Powers are particularly suspected of applying their erroneous views in a way that holds back Third World liberation and development, consciously or unconsciously. The Cold War, therefore, is also taboo. But pure ‘individualistic’ nationalism is cross-cut by the appeal to common identity as the ‘proletarian’ nations, and by the requirements of r aci al sovereignty and/or continental identity. The experience of past colonialism and present neo-colonialism thus generates loyalties to entities and groupings wider than the nation. 3 T h e Party is the ag ency o f li berati on, and the Par ty -St at e th e agency of development (unlike ear ly Russian populism), but the Party-State is not seen as the direct controller and initiator of all economic and other social activity. Great stress is placed upon cooperative and communitarian forms of modernization, and upon ‘self-help’, with the village as the key social unit for development purp oses in th e rural a reas (i.e. th e bulk o f t he count ry). A ‘ mixed’ economy is accepted, including the persistence of private foreign investment, but with the main future growth planned to hinge upon some kind of planned ‘villageization’ in the countryside, and with a good deal of State intervention and control in industry and
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commerce. The strategy of modernization primarily via heavy industry or even secondary industry, however, is discounted, not solely because it is impractical, but because it is held to be inapplicable to agrarian societies, or, in extreme, ‘unnatural’ in a physiocratic sense, a repugnant aspect of urban life which is marginal to the general life of the country. 4 Th e unity of the nat ion is expressed in th e single-pa rty, and sometimes elaborated into a philosophy which links Party, nation, village-life, and self-activity into an ideological complex. In some countries, it is true, spontaneous mass support was never decisive enough to ensure unchallenged supremacy for the majority party. Here, other methods were used to demobilize opposition, ranging from persuasion to force, from patronage to bribery. In this struggle for power, the liberal parliamentary insti tutions for the most part merely constituted a formal framework within which the results of the battle fought outside Parliament were ratified. Parliamentary support and control was thus merely one element, a resource in a complex political field of forces, at one level, and a final ‘legitimizing’ agency at another level. Coun tries like Tanzania, more secure because of overwhelming mass support, and because there has been no very effective opposition (though force has been used against trade unions and students), have experimented with allowing a distinct measure of choice and free expression within the framework of a single-party state. The sub st ant iv e cont ent of t his kind o f politi cal p rogram me m igh t w ell call for no such new te rm as ‘pop ulism ’ at all , and m igh t as w ell be designated by that old-fashioned term ‘nationalism’, had these regimes not, in one way and another, commonly developed, over and abov e the pr ogr amme of nati onal con solid ation and centraliza tio n, ‘s oci al’ prog rammes i n wh ich th e sm all peasa nt a nd th e virtu es of village society were enshrined as the kernel of national identity. Added to this, there has been an emphasis, in some countries, upon the development of small-scale farming, whether small holder or communitarian, as an alternative to both the large-scale capitalist estate or plantation and the collective State Farm. ‘Communitarian’ or co-operative models were also frequently represented both as more truly consonant with traditional rural culture -patt erns a nd as more v iable mod ern b ases for a rejuven ated agriculture than private capitalist development. It has been this small-farmer emphasis, and the emphasis on
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communitarianism, which have caused analysts to characterize such programmes as populist rather than simply nationalist. Since family-farming units and communitarian village life are perfectly compatible, forms resembling the moshav, or the Saskatchewan Gr ou p Far m, ha ve b ee n t he favoured models, intermediate between the independent at one endot ofher. the12ideal-typical con tin uu m and th epetty-farmer co llecti ve farm at the Planned settlement of this kind, however, is usually only an insig nific an t part o f th e agrarian scene, with some exc eptions (e.g. Kenya). Normally, then, populist theorists are discussing more than planned experimental communities. They assume that the rural population generally is homogeneous, that the archetypal citiz en is t h e peas ant, and tha t the phenomenon of mass identifica tion with the par ti uniq ue is simply the ‘registration’ in the political sph ere o f th is u nd erly ing comm unity o f life-situation. Yet differen tiation in land-holding, and in the degree of involvement in the international and domestic cash-economies, are both marked in these countries (with great variations from country to country, and re gio n to reg ion ). Su ch differen ces are very significant axes of social division. There are many other such divisions in the life-situation of the small farmers: some (ever fewer) are primarily subsistence farmers; others feed themselves and grow crops for the market; some are fully-fledged and specialized cash-crop producers; all are involved, in different degrees, in the market-economy as con sumers, or, sometimes, through their, or their relatives’, connec tio ns w ith th e labou r-ma rket, whethe r as buyers or sellers of labour. Some are primarily dependent upon family labour; others employ hired labour seasonally, yet others throughout the year hire labour on farms of sizes located at different points along that continuum at the far end of which lies capitalist agriculture. But the vast majority are still only very small producers, often only seasonal employers of labour, or employers mainly of their kin. Similarly, one needs to distinguish the varieties of farming enterprise, and the structure and content of the units, along many other dimen sions : the relations entailed in growing different kinds of crop, for insta nce , th e degr ee o f involve men t in different types of marketing arrangements, and so on (individual producers being commonly organized into marketing co-operatives, for example). All these differentia constitute important bases upon which more structured aggregations of political interest can, and often do, emerge. More231
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over, many people shift from one category to another at different times, blurring sharp occupational boundaries between, say, ‘mig rant labou r’ and ‘peasantry’ . Yet des pite all the se m icro variations of structure, and the ensuing differences in income level, style of life, and interest which accompany them, the very small farmers (peasants) preponderate, and constitute not only the majority in the countryside, but the majority in the nation. Conversel y, other socia l classes a re m icrosco pic in size , are often external to the polity altogether (as in the case of the overseas firms which control the commanding heights of the economy), or are cultu r ally ‘external’ to the indigenous ethnic majority (e.g. the enclave ‘foreign’ entrepreneurial communities: Indians in East Africa, Chinese in Indonesia, etc.). Such enclave classes, however have dissonant status positions within the different institutional spheres of society: powerful as they may be in the market-place, ot her s mon opoliz e the politi cal resource s, w hether throu gh control of the ballot-box or the army. Their physical isolation in ghettoes (e.g. coastal towns) mirrors their social encapsulation. Their pressence, moreover, preserves the unity of ethnic majorities that might othe rwis e splint er along numerous other su bsidiary potential lin es of cleavage, for, apart from the horizontal economic ones we have mentioned, ethnic, religious and other ver ti cal lines of cleavage have been much more important than horizontal stratification in much of Africa and Asia. This kind of ‘ethnic enemy’, then, is a guarantee of this kind of relative and qualified unity. Such movements differ from the Russian movements in several ways: in particular, they command a mass following amongst the peasantry. But they are closer to the Russian movements, and dis tanced from the American ones, to the extent that they emphasize tr adi ti onal a nd m odern com mun itari anism (the moshavim of Israel bein g a fa vour ed mod el for developm ent, an d the pattern of village life being redefined as ‘African socialism’). Yet, for the most part, the communitarian element is small, certainly in practice, and the smallholder predominates even in the centrally-sponsored and planned schemes. Where actual experimental communitarian schemes hav e be en intr oduced - normally only in th e form o f extremely modest pilot experiments which leave the main rural econom y quit e un aff ect ed - they h ave been singular fail ures, the large plans (Tanzania, Mali) proving abortive. Of course, the emergence of viable economic units historically, in countries such
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as Great Britai n and th e U S A , bo th in cap it al is t agr ic ul tu re and in industry, was accompanied by a massive decimation of the unsuccessful. But when it is g ov er n m en ts which are paying villageization schemes they do not so easily shrug off failure, as they can when failure is paid for solely by the small their failure. These entrepreneur who goes broke, for it is now governments, today, are indeed particularly eager for results in a world economy in which the economic dice are loaded against the primary producer in any case. They rarely continue, therefore, to pour pu blic capital into ineffectiv e and co stly experi ments. Inst ea d they turn back to the classic forms which they inherited from capit ali st colonial tim es, e.g. th ey ‘invest in succes s’ and i nvit e the ric h farmer to ‘en rich h im se lf’ further, as th e Bolsheviks did for a short period. Nominally ‘co-operative’ organizations, too, tend to come under the control of the larger farmers, since the material resourc es and social s kills w hic h giv e m en adva nta ge i n fa rmi ng a re transferable to, or constitute springboards for, success in other, non-farming, organizational contexts. The other major form of agr ic ul tur al p rod uc tion - plantation agri cul ture - is al so e nc our aged, though now refashioned as state farming (though it is not very common, since the managerial skills required are normally quite absent). Thus, in capitalist agriculture, the small farmer
celebrated in populist rhetoric gradually loses out in competition with larger, more efficient, more mechanized and more highlycapitalized units, and communitarian and co-operative forms are displaced by more centralized, large-scale, and collectivistic models or organization (State Farms, communes, etc.) in the communist world. In the initial period of nationalist development, however, the smallholding remains the farming unit, though the smallholder is usually supported by the state, or involved in state-initiated and -controlled smallholder development. This drive to smallholder, high-density resettlement is a function, not simply of ideology, or economic rationality, but primarily of political necessity. If land is not red istribu ted, th e lan dless w ill seize it or squat on i t - and bring dow n g ove rnm ents in the p roces s. Land re fo rm i s e ven mo re politically necessary in countries where the bulk of choice land is in the hands of foreigners (Algeria formerly; Kenya). Ethnic nationalism, then, rather than ideology, fuels the drive to land reform. Kenya’s very large resettlement schemes, powered by land
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hunger, and by nat ionali st rath er than s ocial-com m un itarian m otiv atio ns, have cr eate d a lar ge mass o f ind ividu al farm -ho ldin gs, u nder general, sometimes quite strict, control, supervision, guidance, and support from the state, particularly its agricultural arm: ex tension officers, settlement managers, development officers, etc. Butem the element is slight in these sch es. communitarian-co-operative 13 In many underdeveloped societies, the populist celebration of the peasant , part icul arl y celebration o f the ‘communitarian* aspect of village society, remains simply part of the ideological armoury of rhetoric, what Selznick has called an ‘unanalysed abstraction’, lodged in party programmes and national mythology, but unim por ta nt i n pra ct ic e. T his does not mean that, bein g m yth s, and not ‘operational’ economic guides to action, they are without social significance. ‘Unanalysed abstractions’, unrealized or unrealizable myths, are both major sources of powerful springs of action and major sources of legitimation, identity, and meaning. But where populism is primarily myth, it is clearly at a distinct remove from those populisms directly connected with the life of the small rural producer. The connection between paper political programmes and actual performance is often highly exiguous, for all parties, of course, and not simply ‘populist’-flavoured parties. The reasons for this gap are so man y and varied that they cann ot be dis cu sse d here :14 the y ra ng e fro m cyni cal tri cke ry o f the popu lace to self-d elus ion . One important structural factor is that parties which are actually in power soon find the limits within which innovation can be made without risking disintegration or stimulating radical new kinds of oppositi on. T h e cond iti ons o f acti on ar e such that ideal programm es cannot be implemented. Yet everybody in daily practice applies classificatory labels to movements which fail to realize their expressed programmes. If we were to be so rigorous, we would award them to no regime that has yet flourished. Even the cynical manipulation of an ideology may not debar parties from being dubbed ‘populist’ or ‘communist’, in so far as their supporters p er c ei v e them as such. Thus, we do not eschew applying the label ‘communist’ to societies that have not yet created anything like an egalitarian culture of abundance and liberty (the ‘second stage’ of socialism) after decades, even generations, of power. Similarly, we do not hesitate to apply the label ‘Conservative’ to a government
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and party which presided over the liquidation of the British Emp ire in less th an the lifeti me of a pa rliament. The formulation and operationalization of policy in general, and of agricultural policy in particular, is thus a function of many other things than simply adhesion to some kind of ideology, populist or otherwise. Ideology is merely an element in the field o f fo rces . A ll reg ime s, at th e least - except when suffering from ‘failure o f ne rv e’ - are inte rested in staying in power , whether from motivations of ‘self-interest’ or ‘idealism’; and large-scale land reform in Africa at least has been as much a function of what Profe ssor M azr ui has calle d ‘racial sovereignty’ - whether in Rhodesia’s 1951 Native Land Husbandry Act or Kenya’s resettle m en t pro gram mes - and o f the basic economic nec essity of solving problems of food supply, underemployment, town/country rela tion ship s, etc., mu ch more than it has bee n the o utco me of ‘purely’ agrarian considerations. There is one particular difference in the orientations of the new states which marks them off from both Russian and North American ‘traditional’ populisms: the new states, or their ruling parties, w elc om e and arde ntly desire indu strialization. The Russian populists, with minor exceptions, vilified the factory system and exalted the m i r (the ar tel, the small-scale association of craftsmen, living and working together, however, received their approval). The American populists had no idea or notion whatever of undo ing the city, merely of altering the balance of power so that the industrial East could no longer dictate to the impotent farmer. But the Third World populists positively desire industrialization, though they recognize, ruefully, that for the visible future they will continue to be agrarian societies. Development, in a small-producer agricultural economy, how ever, carries with it the spectre of class-differentiation in the countr ys i de. In North America, during the era of classical populism, the problem of the polarization of the farming community into large r and smaller un its - and thu s the dest ruction of the com m un ity b y cr os s-c ut tin g horizontal class-stratification - was a sub sidiary, even remote, question. Survival, rather, was the immediate question for most farmers racked with debts and worried about prices. The ‘big’ interests they were worried about were the really big corporations and banks of the East, not their marginally more successful neighbours in the locality. They had no objection in
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principle to success; it was, indeed, a goal for all of them, though for most an a bst ra ct and unlikel y possibility. T h e gross and patent discrepancy, then, was between the lives of the vast majority of farmer-producers and the power of the (external) institutions that exploited all of them. Those who failed, moreover, moved out of the farming com munity, to become migrant rural workers or recruits to the lower depths of the cities. They did not stay in the countryside com munities as a permanent local class of landless workers with inter ests opposed to those of their employers. Increasingly, they were displaced by machinery. Social homogeneity, therefore, was in various ways surprisingly maintained despite the rate of failure of farms, emigration being a permanent safety-valve which carried the potentially discontented outside the farming zones. T his kind o f soli darit y was ‘ societal’ , to us e W eb er’ s term inolo gy, insofar as it involved 'a rationally motivated adjustment of interests’ (common market-situation, need for mutual aid, etc.); but it was also ‘communal’ in so far as men had existing ethnic tie s or felt themselves to be ‘pioneers’ together. T h e d uality W eber established is thus not a dichotomy. Mutuality was both ‘expres sive’ and ‘instrumental’, to use Parsons’ further pair of categories. A common life-situation generated sentiments of identity derived from an instrumental calculus of parallel interest in co-operation and reciprocity between independent units. Of course, these ‘com munal’ sentiments la cke d the traditionali sm a nd collect ivism wh ich m i r gave to the common membership of the long-established Russian peasantry. The Russian peasants, similarly, obstinately continued to treat loc al c lass diff erences a s less impo rtant than th eir relatio ns w ith t he state. Lenin was able to demonstrate, in his polemics against the Narodniks,1 5 that the peasant ry was mark edly differen tiated into ‘rich’ , ‘m idd le’ and ‘ poo r’ peasants . Y et h e ass um ed , le ss h app ily, that this was a one-way process, whereas in fact, those households which were ‘rich’ this year were quite likely to be ‘poor* not so many years later. This is why, despite the separation out of a landless-labourer agricultural proletariat, a class of landless ten ants (often share-croppers), a class of petty independent small holders (and allotment-holders working for landlords), and a class of new, capitalist larger farmers employing wage-labour, the peasantry continued to exhibit solidarities which cut across these
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lines of cleavage. The main edge of peasant discontent was turned, not a gainst t h e ric h pea sant, bu t against the State .16 The sociological reasons for this continued by-passing of the class struggle are various. First, as Shanin shows, there was an oscillatory or cyclical process in the movement of the peasant household, a phase of expansion unit, back through into disintegration once moreinto intoa large small compound household/ eco no m ic farm un its. T h is was because the pe asant household was not just a purely ‘economic’ entity, but a household , with multiple patterns of rights and obligations which worked in ways inimical to any ‘pure’ economic, let alone, market, ‘rationality’. Thus the system of land-tenure was affected by its being embedded in a familistic integument: marriage and kinship, size of family, ordinal position within the family, and many other factors, affected the way land was held and used, the life-chances individuals had, the way labour and capital might be or might not be mobilized. Continuous polarization was therefore inhibited. The inexorable build-up of a landless proletariat in the countryside was counter balanced, for the least fortunate, by the not inconsiderable scale of physical extinction (infant and adult mortality) through disease and f am ine prima rily, and th e ‘social’ extinction of o thers who quit rural society by emigrating to the towns and cities, where they became the raw material of the new urban masses (whether as semi-employed occupants of all kinds of precarious interstitial nic he s in urban so cie ty or as part of a new indu strial working force which would nevertheless take a long time to develop a conscious ness of themselves as members of the industrial ‘working class’). For these and other reasons, the peasantry failed to produce sharply marked-off and conflicting ‘classes-for-themselves’ in the countryside. Indeed, paradoxically, Lenin himself adopted a termi nology which obscured the very distinctions he was making.‘Rich’, ‘middle’, ‘poor’, Alavi has noted, placed these separate classes w ith in a wid er array - ‘peasan try’ - with the different strata arranged, one over the other, in a single order. ‘This is misleading: the middle peasants, for instance, do not stand between the rich peasants and the poor peasants; they belong to a different sector of th e rural e c o n o m y .17 T o m ake the po int sharply, a ‘rich peasant’ is not just a producer who owns a bit more land or is richer according to some simple index of si ze (by virtue of which some are bigger and some smaller, but all are on the same continuum).
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Landless agricultual labourers, tenant-farmers, share-croppers, pocket-horticulturists owning their own land, and rich capitalist farmers employing labour are different animals, sociologically, different structural types of agricultural economic actor. Lenin did indee d mak e these diff erence s abu nd antly clear. Ye t h e th en adopt ed a te rmi nol ogy which bl urr ed these b ound ary lines. Un cons ciously, probably, he was right, insofar as, though the classes at any one poin t in time could b e distinguished, th e rat e and vo lum e o f m obility was such that these classes were like Schumpeter’s famous hotels and om nib use s: ‘alway s full, b ut alway s o f differen t p eo ple '.18 The statistics Lenin used, drawn largely from official sources, cre at ed an alyt ic al clas ses i nto w hich th e data was slotte d - so that a pea sant could be all ocate d to different c lasse s a cco rd ing to are a of land sown, or numbers of working animals. But these did not necessarily correspond to social divisions in the form of self-con sci ously an d sharply- opposed classes sp littin g th e co un trysid e, any more than the mass of immigrants to the town became instant proletarians even if many of them did work in factories. As num erous studies of contemporary Afro-Asian urbanization show, migrants to the towns remain attached to rural society and rural val ues e ven af ter decades of living and w ork ing i n th e u rba n are as.19 One should be extremely cautious, then, in assuming that apparently ‘objective’ measures of class-differentiation necessarily indicate even the potential consolidation of class-divisions and the con co mit ant diss oluti on o f older t ies. L en in ’s vigo rou s po lem ics to the contrary, his prognostications were not substantiated by later ev ent s. D espite t he miseri es of the landless and th e ‘hor ticulturist’ pocket-peasantry, the Russian countryside was ultimately to be racked, not by class war between rich and poor peasants, but by massive confrontation between the mass of the peasantry and the state constructed by Lenin’s party. Moreover, it is the middle peasant who has proved to be the most revolutionary stratum initially (a generalization that is relevant for the analysis of urban revolutionism also). Even in North America, militant farmers’ moveme nts hav e pr inci pall y been led by th e m ore su ccessf ul, often quite large, farmers, who give leadership to the mass of smaller men, and, thus, paradoxically, speak in the name of the ‘small farmer.’ Solidarity in the countryside, then, is by no means simply a myth swiftly dispelled by the cold dawn of class-struggle. The
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Na rod nik analysis, for all its romanticism, approximates more closely to an adequate sociological analysis than Lenin’s economistic diag nosis, since the latter ignored the wider institutionalized cultural con tex t w ith in wh ich the peasant’s ‘economic’ life is lived out; that, in fact, no one lives purely ‘economic’ lives, and that poverty and subordination, in any case, as often generate despondency as they do militancy, breed servility, generate a ‘trained incapacity’ to innovate, and encapsulate the peasant from the experience of modern-style organizations. The twentieth century has only become the century of peasant revolutions since new agencies have broken down the barriers between peasant life and the knowledge of the cities. The revolu tionary party Lenin pioneered, led by city-based intellectuals, workers, or, by and large, almost anyone other than peasants, has been the crucial mediating and leadership agency. (The one auth entic peasant revolution, that of Mexico, remains, significantly, ‘unfinished’.) Pure peasant protest, without such external media tio n, is gen era lly a stor y o f blind and sporadic violence, o f betrayal, inability to organize, susceptibility to political counter-attack and treachery, and is ultimately a record of disaster, repression, and counter-butchery, of j acquer i es and la violencia rather than of successful revolution. There remain to be considered two particular ways in which the term ‘populism’ has been used vis-a-vis the ‘Third World’. The first of these is the application of the term to such move ments as Peronism, Getulism, etc., in Latin America. The basic characteristic of these radical movements is their mass political support among an urban population swollen by the immigration of people from the countryside. These people are unaffected by the traditional influence of those orthodox and staid varieties of socialism and communism which have considerable followings amongst the older, more privileged city population of skilled workers, who received these creeds from Europe, whence they or th eir fath ers had co me . T h e ‘populi st’ movements, by contrast, were right-wing radical responses to, first, depression, and then to the situation of rapid, protected industrial expansion made possible by the Second World War in Europe, in which the new industrial ists, in order to break the traditional dominance of the traditional export interests (coffee, meat) were prepared, for a time, to com bine with the masses newly-organized in authoritarian, centralized, 239
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‘personalis t’ mass organ izati ons, notab ly th e trade un ion s.20 Peronism, for example, via Evita Peron, constantly celebrated the simple poor, the descamisado, and intermingled classical patronage with social welf are prog rammes (and circuses). It further pion eered techniques of institutionalized ‘direct access’ to the leader via the pseudo-participation meetings, which, like all such ‘faceto-face meetings with of themass people’, are spurious consultations in so far as the traffic is one-way only. In fact, these are only technical additions to a traditional style of political relationship between leader and mass that has commonly been called Bonapartism, Caesarism, or Boulangism. The only really novel addition is not the t echni ques of mass-communicati on, but the organi zati on o f the workers into controlled trade unionism instead of leaving them as a ‘disposab le’ city mo b.21 Lik e their precursors, th e L atin A m erica n Caesars preached an ideology of national solidarity, above party and sectional interest, and emphasized the peculiar mystical bond between themselves and the masses, linking them in opposition to the established and privileged high and mighty. Finally, there remains a use of populism, more analogical than analytical, which converts it from its srcinal function as a frame work for conceptualizing the i nter nal order of societies by project ing it on to a quite different plane: that of contemporary relation ships between nation-states . In this model, the mass of poor prim countr ies. arypr oducer s becomes the mass o f poor primary-producing T he cl ass ic popu list at te mpt to devel op ideas and m ovem ents w hich steer clear of the Scylla of developed capitalism no less than the Charybdis of collectivism (in particular, marxism), is thus paral leled by the attempts of many Third World countries to steer a midway course between Moscow (and Peking) and Washington, to establish an identity, and some institutionalized expression of that identity, in the form of Bandung, Belgrade, positive neutral ism, and, more recently, the ‘77’ underdeveloped nations at U N C T A D . A num be r of t hes e c ou nt ri es , too , have made so me attempt to develop a place in their ideological armouries, and in their development planning, for some form of ‘internal’ populist agrarian experiments such as we have described above. For these countries, populism manifests itself in both internal and external relationships, however rhetorical the former and however metaphorical the latter.
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We have so far examined populism in its best-known specific form s an d co ntex ts. T h es e may be subsumed un der a more limited general rubric: the encounter between a small-rural-producer so cia l orde r an d t h e superio r power of large-scale (usually capitalist) industry and commerce. These organized populist movements, as we have seen, have taken both left-wing and right-wing forms (more commonly, left). But the presence of populist movements in agrarian societies approaching the ‘development threshold* is, however, only one context in which such movements have emerged. Many writers have also used the term to describe those movements which have occurred amongst the despairing legions of petty officialdom, am onpeople g sm all(e.g. sho pk eepe rs and micro-ent s, amon g re spec table retired middle class) on repre fixed neur pensions and other inflex ible sou rces o f in co m e: all of these being m arkedly hostile to organized Labour. They are, under normal conditions, orthodoxly middle-class conservative until disaster radicalizes them. Then exp erie nce o f su dd en down turn in their f ortunes generates extreme ri gh t-w in g reactio ns. T h is has been cal led ‘extremism of the centre’, a phrase which confuses two different axes: location in a set of su pe rim po sed horiz onta l classes, a nd location along a continuum be tw een Rig ht and L eft. T he y can only be called, clumsily, 'middleclass right-wing radicalism*. It was these ‘lower middle-class’ elements which, classically, constituted, disproportionately to their numbers in the total population, one major source of support for the early Nazi move ment,22 for example, or for Poujadism (on the other hand, McCarthyism, often dubbed populist, is a much more many-sided phenomenon than this kind of petty-bourgeois panic-stricken resentment, as the analysis of the variety of its social sources of su pp or t su gg es ts ,23 th ou gh p opu list appeals to direct involvement in go ve rn me nt and, parti cularly, the by-pas sing of orthodox institutional channels, were certainly important elements). These movements appealed, not to the ‘working man’, or even to the ‘middle classes’, but, more commonly, more evocatively and more indefinitely, to the ‘small man’, in all his vague and various, individualistic and communal, emotionally-explosive manifesta tions and self-definitions, upon which virtual ‘popular fronts of
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M -ITS
M E AN I NG S
the Right’ have been built. At its very loosest, the term ‘populist* has been used to describe any movement invoking the name of the pe op le: the si mple, ordi nar y untutored folk, the co m m on m an, the mass, the descamisado, the san s -c u lo tte\ an appeal wide enough to embr ace , and to wean fro m ex isting attach men ts, w orkers, peasan t/ farmers, micro-entrepreneurs, tribesmen: ofanyone small,provided threat ened, xenophobic, lacking the framework orientation by org ani ze d L abo ur: trade union ism, socialism, com m un ism , cooperativism: but offering to all these a new communal trans secti onal identity, usuall y easily yoked to national im ages - the V olk . Even traditional solidarities, e.g. left-wing themes, could easily be redefined by radical right-wing leaderships for whom the detachment of solidarity from particular left-wing programmatics did not prove insuperably difficult, as in the displacement of socialist and communist sentiments and appeals manifested in Hitler’s attacks on (Jewish) capitalist exploiters and moneybags, in verbal allusions to five-year plans, and even the very title of the National S oci ali s t German W or k er s ' Party Ideological radicalism of the Right, with its mass roots in the menu peuple, as we have seen, is no new phenomenon. Over the centuri es, it has tak en such forms as the trad itional alli ance betw een king, church, and city mob. The twentieth century has similarly converted large segments of the lower orders into the organized mass base of totalitarian parties and has not hesitated to use app ea ls to popul ar sentimen t - as w ell as force, blan dishm ent, patr onag e, etc. - to recruit them . But these movements were anything but ‘populist’ overall: not for nothing are labels like ‘authoritarian’, ‘fascist’, or ‘totalitarian’ used normally to describe them. Populism is only an element , not the dominant feature of this kind of movement. Nazism, for exampl e, had m any other cruci al social sources o f p olitical su ppo rt: among the military and the ex-military, in big business, among all who fear ed soci al revoluti on more tha n th ey feare d th e strong-arm radicalism of right-wing parvenu extremists. And the demobiliza tion of opposition, and the inducement of conformity by the use of s ys te mat ic vio le nce - the S A, the S S and the G estapo - wer e quite as important as any appeals of a populist kind. We have already spread the populist net wide enough to include right-wing as we ll as left-win g vari ants, as f ar as organized agr arian populi st movements we re c oncer ned. W e have now found populist
242
THE CONCEPT OF POPULISM
elements in developed societies as well as in those standing on the thresh old of mod ernization, in the towns as well as in the co untry side, amongst workers and the middle classes as well as among peasants. Since there are obviously innumerable differentials between all of these ‘social locations’, any features common to them all can only be very general indeed. A systematic concatenation of struc tural properties (e.g. in terms of social composition, leadership, particular policies, etc.) is impossible to delineate. Any elements that they may possess in common, then, will be of a high order of generality. Most observers assume these elements to exist when they use the term ‘populism’ but, for the most part, they do so implicitly and intuitively rather than explicitly and analytically. Yet such assumptions are by no means self-evidently justifiable. As we have seen, any ‘low-level’ attempt to leadership, match structural properties (e.g. in terms of social composition, etc.), or ideological emphases (communitarianism, attitude to capitalism, etc.) are likely to yield entirely distinct profiles, as a listing of only three key variables, for the two best-known populisms, reveals:
V a ria b le
N o r t h A m e ri c a
Farmer/peasant mass membership
n/
Leadership by intelligentsia
X
Russia
X
Communitarian system of land-tenure
X
s/
At this level, these movements, patently, have very dissimilar profiles. The boldest attempt to specify these more general and funda mental characteristics of populism which are held to be common to the generally-recognized populisms, despite ‘lower-level’ speci fic differences, has been made by Edward Shils, though he was 2 4 3
PO PU LISM
-ITS
M EA NI NG S
writing particularly about North American variants. Populism, for him, involves subscription to two cardinal principles: (a) the sup remac y of the will o f the peop le ‘over every oth er standard, over the standards of traditional institutions and over the will of other strata. Populism identifies the will of the people with justice and morality’; the desirability of a by ‘direct’ relationship between people and(b) leadership, unmediated institutions.24 Such styles of popular participation, it is commonly observed, are generally ac co mpa ni ed by a quasi- reli gious b elief in t he virtues o f the uncor rup ted, s imple, comm on fol k, and a con vers e d istru st o f th e ‘smart’, effete, supercilious, aristocratic, idle, wealthy, functionally unnec essary and basically degenerate or corrupt: ‘an ideology of resent ment against the order imposed on society by a long-established ruling class, which is believed to have a monopoly of power, property, breeding and culture’. Populism, in this view, involves dist rust of t he ‘ over- educated’ and de nies any degr ee o f autonom y to t he l eg is la ti ve b ra nch of governm ent, jus t as it de nies autono my to any institution. It ‘hates the civil service’ and is hostile to the politician; it is urban as well as rural, right-wing as well as left. It 'seeks substantive justice’, and ‘cares not at all’ for traditional rules or legal systems. Shils condenses all these particular dimensions of pop uli sm u nde r two princ ipal he a d s: the no tion o f th e supremacy of the will of the people, and the notion of the direct relationship bet wee n pe opl e and gove rnment. A t this p oint, w e b egin to see the substantive implications of differences in initial methodological procedures, for our attempt to tease out the special, and common, characteristics of those movements to which the label ‘populist’ happens to have been applied, historically, by different people with different things in mind, has proved singularly unrewarding. All that the movements appeared to share in common was a name. It was only when we moved to a much higher level of abstrac tion, specifying in advance what we meant by populism, that we were able to see why, despite profound variations in specific detail and form, a pair of broad principles seemed to permeate all this variety. What we arrived at, in fact, in adopting Shils’s definition, was an ide al type (‘ pop ulism ’ in its ‘spec ific h istor ical’ forms being ‘an instance of the species’, Shils, pp. 102-3). If we had followed Weber’s methodological prescriptions, we might have s t a r t ed with such an ideal type.
244
THE CONCEPT OF POPULISM
This twofold ideal-type of populism is, therefore, much more widely applicable than simply to those conventionally labelled ‘po pu lis t’ mov eme nts, for the celebration o f the will of the people, and experiment with forms of direct contact between people and leadersh ip occ ur in a wide variety of political cultures and forms. The former, for example, appears in fascist mystique, in demo cratic theorizing, or in regimes in which, as the wit has it, ‘the general will is embodied in the General'. Even the most inhumane and authoritarian regimes, in modern times, have, at least verbally, rationalized their authority in terms of some reference to the will of the people26 (since supernatural legitimation is now archaic, and frank eliti sm disgraced since Na zism). Th e populist syndrome, then, is much wider than its particular manifestation in the form or context of any particular policy, or of any particular class of polity: democracy, totalitarianism, etc. This suggests that popu lism is better regarded as an emphasis, a dimension of political culture in general, not simply as a particular kind of overall ideolo gic al sy ste m or type o f organization. O f course, as with all ideal types, it may be very closely approximated to by some political cultures and structures, such as those hitherto labelled ‘populist’. The search for direct people-leadership contact is one point along a continuum stretching from total non-involvement of the mass of the people at one end to the ideal anarchist self-regulating co mm un e at th e other. In my view, these two extremes are a very large part of what I mean when I use the terms ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ (parliamentary institutions, nationalized industry, etc., etc. having no absolute sociological significance, but deriving their signifi can ce insofa r as the y relate to the involvement of people in the running of their own society). From this point of view, whilst we can recognize clearly mass participation and involvement in, say, Nuremberg rallies and street-demonstrations, it is important to distinguish serious, effective and independent popular interven tion from manipulated, purely illusory or symbolic, pseudo-*inter vention’. The distinction between illusion and reality, that is, remains sociologically valid and important, even if we know that illusions have real consequences. And, as we noted earlier for communism, we can distinguish ‘legitimatory’ functions from ‘operational’ social programmes. It would seem desirable, then, to alter part of Shils’s definition o f po puli sm so that - without eliminating ‘pseudo-participation’ 245
PO PU LISM
-I TS
ME AN I NG S
(demagogy, ‘government by television’ , etc.) - w e could al so include, and distinguish, genuine and effective popular participa tion. ‘Pop ulism ’, then, w ould refer not o nly to ‘direct’ relationsh ips between people and leadership (which must, inevitably, in any complex, large- sca le soc iety, be predom inantly sheer m ystificati on p a r t i ci p a ti o n in or symbolism), but, more widely, to popular general (including spurious ‘pseudo’-participation). It seems particularly important to distinguish the participatory element i n pol iti cal act ion si nce it is an in trin sic part o f the de m o cratic process, in particular, and one that has been quite under valued in some recent sociological writing. Lipset, for example, has written that democracy in a complex society may be defined as a political system whic h supplies regular constitu tiona l op po rtu ni tie s for ch an gi ng the governing officials, and a social mechanism which permits the largest possible part of the population to influence major decisions by choosing among contenders for p olitical o ffice . . .
and that democracy, so conceived, ‘is the good society itself in operation’.2" Th is seems to me an a rbitra ry asserti on that o ne elem en t in that complex concept, ‘democracy’, the institutionalization of legiti mate modes of opposition and of change of government, is some how the most impor tan t or quintessential elem ent. Y et, histori ca lly - not sol ely i n rhet or ic , but in the reali ty o f innum erable political mechanisms and devices ranging from the referendum and the elec tio n, the mandate, the initiative and t h e recall, thro ugh town meet ings , p lebi scit es (including ‘plebiscites de to us les jou rs’ ) to f orm s of dele gati on a nd repres entati on - attem pts to pu t into practice the concept of the supremacy of the will of the people have been an intrinsic, central part of ‘democracy’, which has alway s i nvolve d a g re at dea l more than th e ins -an d- ou ts o f parl ia mentarism. It has involved the conception and the praxis of the inv ol vement of peopl e in the governing of their o w n lives, however ineffective the achievement. As a recurrent part of the communist, anarchist, socialist and democratic traditions alone (manifest in such recent developments as Yugoslav and Polish experiments in ‘workers’ control’, experiments with Ombudsmen and consumer associations) it would have been worth dignifying by a special label - p opulism. Po pulism as ‘d irect* p articipation is th us a
246
THE C
ONCEPT
O F POPULISM
dimension of the democratic and socialist traditions. It is not the w ho le of th es e traditions, bu t it is quite a s im por tan t a comp on ent of them as Lipset’s notion of legitimized opposition and change of government, or Schumpeter’s notion of ‘participation’ of a more oblique kind: choosing amongst contenders for office. The populist ‘dimension’, however, is neither democratic nor anti-democratic: it is an aspect of a variety of political cultures and structures. Populism is certainly compatible with democracy, though this is often denied. In so far as it ignores the need for institutions and pluralism; in so far as it dislikes factionalism; insofar as it disto rts socia l m echan isms which seem to it spec ialize d and bureaucratic, it appears to undervalue the importance, and even the rights, of minorities, and to depart from ‘rule of law’. But there is always a tension in our conception of a just society between the rights of minorities and the rights of the majority. Insofar as populism plumps for the rights of majorities to make sure - by ‘inter ve nin g’ - that they are not ig nor ed (as th ey co m m on ly are) p op ulism is p rofou ndly compatibl e wit h de mocrac y. The penumbra of meanings surrounding this term need not frighten us into fearing that we have here some peculiarly spongy con cep t. W e ca n alway s qua lify it by ‘ Right-w ing’ , ‘Left-wing’ , ‘pseudo-* or any other qualifiers. There is nothing strange or regrettable in the fact that the attempt to capture, in a single word, complexes of thought and behaviour which have developed and changed over time, have become institutionalized, diversified, and embedded in successive and varied niches, milieux , and contexts, nec essarily inv ests that ter m w ith Em pson-like ambiguit ies .27 Thus ‘capitalism’ is used to refer to classic la isse z fai r e free-enterprise and to ‘monopoly’ capitalism; to petty shop-keeping, to micro w ork sho p en terp rise, and to peasan t agriculture ; to bo th industrial and agrarian economic activity; to (though we usually use the word ‘bourgeois’) values, ideas, beliefs, etc. believed to be appro priate to, or inherent in, capitalist economic relationships; to form s o f enterpr ise located w ithin ‘mixed econo mies’; to ‘boot y’ capitalism, ‘imperialist’ or ‘neo-colonial’ capitalism, ‘state’ capi talism, etc., etc. ‘Populism’, then, is no looser a term than such labels as ‘capitalism’ or ‘communism’. Yet we have been singu larly slow to adopt it, possibly because it has usually been used mainly to refer to distinct movements which have been pheno mena of transition, or r evoluti ons manq uees , transitional moments
247
PO PU L ISM
-I T S ME AN I N GS
in processes of political change, whilst the wider concept of po pu lism as an elem en t or dim en sion o f po li tical act ion in g eneral has been o bscured by the u se o f com m on sense but quite i na d equ a te terms like ‘democracy’, ‘Caesarism’, etc. T h e p op ulist m ove m ents, norm all y, hav e f ai le d. Hist ory ign ores the defeated, but from the Narodniks and the American populists onwards, throug h to th e contem pora ry m anifes tati ons of o rg a n ized populism, the themes we have traced seem persistent enough, however great the variations upon them, and their recrudescence so continual, that it would seem that we need this label to describe this con stantly-recurring style
o f politi cs - the et er nal a tt empt of
peop le to clai m po li tics as som eth ing o f theirs - and t hat the o ne peop le have used -
‘p op u li sm ’ - is as goo d a s any t er mi no l og i ca l
neophilism. What we have tried to do in this essay is to spell out the main m eanings inform ing the diversi ty o f usag es to which t he ter m has been put, rat her than leave them im plicit and une xamine d.
N o te s 1 A pionee ring disti nction o f this kind was M a x W eb er’s sep ar at io n of 'social ethic’ from ‘theology’. Today, however, we should scarcely assume universal that either Protestantism or Catholicism carry with them any implicationsforaction at all. 2 See the discussion of the concept of ‘charisma’ in the Introduction to m y The Tr umpe t S h all Sou nd (revised edition, Schocken Books, New
Yo rk , 1968). 3 How this came about would be worth studying. I suspect that whoever made the initial transl ation was n o t implying any resemblance between Russian movements and American ones (themselves, reciprocally, little narod known to the outside world). It is probably a verbal coincidence ( people, nation, etc.), but one which may (as we must consider to be a distinct possibility at this stage) have generated a complete pseudoproblem for comparative analysis. evolt: a hist o r y of t he 4 Joh n D .H ic ks ’ class ic study, Th e Populist R Far mer s’ A ll ia nce and the P e ople ’s P ar ty (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1931) describes the most important of these various movements. 5 See E. J.Ho bsbaw m, P r im itive R ebe ls: st ud ie s in ar cha ic for m s of so cial move me nts i n the ni net eenth an d tw enti eth centur ies , Manchester University Press, 1959 (‘Millenarianism II: The Andalusian Anarchists’, pp. 7492). 6 Nineteenthcentury populist farmers did experiment, often spectacularly, with cooperative marketing of their products and bulk purchase of
:
other farm requirements (see Hicks’s discussion of the Texas and Georgia
248
THE CONCEPT O Ex cha ng es, op . cit ., pp. itself
is very
H en ry
132-40
atyp ical: the
on and C
Perspectives,
eds.B.
). T h e collect
Blishen,Fra
them , in
that
than
pro du cti on
acco rding to w
ing’,
Secon
22 7-42).
co-opera
rD .N aegele,
Th ese ‘group’
tive, a t erm
i s join tly undert
ork -days pu
d W orld
JohnP ort er,
f ar ms ar e col le c-
that i s of ten used for
aken, with
re wards
al lo cat ed
kolkhoz
t in: m uch li ke the Soviet
Sta te F arm ). H ow eve r, outside producti
W ar ( ‘Pr i or
Canadian S ociety: Soc iolo g ical
in
nkE .Jone s,Kaspa
M ac M ill an , To ro n to 1964 , pp. tivisti c, strictly, rather
of a re thos e des cri bed by
kat chewan, post-
oop erative Farm
ISM
ive organi zat io n of fa rming
on ly cas es I k now
Co op erstock for Sas
Socialisati
F POPUL
on, li fe i s quite
orthodoxly
(not
th e
N orth
A m e r i c a n , u n l ik e t h e m o s t ‘ t o t a l ’ c o n t e m p o r a r y c o l le c tiv e s k n o w n : th e
kibbutzim.
In div idu al fam il ies of spouses and
hou seho lds, ow 7 R eligio
n p rop erty, etc., and there i
n , un like po
read il y d etach ed from reli gion in the
s no coll
local , indeed
‘m elti ng -pot’, s
can be more
earthl y, inst it uti ons. O n the rol
e of
Pr otesta nt, C atho lic, J ew :
ee W il l Herberg,
that future researc
pha sis upo
A n c h o r B o o k s , N e w Y o r k , i9 6 0 ,
H utterites, D
h, for Can
ing factor i
n colonizat
ion than
se.T he com m unit ari an reg imes of t heM enno nit es,
ou kh ob ors, etc., a
historical cases, ‘com
re , of c ourse,
extre m e ca se s onl y. In m ost
m un it arian ism ’, ‘collectivism
to b e foun d in v arying com ‘pu re’ case, such as
ad a at l eas t, w il l pl ace m uch
n ethn icit y as a bind
has hit herto been the ca
type
e, si nce it
.
8 I be li eve greater em
i Ve i n sep arat e
ecti vist ideol ogy.
li tics, i s easil y transportabl
an essa y in A mer i can r eligi ous so ciol ogy , Ch aps. 2 and 3
children l
binat ions and degrees
kibbutzim,
the
’, etc., are on ly elements o f st rength: t
serves as an ideal (
he nea r
and ve ry unu sual)
only .
9 P lus th e p ow er o f the rail road interest go vern m en t po li cy to fi nd them
a new source o
s t o infl uence Ca
nad ian
f prof it . See H arold A . Inni s,
T he F u r Tr ade in Ca na da: an intr oduc tio n to Canadian e conomic hist or y
(U n ivers ity of
T or on to Press
int er-r el ati onships bet
, 1956, pp. 39
ween the Gran
6-402) for
a di scuss ion of
d T ru n k R ail wa y Com pan y,
H ud son B ay Co m pan y, t he Canadian Paci
fi c Rail way, and
the
th e
the Dom ini on
Government. 10 O ne shou ld note a
newer category, t
con tem pora ry A fri canists and the N
o-Pa rty State
13, M ar ch -A p ril w h ic h
he ‘no-p arty’ s ta te , use d b y some
(s ee , f or exam ple,
: Tan ganyika and t
196 4, Kam
pala, pp. 25
s e c tio n a l p a r tie s are h e ld
H en ry Bienen, ‘
he Soviet Un -32)
( b y th e
ion’
to ref er to those
T h e Party
Transition, poli ti es i n
v ic to r io u s p o litic ia n s ) to h a v e
b e c o m e r e d u n d a n t o n c e i n d e p e n d e n c e is a c h i e v e d , b e c a u s e a ll a r e s a id t o b e a g r e e d u p o n c o m m o n o b je c tiv e s : ‘n a tio n -b u ild in g ’ , e tc. S e c tio n a l parties t herefore eit her ‘wither aw ay ’ or a re abolished. T h e resulti ng po lit y i s one
that I have label
C olo ny b eing anot Lon don , 1967, 11 W eidenfeld
her va ri ant
led the
‘ Ad m inist rative Sta
{ The Thir
d W orld ,
te’,
wn
W e id e n fe ld a n d N ic o ls o n ,
pp. 25-32). and N icolson, revi
12 Indep end ent small f
armers al
sed edit ion, 1967. so recei ve considerable suppo
the state via extension services, research institutes, credit agencies, etc., and are oft
the Cro
en q uite strictly controlled in their farm
249
ing practice.
rt f rom
POPULI SM - I TS
M E A N IN G S
13 See Hans Ruthenberg, A f r i c a n A g r i cu lt u r a l P r od u ct i on D ev elopm en t Pol icy in K eny a 1952-1965, Springer, Berlin, 1966. 14 See Philip Selznick, T V A and t he Gr as s R oo ts : a st ud y in t he soci olog y o f f o r m a l or g an i s ati on , Harper, New York, 1966, Chap. II, ‘The Functions and Dilemmas of Official Doctrine’. 15 Notably in his D eve lop me nt of Capitalism i n R us si a ; (see also S el ec t ed Works, V ol . X I I : ‘T h e T h e o ry o f the Agr ari an Qu es ti on ’ , La wr en ce and Wishart, Lon don , 1943). 16 In 1906, for example, eighty per cent of peasant disturbances were antistate; two p er cent antirich p easant (see T . Sha nin’ s * Cy c l ic al D iff er en ti a ti on am on g th e R u s s i an P ea s a n t r y , 19102 5 (Ph .D. thes is, Univers ity of Birmingham, 1967). S oci ali s t R eg i ster 196 5, 17 Hamza Alavi, ‘Peasants and Revolution’, Merlin Press, London, pp. 24175. 18 S o c i a l C las s es / I m p er i ali s m : two essays by Joseph Schumpeter, Meridian Books, New York, i960, p. 126. 19 To cite only one outstanding study, see Philip Mayer’s Tribesmen of Townsme n: conse r va tis m an d th e proc ess o f urbanisat ion i n a S ou th A fr i can city, Oxford University Press, London 1961. 20 See Torcuato, S. di Telia, E l Siste ma P ol itico A r g entino y la Clo se Obrera, Buenos Aires 1964, pp. 5 56 , and Francisco C . Weffo rt, ‘ Estado e Massas no Brasil’, R evista Civ ilizac ao B r asil eir a, No. 7, 1967, pp. 13744. 21 Se e E .J .Hobs bawm, C h. V II, ‘Th e City M ob ’, in P r im itive R ebe ls, and George Rude’s related studies, notably Th e Cr ow d in th e Fr enc h R evol ution, Clarendon, Oxford, 1959, and W il kes a nd L iberty : a so cia l stu dy o f 17 6 3 to 17 7 4 , Clarendon, Oxford, 1962. 22 See Hans H.Gerth, ‘The Nazi Party: its leadership and compos R eade r in B ur eauc r ac y , ed s. Rober t K . Merton, A ilsa P.G ray , tion’, in Hockey, Barbara Hanah C.Selvin, Free Press, i960, pp. 10013. 23 See Martin Trow, ‘Small Businessmen, Political Tolerance, and Support for McCarthy’, A m er i ca n J o u r n a l o f S oci olog y , 1958, Vol. 64, No. 3, pp. 27081. 24 Edward Shils, Th e Tor ment of S ecr ecy : the ba ckg r ound and co nse qu enc es o f A m er i can s ecur ity policies, Heinemann, London, 1956, pp. 98 104. 25 Usually using the wor d ‘democracy’. T h u s Finer notes the following: ‘presidential’ democracy, ‘basic’ democracy, ‘guided’ democracy, ‘organic’ democracy, ‘selective’ democracy, ‘neo’democracy. ‘The one style mis-
sing here ’ , he notes sardo nical ly, ‘ is “ democracy ” , with out qualification' . (S.E.Finer, Th e M an on H orseba ck: th e r ole of the mi litary in po litics , Pall Mall, London 1962, p. 242.) 26 S.M.Lipset, Pol itic al M an , Mercury Books, London, 1964, pp. 21, 403. 27 L Wittg enste in, Ph ilo sophica l I nve stigations, Blackwell, Oxford, 1963, p. 32; *... We are a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing; sometimes overall similarities, sometimes s imilarities o f de ta il. . . I can think of no bet ter ex pre ssion to ch arac ter ize th ese sim ila rities than “ family re sembl ances ” .'
250
INDEX
INDEX
A b e r h a r t, W illia m N orth A
( t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y A le x a n d e r n , K i n g o f Y u go sl av ia , 1 1 2
m eric an popul
is t) , 1 7 1 ,
A lg e r ia , 2 32
allyu
176
(Peruvian
for m o f communa l
ownership), 192
absolutism, 65
A 9 a o P o p u la r ( B r a z i li a n s t u d e n t c a t h o - ana rc hi sm, 49,181,199,203 lic organ izati on),
anti-Semitism, 6, 171, 174, 177 in Eastern Europe, 11618, 176 A P R A ( P e ru v ia n political party),
cratic party), 50 (Peruvian
party), 35,
populist
4 1, 47 , 51, 52
A ccra, 145 ion, 124
6,
182,
28,
, 129, 137, 14
36, 49,
189, 194
and peasants
156,
0
175,
A p t e r , D ., 1 2 3 , 12 4 , 12 5 1 7 8 , A r g e n ti n a , 13 , 29 , 3 1 , 32 , 34, 38, 39,
, 210 , 219 , 229, 23 1,
186, 188
Arielismo
2 34> 237 populism i n, 119
, 19 12
C o lo n e l
A r r i g h i . G . , 1 2 3 , 13 3 , I4 7 n
( G h a n a ia n
m i li t a r y A r u s h a D e c la r a ti o n , th e, 14 4 A s i a , 6, 1 1 9 , i56» *78, 182,
agrarianism, 63, 74, 97, 170, 185, 202
191, 19 4,
210, 219, 229, 231, 237
42 4
authoritarianism, 195, 241, 244
i n Cu ba, 478 in East ern
cultural
aristocracy, 9, 11, 69, 169, 177, 224
leader), 145 i n M exico,
(LatinAmerican
selfesteem), 36, ssn
46
A fr ica n trad ers, 12 6 , 128 A frifa ,
41,
50
adm inistrat A fr ica ,
,
245 A n g lo p h o b e , 18 2
Action Democratic (Venezuelan demoAction Popular
,209,222
244,
53
autocracy, 75, 204, 222
Europ
e, 10 116
A z u e l a . M . ( M ex ic a n no ve lis t) , 41
as an i de ology , 156 , 161 in Canada, 228
Bakunin, Nikhail (nineteenthcentury
A g r a r i a n I n t e r n a t i o n a l ( 1 9 2 7 3 8 ) , 10 9, agrarian reforms, in Eastern Europe,
157, 161, 170, 174,
A g r e e m e n t , t h e 1 9 0 0 ( A f r ic a n ) , 1 2 4 in N orth Am
erica, 10, 1
3, 17,
23 5,
Belaun de, Fernando
(fo unde r of Pe ru’s
Accidn Popular),512,
2245 La tin
Am erica,
31,
424, 47, 49 Eastern
Europe,
35,
97>
389, 10 2 4 ,
167, 171,
17 8 Bendix, Reinhard, 190, 194 Benton, Senator, 12 Berlin, Isaiah, 156, 201
11114 in A frica, 126,
Bessarabia, 100, 101
132, 142
b im et a ll is m (n in et ee n th c en tu ry fin an -
cooperatives, 202 impact o
Bataka pattern, the (African pattern of dans), 124
agriculture
in
177. 198, 199.
222,234
99, 102, 104
in
Russian anarchist), 63, 89, 221 b a n k in g , ba nk er s, 6, 1 1 , 12 , 15 , 18, 22,
12m
cial doctrine), 206
f i n p oli ti cs, 22 932
Bolfvar, Simon, 36
A le g r f a , C i r o , 4 1 253
IN D EX
Bo li via, 31,
34, 35,
Bolsheviks, 172,
40, 41, 44, 46, 47
cash nex us ,
232
Bori s, K ing o f Bulgari
a, 112
Castro, D
b o u r g e o i s ie , 3 0 , 1 3 4 , 1 6 7 , 1 6 8 , 1 7 2 , 1 7 4 ,
r F idel,
and the Cu
a, 65, 6 79 , 71 5 , 7 7 " 8, 82,
C C F
86 n Euro pe, 107,
109, 118,
119
Bra zil, 29, 33, 34, 38,
18 56
18 60 192 5), 16 , 18, 170,
i ve
Commonweal
century Bri
Ch em yshe vsky,
N . S.,
( ni net ee nt h
cen tury R ussian pop
17 1
uli st doct ri n-
ai re) , 5, 6 7 7 1 , 76, 81, 834, 8
n o , 112, 117
100, 221
3, 106,
C h il e, 31,
, 118
Ch ina,
47, 5 °, S 1, 52
67, 115, 119
214, 217
in Cuba, 4850
55.
, i
, 219, 23
s ee D on nelly, Igna-
archo
E
li as
caudillismo
(doctrine of
capital , 10, 13, 18, 31, 102, 11 7 , 123, 145, 168 , 17 3, 203, 226, 232 , 236 industrialization
in
6,
and com
9,
, 99, 103,
9, 18, 22,
29, 3 4
m unism in Bul
gar i a, 116
17
in Africa, 140 2, 145, 23 01 i n Russ i a and U S A , i 73~ 4» 1 88 9, 222 3, 226
7, 23 4, 237
class , m idd le, 125
, 16 2, 184,
195, 20 0,
240, 242
43, 4 4 ,85 ,90 ,
i n U SA , 22 3
98 in nineteenthcentury Russia, 63,
i n L ati n Am eri ca, 2937
64, 66, 68, 7 19 , 22 04 i n East ern Eu rope, i n Africa,
i n East ern Eu rope, 10
10 815
13481 140
clas s, w ork ing, 19
. 142 3, 14
56 ,
2301 9 204,
207 erica,
220,
224, 229,
237
31, 39
li sm , 7690
Easte rn Eu rope, 10 11 6 17 , 161, *
710 , 114,
69, 176
and i ndu stri ali zati on, 18 56 , 1889
Caracas, 38 as,
and R ussi an popu in
in No rth Am
71 8 8, 2 40,
i sm in t he U S A , 19, 22
in La ti n Am eri ca, 29
and cri ses o f deve lopm ent, 201,
89, 11
5, 213 , 220,23
242 and popul
and cooperation, 168
Cirden
18, 37, 67, 91
in La ti n Am erica,
Eastern
Europe, 108, 115 capital ism ,
Am erican, 12, 15, 1
107, 131, 136, 139
poli ti cal lea ders hip) , 3 3 ,38 ,42 ,43
and
the
class struc ture,
8 ,178 , 186
populism in, 2268 and
W ar,
clans, 124, 128, 134
, 1 3, 167, 16
caudillo
0, 51
26, 41
(M exican
President), 43, 45 Canada, 6
197,
C IA , t he, 3 0, 1 63 C ivil
tius
168,
1
Ch rist ian D em ocra t Party, 5
Plut
9
his influence in Eastern Europe,
b u reau cracy, 29, 16 2 , 202, 246
Call es,
t i sh
m ov em en t), 162, 1 69, 172,
178
9
97 , 99, 100, 101, 10
Caesar’s Column,
th 175,
175
(nineteenth
radical
Buganda, 124, 125, 137, 139
107 , 1 09,
in
53, 97, 161
, in Can ada), 169,
berl ai n, H .S.,
Ch artism
4 7, 50, 53
24, 25, 16 7,
Bu eno s Aires, 38, 3
Bu lgaria,
tal is m
178
Bry an, W i l l i am Je nni ngs (U S D em o-
20, 22, 23,
45 , 50,
(Cooperat
Cham
and i ndu stri ali zati on,
crati c leader,
capi
33, 37, 21 4
, 33,
Fe de ration
i n Easter
see
ba n revol uti on, 47 51
C ath olicism
189, 206, 224, 240 i n Russi
th e,
A fr ic a
Cliffe, Lazaro (Mex
and Presi
dent),
ican
General
42, 4 4, 16 7, 17 1,
178 Carol 1 1 , K ing o f Rum ania, 112, Carra nza, Venusti dent), 42
ano (M
exican
117 Presi -
Lion el, 127
C ob be tt,
W il li am
(Bri ti sh
ra di cal
politician), 161, 171
Coin’s Financial School,
14, 16, 27n
co llectivism
2, 200,
, 98, 104, 17
239, 242 in Africa, 22932
209,
2 5 4
INDEX
colonialism, 6, io, 30, 378, 124, 128, 129, 130.
134,
Danielson,
143 4,
»367 , H i.
Nicolai
(nineteenthcen-
tury Russian populist doctrin-
156, 182, 1834, 186, 189, 192,
aire), 66, 75, 77, 82, 85, 86, 87,
208, 232
88, 89
decolonization, 130, 132, 144
Darwin, Charles, 80, 158, 159, 225
excolonial, 36, 66, 132, 138, 145
De bray , R lgis (cont emporar y Frenc h philosopher of guerilla warfare),
Columbia, 28
49
communitarianism, 28, 68, 135, 168,
deflation, 18
192 i n M exi co, 413
populist attitude towards, 1689,
, 489
20 7
in Russia, 6870, 7883 in Africa, 14
Delaisi.F. (twentieth century French
24
economist), 98
in the Third World, 22930
democracy
communications, 13, 14, 25, 33, 39,
in the United States, and Jackson,
212, 215, 222, 239
1213
communism, 3, 32, 43, 48
and Bryan, 245
in Latin America, 49
in
in Eastern Europe, 11619 and
populism,
21314,
nineteenthcentury
21819, in peasantist doctrines, 102, 103, 108, 11014, 11819
2323
compadrazgo, see
patronage
in Africa n populism,
Congo, the, 132, 137, 139, 141 , 101, 104,
8
112 , 115 ,
v il la g e d e m o c r a c y , 15 6 Democrats, the (United States party),
conspiracy theory
234. 176 demonstration effect, the, 182, 185,
in Latin America, 37 as charact eris ti c o f populism,
186, 187; see also frustration
157 8,
163, 167, 177, 192, 198 in the Un ited St ate s,
Denmark, 104 despotism, 21, 38, 217, 222
206 7
Constitution, 101, 102, 107, 112, 118 co nsu mers , n o , h i
determinism, populist w ar d s, 2 0 2 3
continuismo, 34, 42 Cooperaclon Popular(Peruvian
De
Valera,
Eamonn
attitudes
Diaz,
(contemporar
y
Porfirio
(Mexican
president),
412, 46
cooperatives, 25
dictatorship,
in East ern Europe , 10 5, n o , i n ,
in
Eastern
Europe,
11214, 11819
11415 in Afr ica, 128, 13 5, 138, 142
Dominican Republic, 50
definition of, 1689, 224. 229, 230,
Donnelly, tury
232, 241 corruption, 2 2, 34, 4 2 5, 48, 114,
Cuba, 31, 35, 37. 46 51, 214, 217, 219
53,
Ignatius U S
(nineteenthcen-
noveli st,
Caesar’s Column),22,
11 7,
136, 138, 168, 192 Croatia, 99, 103, 106, 114, 118
author
”
5,
”
9. education, 221, 225, 243 in Latin America, 301, 37, 39, 42,
populist attitude towards, 1689,
46, 489, 53
174, 176, 206, 220 97,
and Elites in Africa, 1267, 1301 10 0,
107,
n o,
political effect of, in underdeveloped
, 113, 114, 118
countries, 1878, 1934
255
of
128, 205,
20 7 Durkheim, Emile, 160
currency, 158, 161
i
to-
Irish statesman), 162
social
organization), 52
h
20 1
and participation, 246
161, 162, 188, 195, 240
Czechoslovakia,
122, 129, 130,
14 1, 145, 17 1, 1 72, 176, 190,
Co ngr ess Party, I ndian, 103, 112, 18 conservatism, 28
Russian
ideologies, 667, 712, 778
INDEX egalitarianism, io, 146, 163, 173, 207,
feudalism, 65, 71 133, 171, 186
223. 233
Egypt. 13 ejido, the ( M exican
finance, 26, agricul
tural
28, 52, 158
, 16 9, 19 9, 207,
220, 221, 223, 224
com -
and
munal organization), 424, 192
U S populi
sm, 10, n
,
12,
13 ,
14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 23
the Ejidal Bank, 43 elect oral
, 72, 74 , 84, 99, 10 1,
system , 103, 106, 109, 113
in Africa, see cashnexus
,
Flerov sky (nineteenthcentury Russian 114, 117, 130, 177, 207 ilite, ilitism in Latin A
populist), 73, 74, 89 folkm em ory,
m erica, 30 , 31
landowning, 36, 37, 42, 53 intel lec tual,
in Russia, 63, 9
1 2 ,
174-5 02 , 139, 143, 146
Freud,
and fas ci sm, 1 75 6
93“5
and mo derni zati on, 18 78 , I em ancipation, Em ery, M
97, 106,
182, 183,
rs Sar ah E .V , (ni net eent h
175,
178,
Sigm und , 153
frus trat ion, 1 30, 14 1, 1 8 5; se e dem onstrati on effect
G and hi, M ahatm
a, 171
8, 18 4
39 ff ord , 190
G eertz, Cli
4.
182, 207, 214,
231,234
GerardLibois, 132, 1480 Germ any, 27,
82, 114 , 118,
139, 1 71
Gestapo, 241 Ghana, 145, 197
Enlightenment, the Russif ,, 703, 76,
Gherea,
2 06
C.
Do brog eanu (twent
century R
entrepreneurs, 223, 225, 231, 232
um anian soci
Goebbels,J., 175
Europe, 29, 190, 203, 208, 210, 218, 238
go ld standa rd, 20,
24,
gov ern m ent, 3, 21, 26
root s i n La tin Am erica, 37, 38, 39
44. 52,
capitalism in, 689, 923
170 , 183, 188
Eur ope an popul i sm, 15 7 ,16 12 ,19 6 and Africa, 18
77 . 85,
169,
199, 207
, 29,
30, 35, 38 ,
86, 87,
118 , 119 ,
123, 129, 130, 139, 160, 162, 169,
Eastern Europe, 97121
, 189, 19 4, 205,
220,
221, 222, 225, 226, 228, 232, 236,
12
Europ ean business
ie th
al i st ), 10 1,
102, 104
i n t he U S A , 9, 26
237 men , 124,
142
Gram sci , A ldo (tw
exploitation, 18, 30, 41, 42, 65, 202 expropriati
, 172, 17
Gauchismo,
204, 213 England, 71, 77, 82, 87, 88, 90. I2 169,
21 4
10 , 207
15 7, 16 1
century U S popu li st) , 17, 19, 207 Engels, Friedrich, 86, 87, 88, 203,
137.
23 , 44, 20 1, 220,
234 France, 174, free trade, 1
in Africa, 13
46, 47, 52, 156, 163
food , 9, 13, 18, 20,
on, 68, 11
entiet h century
i an Co m m un ist phil osopher), 1
7
Gran ger m ovem ent (i n
It al78
nine te ent h
ce nt ury U SA ), 16 Fallers.L., 122, 123, i47n
Grau
Fanon, Frantz,
Greece, 113, 155
5, 36 ,49 , 13 1, 138, 139
fa rmers , farming, 17 i n the
1, 188 9
U S A , 12, 1415
, 17, 203,
36 7, 140
2
in Eastern Europe, 98, 109, 113,
and com Guevar
11519 an d po pu l i s m, 17 6 7,17 Ferguson,
guer i l la movem
ent, 39
40
i n Cu ba, 479
fascism,
24L
Greenb ack m ovem ent (i n nine te ent h ce nt ury U SA ), 16 Guayaquil, 38
256, 2213, 2268 i n Afri ca, 1245, I
San M arti n, 4 8
8 ,18 1,19 2 ,
m unist
doctri ne, 214
a, C h i, 214
Guinea, 187
24 4 Ad am
Sco ttish
(ei ghteent h century
philosoph
er), 80, 159
hacienda
(La tinAm
o f prop erty), 38,
erican 43 , 47
rur al ty pe
256
INDEX
individualism, 8 0, 81, 135,138, 13 9, 142, 159, 160, 161,162,169,192, 204, 205,209 Indonesia, 231 industriali zation, 135, 161, 181, 2 09, 234 and the Russian populists, 69, 75,
Halpem, Manfred, 124, 145 Harding, P.J., 140 hardmoney, 11, 15 Harvey, W .H . (‘Coin’), 14, 16 hatred, 117, 158, 177 Heath, B .S ., 18 Hegel, Friedrich, 66, 83, 92
Herceg, (contemporary 823,859 slav Rudolf peasanti st author), 107 Yugoin Eastern Europe, 102,104,10911 Herder,J .G . von (eighteenthcentury and popul ist movem ents, 1856, German philosopher and critic), 1923, 2012 156, 159 industrial revolution in England, 77 Herzen, Alexander (nineteenthcen- industry, in nineteenthcentury USA, tury Russian political writer), 66, 10, 13, 1819, 256 67, 68, 69, 83, 221 in LatinAmerica, 2932, 35,44, 53 Hitler, Adolf, 241 in Russia, 68, 81, 82, 84 91,1712 Hobsbawm,E. J., 92 In Eastern Europe, 10710, 119 Hodza, F. Milan (twentiethcentury in Africa, 123, 136, 157, 161, 162, Slovak statesman), 108, n o , h i 163 H oggart, Richard, 169, 174 inflation, 13, 24,26, 158 Holland, 139 institutionalization, 15960, 184, 185 humanism, 49 integration, 131, 182 Hungary, 97 intellectuals, intelligentsia, 24, 161, populism in, 100, 106 162, 167, 170, 1745, 177. 180, the Hungarian village searching, 188, 194, 198, 20 2, 210, 212, 220 , 170, 174 221, 238 in LatinAmerica, 289, 356, 38, identity crisis, 36, 37, 38, 40 402, 456, 49 ideology, 5, 6, 90 in Russia, 63-4, 67-9, 76, 84, 88, problems of, in Latin America, 34, 91-2, 172-3, 223 367, 42, 44, 46 populist, in Russia, 64, 669, 72 in Eastern Europe, 99-101, 105-6 International, the (1864), 76, 172 populist and peasantist, 91, 100, international socialism, 101 103, 115, 118 internationalism, 183, 218, 219 in Africa, 197212 international trade, 38, 39 and populism, 15365, 175, 180, Ireland, 161, 162, 168, 170, 177 181, 21318, 2324, 2412 Iron Guard, the (Rumanian fascist and nationalism, 1836 organization), 117, 171, 176, 178 functions of, 191, 193 isolationism, 158, 170, 182 and politics, 197212 Italy, 118, 181, 214 immigration, 38 imperialism, impact of in Latin Jackson, Andrew (General, seventh America, 2930, 378 President of the USA), 11-12,98, and industrialization, 1856, 190, 206, 207 192 Inca forms of social organization, 512Japan, 118, 208 Jefferson, Thomas (third President of independence, national, 184, 187 the USA), 10, 12, 14 India, 13, 103, 112,116,156,163, 171, Jews, 101, 117, 118, 157, 171, 176, 184 Indians, in Latin America, 37, 39, 40, i77, 241 Jim Crow, 177 41, 42, 45, 46,47, 51, 52, 225 (LatinAmerican belief in Johnson, Lyndon, 178 July 26th Movement, the (in Cuba), 48 domestic values), 37, 38, 40, 41
indigenismo
257
INDEX
Kabaka, 124, 125 Kansas, 177, 206 77, 78, 81, 84, 86, 88 Katz, see Gherea Kenya, 127, 129, 230, 232, 234 Kilson, Martin, 128, 129, 130, 133,
Kapital, Das, 134
.
139
liberalism, 3, 5, 28, 66, 69, 71, 75, 78, 101, 104, 112, 199, 209 libertarianism, 217 Lima, 31, 38, 52 Lincoln, Abraham, 19 Lipset.S. M., 245, 246 literature, 22, 40, 41, 73, 97, 98, 213,
kinship, 33, 134 214 Koz’min.B.P. (contemporary Soviet Lloyd, Henry Demarest (US populist historian), 62, 65, 66, 67, 70 writer), 24, 203 223 Lloyd George, 169, 170 Kwilu rebellion, the (of 1964 in Lombard Street, 12 Congo), 132, 133, 138, 139 London School of Economics, 4 Lonsdale, John, 127, 128 labour, 10, 13, 14, 17, 18, 47, 48, 80, Low, D .A ., 124, 125, 126 81, 85, 109, 125, 132, 137, 139, 156, 161, 162, 168, 220, 223, 230, machinery, 10, 13, 15, n o , h i , 157,
kulaks,
231. 235-7
235 labour, division of Macpherson, Professor Brough, 228 in Mikhailov’s theory, 7981, 85 Madero revolt, the (in Mexico), 46 in Durkheim’s theory, 15960, 162 Madgearu, Virgil (twentiethcentury in Czechoslovakia, n o , i n Rumanian economist), n o , i n (economic liberalism), Mali, 231 2234 Mannheim, K. , 159 land markets, 25, 135, 136, 138, 145, 158, in nineteenthcentury U S A , 10, 2 2 0 1516, 18, 21, 24, 28 domestic, 9, 15, 23, 25, 85, 105, 230 in Latin America, 38, 39, 424 foreign, 85, 90, 224 in Eastern Europe,105, 108 world, 9, 12, 13, 15, 23, 25, n o , 113 in Africa, 1245, 2324, 236 Maniu, Juliu (twentiethcentury Rulandowners, 9, 30 , 31, 38, 97, 99, 108, manian statesman), 167 109, n o , i n , 115, 118, 223, 224, Mabism, 5, 93, 119, 154, 161 236 Mao Tsetung, 178, 205, 214 La Paz, 46 Marcuse, Herbert, 5 Latin America, 6, 2861, 119, 156, Mari&tegui, 41, 57n 182, 186, 190, 219, 229, 238, 239 Margai, Sir Milton, 130 economic independence, 37 Markovlc, Svetoslav (twentiethcenemancipation, 36 tury Serbian political leader), 100 definition of populism in, 29, 34, 35 Marti, Jose (nineteenthcentury Cuban rural populism, 3653 populist writer), 37, 47, 48, 214 urban populism, 2836, 46, 47, 48, Marx, Karl, 68, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 50 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 92, 93, Lavrov,P. (nineteenthcenturyRuss98, 136, 164, 172, 173, 178, 199. ian populist), 64, 73, 74, 76, 84 206, 213, 217 leadership, 107, 134 Marxism leadership cadre, 130, 135, 139, 143 and populism in Russia, 18, 51, 63, Lenin,V. I., and populism, 62, 6573, 65. 66, 73, 758, 816, 88 82, 91, 117, 178, 217, 235, 237, and peasantism, 90 , 92, 93, 98, 115 , 238 153, 163, 164, 167, 175, 198, 200, Leontyev, Constantine, 65 204, 206, 209 Lewelling, Governor, 206 different kinds of, 21617, 239
laissez-faire
2 5 8
INDEX
masses, the, 29, 30, 31, 3*. 37. 39, 63. Mulelism (Congolese doctrine), 132, 68, 71 , 85, 98, 106, 112 , 113 , ” 8, 139 124, 126, 128, 129, 130, 134, 139. Nairobi, 128 141, 145, 146, 161, 167, 181, 188, narodnichestvo (Russian expression for 190, 195, 229, 236, 239 populism—narod:people), 5, mass production, 69, n o 6290, 98, 99,100,104,119,133, materialism, 11, 36 135, 138, 169,170,171,172,173, Mazrui, Professor A., 234 174, 175,178, 197, 207 , 2 *9 , 220, (Mexicans of mixed descent), mestizo 222, 223, 235, 238, 247 38, 40, 41, 46, 52 nationalization, 29, 44, 170, 172, 244 Mexico, 31, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, nationalism, 6 44, 46, 47, 188, 192, 238 in Latin America, 29, 30, 36,3840, Revolution, 35, 36, 37, 41, 42, 4 3 . 4 4 , 99 4 5 , 46 in Eastern Europe, 100,101,1045, Meyers, Marvin, 11 176 McCarthyism, 177, 240 in Africa, 125, 127, 128, 131, 163, McKinley, William, 25 181 migration, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, and populism, 1835, 199, 200 35 . 39 , 4 7 , 52 , 12 5 . 13 7 , 161, 169, in the Third World, 209, 210, 229, 173, 183, 187, 188, 231, 235, 236, 230, 232 237 naturalistic evolutionism, 73 Mihalache, Jon (Rumanian peasantist nazism, 5, 114, 119,187, 240,241,244 leader), 107 Negroes, 174, 177 Mikhailovsky, N . K ., (nineteenthcenneocolonialism, 36, 37, 137, 138, 139, tury Russian populist), 64, 73, 163 74. 78, 79, 81, 83, 84, 85, 155, 159 neopopulism in Eastern Europe, theory of progress, 79, 80 11619 military, the, 34, 132, 145, 17°, 185 neutralism, 144, 239 Millet, JeanFrantois, 174 mir (traditional Russian assembly of New Deal, the, 26 heads of households administer- Nietzsche, Friedrich, 21 6 nostalgia, 206 ing the Commune), 157, 168, nouveaux riches, 30, 31 1723, 200, 220, 222, 2345 Nyerere, Julius (contemporary TanMitrany, David , 98, i n zanian statesman), 141, 144, 167, mobility, 103, 182, 193 17 8 modernization, 91, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 163, 180, 181, 185, 187, 191, 192, O’Connell, Daniel (nineteenthcentury Irish political leader), 161, 193, 222, 242 162 money power, the, 18, 19, 20, 21 O’Connor, Feargus (Irish Social monopoly, 10, n , 12, 18, 207 thinker), 161 Montevideo, 38 oligarchy, 28, 35, 37, 124 Moore, Barrington, Jr., 114, 135 moralism, 167, 171, 201, 205, 206, 208, oneparty system, 103, 145 Orange Guard, the (paramilitary 209 organization of Bulgarian agrarian Morris, William, 161, 162 party), 109, 113 Morse, Professor, 31, 32 Orthodox Church, 97 movements, 6, 126, 130, 132, 133, 156, 162, 167, 168, 172, 181, 186, 190, orthodoxy, 214, 215 193 , 194 populism as a, 197211, 219, 220, pacifism, 170, 176 223 Paine, Tom, 206 MNR, the, 46 Parsons, Talcot, 235
* 5 9
INDEX
parliament, 107, 113, 116, 1x8, 119, Populist Party in America, 12, 16, 17, 176, 190, 193, 214 , 228, 229, 244 214, 177 participation, popular, 123, 124, 126, Portugal, 139 positivism, 37, 42 244, 245, 246 Poujade, Pierre (twentiethcentury patronage, 30, 32, 33, 35, 38, 47, 50, French political agitator), 176, S*. 52 , S3 , 239 178, 187, 194, 240 peasantism, 6, 98, 99, 1004, 10616, 11719 peasantry, 6, 910 in Latin America, 28, 301, 357, 40 50 , 53 in Russia, 637, 6972, 74, 77, 79, 82, 87, 1678, 1723 in Eastern Europe, 88, 92, 978, 10010, 11217, 119 in Africa, 12442, 145 and primitivism, 1546, 15961, 16473
poverty, 9, 10, 1617, 37, 41, 68, 74, 81, 856, 1456, 161, 199, 202, 208, 209, 220, 238 power, 9. 15. 28, 31, 208 pressure group, 43, 45, 220 PRD, the (Dominican political party), 5° PRI, the of Mexico), 445, 188 prices, 13, 15, 235, 199, 234 primitivism as a basic populist theme, as the base of populist movements, 1545, 160, 1623 1867, 18890, 1923, 2004, profit, 9, 11, 15, 26, 29, 168, 227 2203, 22931, 233, 2358, 242 Progressive movement and era in the Peasant Leagues, the (in Brazil), 47 United States, 16, 256 peasant syndicates, 50, 53 proletariat, 49 People’s Will, the 63, 64 in nineteenthcentury Russia, 68 Perdn, Juan (contemporary Argentin70, 823, 856 ian political leader), Peronism, in Eastern Europe, 1034, 138 29, 3i5, 39, 181, 183, 187, 188, and classconsciousness in the 194, 238, 239 United States, 1734, 176, 200, personalism, 324, 50 202
(Partido R evoluciona rio Institutional
personality, theory of, 15962 agricultural, 223, 236 Peru, 31,35,4 0,41,4 7,50, 51,52,16 8, (Chilean populist 192, 194 programme), 51 Peffer, WilliamA., 17, 18, 20, 21 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph (nineteenth Pilsudski, Joseph (twentiethcentury century French social philosoPolish Nationalist leader and pher), 72, 172 statesman), 112 psychology, 5, 37, 48, 115, 117, 217 Pipes,R., 62, 63, 64, 73 Pisarev, 1. (nineteenthcentury Russian racial equality, 37, 402 writer), 69 racialism and populism, 157 8 , 163, planned settlement (agricultural com167, 1701, 174, 177 munal scheme of organization), radicalism, 9, 10, 14, 26, 379, 412, 22930, 232, 234, 239 4 7 , 50, 53 , 7 i, 74 , 101, 109, 122 Plekhanov,G . U . (nineteenthcentury African rural, 131—4, 136 Russian socialist), 65, 81, 83, 84, in the Third World, 238, 2401 88, 90, 92, 101, 216, 221 railroads, 1316, 18, 23, 26 plutocracy, 71 Raskol, the (seventeenthcentury Poland, 97, 1001, 103, 107, 11112, Russian heretical movement), 190, 203 245 Pollack, Professor Norman, 1623, religion, 190, 216 1989, 201, 203, 205 in Latin America, 323, 45 (Rumanian agrarian docin Africa, 141, 163 trine), 100, 1026 and populism, 170, 174, 176
Prom ocidn Popular
poporanism
260
INDEX
revolution, revolutionary thought, in Latin America, 356, 389, 412, 4 4 , 4 7 , 4 9 , Si in Russia, 634, 67, 69, 74, 78, 901, 1724, 203 in Eastern Europe, 101, 104, 107, 115, 11719 in Africa, 130, 139 and populism, 167, 18990, 204, 214, 222,238 rhetoric, 21, 22, 198, 199, 208, 233 Rhodesia, 234 Rio de Janeiro, 38 Rivera, Diego (Mexican painter), 44 Roberts, Henry, 98 Rodbertus, Johann Karl, 172 romanticism, economic, 712, 76, 79, 812, 89, 170, 200, 238
SetonWatson, H., 188 Seyd,E., 207 Shanin.T., 236 Shils,E., 180, 2424 Sierra Leone, 12830, 1378 Sierra Maestra, 48
Rothschild, House 126, 159 Ro usseau, J .J ., 80,of, 154 royal dictatorships in Eastern Europe, 98, 11213, 117 Rumania, 97, 99100, 166 and populism, 1014 peasantism in, 107, 10912 fascism in, 11718, 176 ruralism, 40, 42, 127 rural (and urban) logic, 2018 rural population, see peasantry, farmers rural unrest, see peasantry, farmers rural values in Latin America, 28, 3652 in Eastern Europe, 989, 1023, 105, 1079 and populism, 15860, 192, 2023, 2378 rural world revolution, 119 Russia, 5, 6, 28, 35, 41, 6296, 154, 1569, 1601, 163, 166, 16875, 186, 18890, 192, 200, 2034,
small producers in Russia, 66, 68, 69, 75, 77, 879, 91, 223, 233, 240 Smith, Adam (eighteenthcentury English economist), 71, 80, 159 social democrats, 190, 217 socialism, 5, 6, 19 in Latin America, 28, 41, 46 in Russia, 63, 65, 689, 72, 73, 74, 76, 812, 84, 85, 89, 92, 93 in Eastern Europe, 98, 99, 1004, 109, 11112
214, 220, 231, 2346, 257 1057, and Eastern Europe, 98101, 113, 11718 Revolution, 184
(SturmAbteilung),
SA, the 241 Sarmiento, D . Faustino (nineteenth century Argentine writer), 38 Scandinavia, 168, 170 Selznick, Philip, 215, 216, 233 Senegal, 187 Serbia, 97, 99101, 103, 106
silver, 1314, 16, 234, 160,19, 207 demonetization, 13, 16, 22 Simpson, J. (nineteenthcentury U S populist), 18 (Mexican politicoreligious movement), 45 Sismondi.S. de (French nineteenth century sociologist), 72 slavery, 9, 19, 38, 478 Slavophiles, 65, n o , 192 Slavs, 97 Slovenia, 99, 101
Sinarquismo
in Africa, 139, 141, 144, 145, and populism, 16875, 178, 231 181, 186, 190, 199, 201, 209,218, 233, 238, 241, 2456 socialization of labour, 85, 86, 87, 88 social roots of populism, 6, 22, 18096 social units, localized, 126, 136 sociology, 5, 63, 656, 801, 83, 107, 140, I53 , 159 , 21214, 217, 219, 237 , 244 Socorrds, Prio, 48 popular solidarity, 1436 Sorel, G . (twentiethcentury French political philosopher), 49 Sorokin, Pitirim, 107 Spain, 182, 222 and Latin America, 368, 40, 47, 52-3
Spencer, H. (nineteenthcentury English sociologist), 158, 160 Spengler, O. (twentiethcentury German philosopher), 10 SS, the Nazi paramilitary organization), 241
(Schutz Sta ffeln,
261
INDEX
Stalin, J.V ., 115, 154, 178, 214, 217 populism in, 927, 1734, 1989, Stambolisky, Alexander (twentieth 21828 century Bulgarian agrarian poliparty system, 215 tical leader), 103, 1067,i o 9> university, 30, 39, 50 112-13 urbanization, 9, 23, 25, 303, 356, Stere, C. (twentiethcentury Rumanian 38, 47 . 4 9 . 52, 157 , 161, 169, 190, political thinker), 1005 223, 237 students, 39, 42, 48, 50, 53, 194, 229 urban logic, see rural logic Struve, P. B. (nineteenthcentury Russ-urban population, 3, 10, 2833, 43.45, ian political thinker), 645, 83 512, 1 07 9, i n , 11718, 12 5, Sukumaland, 128 127, 1356, 1578, 161, 180, 188, Sun Yatsen, 67 191. 193. 195, 202, 2212, 2356, surplus value, Marx’s theory of, 71 238 Syndicalism, 181 urban populism, 28, 34, 41, 44, 169, 187, 188, 189 Urquhart.D., 80 Tannenbaum.F., 43 TANU, the (Tanzanian political party), 128, 137 Vann Woodward, C. , 177 Tanganyika, 127, 129, 1378 Vargas, Getulio (twentiethcentury Tanzania, 127, 142, 144, 299, 231 Brazilian political leader), 29, 34 Taoism, 155 Vasconcelos (twentiethcentury Me xitariffs, 12, 13, 18, 22, 29 can political leader), 40, 42 taxation, n 1 2 , 14, 16, 18, 87, 157, Venezuela, 31, 50 161, 170 Venturi, F., 64, 182 technology, 84, 89, 133, 161, 225 vested interests, 10, 17 1 8 , 20, 26 T e li a ,T .S .d i, 53n, 54n, 184, 193, 194 Vienna, 100 Third World, the, 29, 36, 37, 92, Villa, Pancho (twentiethcentury Me xican leader), 412 122,123,124,156,208,228,239 Tillman, Ben, 177 voluntarism, 202, 203, 206 Titoism, 5 Vorontsov, V., (nineteenthcentury Tkachev,P .N . (nineteenth century Russian populist), 75, 82, 85, Russian political thinker), 74, 76, 8791 84, 91 Tocqueville, A. de (French nineteenth Wall Street, 12, 19, 30 century political writer), 69 War, 19, 878, 190, 194 Tolstoy, L . (Russian nineteenthcenFirst World, 6, 97, 106 tury novelist and philosopher), 3, Second World, 115, 119, 195, 238 170, 171, 175, 176 Watson, T ., 177 Torre, Haya de la (twentiethcentury wealth, 24, 29, 35, 39, 68, 81, 117, Peruvian political leader), 4 1 ,1 7 1 , 157, 171, 208, 209 178 Weaver, General, 12, 18, 21 totalitarianism, 49, 172, 176, 195, 241 Webb, Sydney and Beatrice (twentiTouraine, Alain, 5 ethcentury British social theortraditionalism, 92, 182, 187, 1912, ists), 169, 178 194. 205 . 222. 229 Weber, Max (twentiethcentury Ger transport, 1415, 18, 24, 25, 161 man sociologist), 21617, 235, 243 Trotsky,L., 5, 214 Weiss,H., 132 Tsarist government, 78, 86, 90, 97, welfare, 28, 68, 81, 90, 239 105, 18990, 204, 220, 222 91 Turkey, 41, 97 Wertheim, W. F., 146 West, the, 75 7 , 845, 8992, 98100, United States, 3, 6,48,1578, 16872, 104, no, 11213,154,157.1812, 186,192,2034, 208 1758, 186, 190, 243, 247
Weltanschauung,
262
INDEX
Westernizers in Russia, 65, 69, 70 Witos, Wincen ty (twentiethcentury Polish agrarian leader), 107 working class organizations, labour movement, 22, 302, 34, 41, 43, 4 7 , SO, 114, 183, 1889,22 9 ,239, 241
youth, 48, 501, S3, 163, 164 Yugoslavia, 97, 100, 107, 109, m 1 2 , US, 119, 245 Yugoslav League (Kardelj) doctrine,
Wrigley, C .C ., 125 Wyslouch, B. (nineteenthcentury Polish populist leader), 100
Zapata , E.political (twentiethcentury Mexi can leader), 42, 43 Zasulich, Vera (nineteenthcentury Russian revolut ionary writer),
Young, Crawford, 132, 137, 141
h i
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