Ep 392 - The People Are Not One: Socialist Strategy After Left Populism with Daniel Tutt & C. Derick Varn

Daniel Tutt and returning guest C. Derick Varn join Steve to discuss their new book, The People Are Not One: Socialist Strategy After Left Populism, whose title states its thesis outright. When the left speaks of a unified people confronting a corrupt elite, it conceals the real stratifications inside the working class and borrows a Manichean framework that functions identically on the right. Their argument: since 2008, from Occupy through Syriza, Podemos, Corbyn, and Sanders, left populism has served to extinguish the class antagonism at the center of socialism, operating as a new Popular Front in which liberalism holds the upper hand.The conversation lands directly on this show's own history. Varn is blunt about his long-running argument with MMT advocates: he never disputed the nature of the currency, he disputed the analysis of power. They are not going to let you have a Job Guarantee, because it removes their ability to discipline workers. Steve agrees, describing his own path out of economism and the trap of thinking a basket of policies and a few more progressives in office adds up to a threat to capital.On class consciousness, Varn is careful with a term he calls one of the most abused in socialist history. The reason to organize around the working class is not its victimhood. It is that the working class already possesses, collectively, the skills to reproduce society. The differences within the working class are resolvable. The difference between the working class and those who live off its labor is not.They close on electoralism. Varn's formulation: electoralism is a tactic, not a principle. Democracy is the principle. Tutt points to Lenin's actual position, that ballots are justified only alongside extra-parliamentary means and on terms of strict class independence. The Popular Front let liberalism lead. The United Front did not.If you've followed this show from Ep 218 - Beware! the Counter-Revolution with C. Derick Varn, through Ep 318 - The Death of the Left? with Simon Winlow & Steve Hall, Ep 371 - You Can't Vote Away Colonialism with Fadhel Kaboub, and Ep 388 - From Theory to Praxis: Lenin's Revolutionary Formula with Breht O'Shea, this episode is the strategic argument those conversations kept circling. Daniel Tutt is the author of Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family and How to Read Like a Parasite. His writing has been featured in Jacobin, Current Affairs, Philosophy Now and Aeon Magazine. He is the host of the Emancipations podcast and study group collective. Find him on Twitter @TuttReal or his Substack: https://danieltutt.substack.com/aboutC. Derick Varn is an author, poet, and educator, and host of the podcast Varn Vlog, where he publishes podcasts and series on the great thinkers, and interviews authors and academics. He is the author of Apocalyptics and Liberation and All That Bright Etc. He has been a union rep for the past six years. Find him on Twitter @TheRealVarnVlog or his podcast https://varnvlog.buzzsprout.com/