The People are Not One: Socialist Strategy After Left Populism (With Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn)

This week we invited Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn to talk about their new book, The People are Not One: Socialist Strategy After Left Populism.  From the publisher: In The People Are Not One, Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn dismantle the central illusion of contemporary left politics: that “the people” can serve as a coherent subject of emancipation. Against both right and left populisms, they argue that this fantasy of unity obscures real class antagonisms and traps socialism in a dead-end politics of moral appeal and electoral maneuver. Through a sustained critique of left-populism, post-Marxist theory, and Democratic Party–oriented socialism, Tutt and Varn show how the collapse of mass politics, alongside debates over the professional-managerial class and the atomization of working-class life, has produced a strategic impasse on the left. What follows is not a lament but a provocation: a call to abandon populist shortcuts and rebuild socialist strategy on the terrain of class struggle as it actually exists—uneven, divided, and politically unformed. The People Are Not One is a manifesto for a post-populist left willing to confront fragmentation head-on and begin the long work of reconstructing class power. https://www.revolpress.com/people-not-one https://danieltutt.com/ https://www.patreon.com/cw/varnvlog