The People are Not One: Socialist Strategy After Left Populism (With Daniel Tutt & 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