Abstract
This chapter utilizes our cultural-historical psychology and Liberation Psychology, and their concepts about effective liberation, to evaluate populist social movements. These include women rights, humanism, racial justice, and socialism. Populist movements are generally found to be inadequate. The reason is that they do not challenge the fundaments of society. They focus on challenging subjective factors and interpersonal interactions. We see how populist conceptions of emancipation generate a cultural psychology of perceptions, emotions, and reasoning. We document how socialist movements are adopting populist views of emancipation. Naomi Klein’s and Richard Wolff’s views on emancipation are similarly populist.
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- 1.
Populist “political organizing” around subjective feelings and expressions is abetted by social media. It enables a major demonstration to be launched spontaneously and loosely in a matter of weeks. It took less than six weeks after the Parkland shootings to mobilize more than one million people nationwide. The airport demonstrations protesting the Muslim ban took place across the country the day after the ban was introduced. In contrast, the Civil Rights Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and the March on Washington in 1963 took years to organize by legions of activists (Cole 2019).
The ease of political organizing feeds into the spontaneity and looseness of populist actions. Actions must also allow for individual choice and variation. They cannot be tightly organized, disciplined actions led by strong leaders. For this would continue the “oppression” of subjectivity.
Social media plays into populist organizing. Nothing more is needed than a computer and a mailing list and some slogans about injustice and outrage. It is only after diverse individuals come together from their scattered spheres that they begin the process of trying to figure out what the real problem is and what a solution could be that they voluntarily agree on. This diverse, unprepared gathering has no common, effective, understood theory which could guide their efforts. Of course, populists are not interested in such a constraining theory and prefer to just start recruiting individuals’ ideas and ideals, and trying to find some commonality. This is what Occupy Wall Street did, and it could not cope with the scale of the political economy of capitalism, or its military might which one day simply threw the encampment into some garbage trucks and terminated the “movement” without resistance.
Yet this failed movement is still regarded as a heroic touchstone for populist organizing—just as the failed Jakarta strike is.
- 2.
Nivedita Majumdar (2017) provides an excellent critique of this approach that pervades postcolonial theory. She explains how scholars in postcolonial theory confine their admiration of a woman’s agency to single acts of female independence from men. They ignore political and military acts of women revolutionaries.
Draupadi joins the movement [against landlord armies in East India] with her husband; she is clearly trusted and valued by her comrades, as evidenced by her inclusion in a political assassination; and she values the movement itself enough to withstand inhuman torture and rape at the hands of the police. But if we turn to Spivak’s commentary, these political and organizational dimensions of Draupadi’s agency are strenuously pushed to the background. “It is when she crosses the sexual differential into the field of what could only happen to a woman that she emerges as the most powerful ‘subject.’”
Her decision to join the revolutionary movement, we are to assume, is not conscious political agency. (Majumdar 2017, p. 103)
Majumdar explains that Spivak’s feminist commentary distorts the descriptive details of Draupadi’s life and psychology. These details indicate the formative influence of her revolutionary, political conviction and her political solidarity with her comrades. “Yet all of this Spivak sweeps aside with the back of her hand.” “This gesture by Spivak … devalues and submerges Draupadi’s political agency.” “Her subjectivity is [only] affirmed when she steps forth and expresses awareness of her subjugation specifically as a woman—when the brutalization is to her body.” “Spivak denies her this [agency] when Draupadi rejects her brutalization as a class subject and joins in with her comrades to overturn that class hierarchy. So when she fights alongside the male members of her underground squad, she is not yet fully a subject” (ibid., p. 104). “What Spivak holds up as a paradigm of resistance is Draupadi’s refusal to obey a single command, not her refusal to abide by an exploitative and patriarchal social order. What is admired is her act as an individual, not her willing and conscious participation in a revolutionary movement” (ibid., p. 105, my emphasis).
It is not that Spivak and Bhabha, for example, just give more importance to one aspect of their women’s political involvement than to another. Rather, they altogether suppress aspects of the texts that would invite another interpretation. The elements of the narratives that highlight the women’s commitment to organized and class politics are simply ignored. We only learn about them by reading the texts ourselves. In other words, aspects of political agency that are very much part of the textual record are suppressed by the narrative favored by the theorists—the very sin of which they accuse the holders of grand narratives. In this case, it is a quite particular and narrow conception of gender politics displacing and marginalizing the various dimensions of the women’s broader political agency. (ibid., p. 113)
Another author in postcolonial studies engages in the same individualistic distortion of a woman’s behavior: “For Guha, the acts of resistance are to be found in Bhagobati’s decision to abort Chandra’s fetus…He presents these actions as an assertion of women’s autonomy and solidarity” (p. 93).
Majumdar criticizes the discipline of postcolonial theory in the same terms that I use against populist cultural psychology and populist political organizing: “a distinct unease with class and organized politics, whether as an analytical category or as a form of political engagement… During the years in which postcolonial theory has flourished, the sense of despair very quickly morphed into a general hostility to class which has not only pervaded cultural studies but has extended to most every nook and cranny of the academy (ibid., p. 113, my emphasis).
- 3.
This was manifested in the transgender movement which insisted on using public toilets that corresponded to their self-identified gender rather than their biological gender. Their demand was based on respecting their chosen identity. It was not based upon any rational argument, it was not based upon any decision-making that included the opinions of the majority of citizens, and it did not consider the broad social good or social or religious issues. It did not develop any rational, fulfilling principles of gender and bodily privacy in general—for example, should any bathrooms or dressing rooms or shower rooms or dormitories be gender segregated? It was the narrowest of demands that concerned only transgender bodily privacy/exposure. Transgender populism is a dangerous policy that prioritizes the personal feelings of a miniscule percentage of the population simply as a demand for respecting their feeling, no matter what. Disagreement is denounced as disrespect and discrimination—as Amy Goodman declared on Democracy Now!. Disagreement is not refuted, it is denounced.
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Ratner, C. (2019). Contemporary Populism. In: Psychology’s Contribution to Socio-Cultural, Political, and Individual Emancipation. Critical Theory and Practice in Psychology and the Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28026-0_5
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