Neopopulism as Geopolitics: Nick Dyer-Witheford interviews Raffaele Sciortino

Nick Dyer-Witheford: In the opening  to “Neopopulism as a Problem” you movingly, and with a profound realism, write of how surveying the current global crisis requires—perhaps particularly for those on “the left”-- “putting oneself in the perspective of the disintegration of a whole system of social relations, economic configurations, political and geopolitical perspectives and, also, of the subjectivities that one is accustomed to assuming”. Can you say something about how you, as an author and analyst, deal with this dilemma of writing amidst the disintegration of assumed subjectivities?

Raffaele Sciortino: I think that the unravelling of the international system as we have known it in recent decades, stretching from the end of the “Long 1968” to the global crisis, is now obvious to everyone. A crisis of the liberal international order; growing financial bubbles; socio-political upheavals in the West through the emergence of the so-called populist moment – all of this indicates that globalization has become not only more sluggish and more cutthroat, but is also in the process of simultaneously unravelling and reconfiguring itself. At the same time, it’s important to try to trace out, beneath all this disruption, the crisis of value and the deep fractures of the capitalist social relationship in terms of the constitution of subjectivity – bearing in mind that globalization is not, nor ever has it ever been, just a policy. Rather, it is before anything else a “stage” in the process of affirming Marx’s notion of the world market. This process corresponds to the antagonistic socialization and internationalization of production, and the prevalence of abstract and reified forms of fictitious capital, with all that this means for the restructuring of class relations. This process is the harbinger of explosive contradictions that can, under certain conditions, actually explode. There will be chaos, unfolding through leaps and bounds, albeit a chaos shaped by class conflict and the clash of social perspectives (and without ruling out the possibility of “the mutual ruin of the contending classes”).

In other words, there is considerable discontinuity in play, against this backdrop of the totalisation of the capital social relation through the real subsumption of life to valorisation. Along with the fragmentation of the collective worker, created by the decoupling of the enterprise form from the physical location of the factory, this helps to explain the collapse of the classical workers’ movement and of the Left. Program, social identity, organization, perspectives, the capacity for struggle based on a gradual transition from the union terrain to the realm of politics, seeking to “become the state”: all this has definitively fallen by the wayside. (Then again, neither the “new social movements”, nor identity politics, nor single-issue mobilizations – each of which now fall within the parameters of liberal discourse – have represented a truly antagonistic alternative to the system).

Now, we don’t yet know what this tendency towards the whole system’s unravelling will bring. Are we are (simply) facing a dramatic capitalist restructuring able to calibrate a new standard of value whilst it reconfigures class relations as a whole, a “machinic subjectivity” capable of disrupting the anthropology of species-being? Or will there be a profound crisis of capitalist civilization itself, one that can open things up to the perspective of a human community? Given all this, it’s very hard to get one’s bearings. What we can say is that we are still dealing with a “system” – understood not in the structural-functionalist sense, but as a social relationship that expresses itself as the antagonism of classes (in the plural), therefore of (dis)organized collective subjectivities, of co-present contradictory tendencies. As a consequence, it is both possible and necessary to ask ourselves what the proletariat has become, both in production and in social reproduction. What potentialities exist within its subordination to capital (a subordination that sometimes appears to be complete)? We ask this not to exalt the proletariat’s subjectivity as such, but rather to trace the specific contradictions of the specific phase, including the level of their explosiveness (or, on the contrary, the possibility of their management by capital). Certainly, in the short to medium term, we do this without expecting any immediate or easy bridging of the gap between theory and practice. Instead, we seek forms of class struggle that, in their novelty, may at times seem spurious. In doing so, we favour the humility of the researcher over any apocalyptic overtones, seeking to pass the torch on to what will hopefully be a completely different, if no less complex, phase in the real movement for the abolition of the present state of things.

NDW: There has been a recent surge in writing about populism. You use the term “neopopulism”— why?

RS: First of all, to establish some distance from the mainstream use of the term. We are talking about a very different phenomenon to the early populist currents in Russia and the United States, which were movements against proletarianization, as well as populism in Latin America, which opposed the imperialism of the gringos. Today, by contrast, populisms are bound up with (hyper)proletarianisation. Finally, my approach is far removed from the political constructionism of Laclau, who is the best-known postmodernist theorist of populism, and whose work at least has the merit of connecting things to the plebeian democratic tradition. I think that the term neopopulism helps to focus matters upon social composition and upon deep (often implicit) contents, rather than simply on (precarious) organizations and allowing us to move beyond the distinction, however important, between left-wing populism and right-wing sovereignty. In fact, I interpret the neopopulist dynamic – limiting it to the imperialist West – with a Marxist historical sociology that traces its genealogy back to the trajectory of the twentieth century workers’ movement, and to the crucial passage of the “Long 1968”, within the context of the transformation of the capital relation towards real subsumption. It is an attempt to answer the following non-rhetorical question: where has the class struggle (first of all, but not exclusively, the class struggle of the proletariat) been hiding? We need to answer this without falling either into false consolations or into inconsistent analogies with historical fascisms. Neopopulism is not a movement antagonistic to capital. Instead, it represents the new proletariat’s first subjective rupture within the context of the crisis of neoliberalism. At the same time, it is a cross-class blancmange, an ambivalent incubator of contradictory class and nationalist moments. The least incorrect juxtaposition that can be made is with twentieth century working class reformism – with the proviso that in the meantime, we recognize that the social class composition of the class has changed profoundly. This transformation is a consequence of globalisation and of fictitious capital, of declining expectations, and of the almost total absence of that (relative) autonomy from the world of the commodity which the proletarian class had enjoyed during the years of historical reformism. Today, on the contrary, that world has come to assume the status of the “natural” underpinning of life. All this is due to capital’s totalisation – even if the latter can avoid neither the crisis of valorization, nor the social reactions to the latter within the West. The terrain of the neopopulist movements is one (but not the only) landscape on which the crucial game will be played between two tendencies that today remain confused. The first of these is mobilization in the direct service of clashing national capitals. By contrast, the second involves a dynamic that, in overcoming itself through a long series of ruptures, places itself in open antagonism to capital. In other words, we are not talking about an already-constituted social and political subject, but rather a phenomenon that must be read as an ensemble of opposing tendencies which, as they develop, are bound to explode.

NDW: Your article situates neopopulism in regard to the geopolitics of the capitalist world-system, and in particular to the geopolitics of financialization. The analysis on this point is compelling, but also complex and compressed. For readers who may not be fully up to speed on the world politics of money, can you give a brief explanation of why you see US strategies for maintaining the power of the dollar as crucial to explaining neopopulism?

RS: The link is not direct, but it is crucial. Exploring it means returning to the fundamental relationship between geopolitics and class struggle, which I have sought to address from a Marxist approach that seeks to be neither structuralist nor culturalist.

It could be argued that if globalisation created the social preconditions of neopopulism in the West, then the crisis of globalization caused neopopulism’s contradictions to explode. While such a view is correct, it is still too generic. US hegemony after 1971 (which was bound up with uncoupling the dollar from the gold standard) has been an assemblage that is unique in the trajectory of world capitalism. This is true both for its economic-financial aspects, based as they are on the (irredeemable) debt of the hegemonic power and on its relative deindustrialization, and for its political-military aspects, given that there are no realistic rivals able to replace Washington’s global domination. When we talk, therefore, about the dollar as world currency, we are indicating the apex of a complex and asymmetrical system that in recent decades has been based on the indissoluble combination of productive and financial globalisation, on the one hand, and on China’s openness to the world market on the other. The appropriation of the surplus-value produced by the Chinese and Asian proletariat became the condition both for the resilience of the capitalist accumulation centralized by the West, and for the maintenance of social peace here, despite the decrease in the value of the labour-power through the post-Fordist social compromise. Since then, a growing mass of securities held in dollars without the backing of adequate real assets — “fictitious capital” in Marx’s sense of the term — has sought to valorise itself through exchange with global trade surpluses. In doing so, it seeks to suck masses of capital from subordinate countries in a number of ways: by means of the system of loans and public debt, by subordinating Western labour-power, by extracting free gifts from a tormented natural world. The United States is both guarantor and maximum exploiter of this global system. But this “balanced disequilibrium” has been unable to prevent the growing contradiction between China’s rise and an increasingly asphyxiated and overburdened global accumulation of fictitious capital — a situation which first led to the global crisis, and now to the US-China confrontation. Within the West itself, it has laid the foundations for social polarisation, mass indebtedness and the financialisation of life, the destructuring of the working class, individualisation, and more besides.

These contradictions re-emerge with the breakdown of globalisation. Neopopulisms are both the effect and the active expression of this crisis. In the United States in particular, it’s clear that the situation threatens to become explosive, since it can no longer be managed through “business as usual”, nor contained within the old parameters. Trumpism is just the first upheaval of a profound dynamic in which angry efforts to reaffirm a threatened global domination encounters mounting internal social conflict. We will have to see how all this plays out in terms of recalibrating Washington’s Grand Strategy, as well as how “allies” and rivals alike respond. Will the United States, in its quest to reaffirm global domination, succeed in recreating a new internal consensus – and if so on what basis?

NDW: I find your account of the changes in class composition in Europe and North America that have generated neopopulist movements extremely persuasive. In some ways, your analysis seems to follow the path of post-operaista thought, tracing the transition from the Fordist mass-worker to post-Fordist “social individual”. But it does so without the hyperbolic optimism that characterizes the writings of say, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri on multitude. How does your work stand in relation to post-operaismo, and the broader tradition of class composition analysis?

RS: Although I do not come from this tradition, I am familiar with operaismo, both as a scholar and as a militant. Operaismo had the merit of elaborating the notion of class composition (here I refer English language readers to the work of my friend Steve Wright). For its part, post-operaismo’s focus on the destructuring of Fordism has achieved some important results, even if some of the conclusions that it draws are debatable. I had the opportunity to discuss things with Toni Negri during the experience of UniNomade 2.0. Whatever its weak points, the book Empire helped to reopen the Marxist discourse on imperialism. In extreme synthesis, I believe that the source of post-operaismo’s Promethean optimism lies in the idea of the autonomous development of social cooperation as a given, rendering the enterprise form (which is the core of capitalist reproduction) a parasitic superstructure that can expropriate the common only from without. Unfortunately, this is not the case: real subsumption and digital machinism have sucked the life out of workers autonomy (which was only relative in any case)! The operaio sociale, then the multitude, are thus in post-operaismo the final subject of emancipation, within an approach that ends up merging with the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political radicalism and its exaltation of the forms of the “new social movements”. Faced with digital machinism – I am thinking here of your work on Inhuman Power as well – I believe that it is more appropriate to draw upon the (self) critical reworking undertaken by Romano Alquati, who I came to know in Turin during the 1990s. While he is best known perhaps for first formulating class composition analysis, he would later develop a sociology centred upon the processes of hyper-industrialisation and the “labourization” of human activity. To his mind, the social individual “in itself” still works for capital, while providing the “technical composition” for the potential constitution of anti-capitalist subjectivities. This in turn evokes the thematic of the relationship between proletarian emancipation and human community (Gemeinwesen), involving Camatte, Debord, radical critique, and communisation. Finding a way in which these two great threads might interact today remains a great challenge…

NDW: Because I and my colleagues work in the field of Information and Media studies, we are particular interested in how your address the place of social media and, more generally, “Big Tech”, in the current crisis. You and Steve Wright coauthored an important article on “The Spectacle of New Media”.[1] What is your present thinking about the role of social media in trajectory of neopopulisms?

RS: While I lack specialist knowledge of this field, I do think that neopopopulism as a social dynamic is an emerging expression of a more general tendency to “politicise” that hybrid sphere which the editors of the book you mention sought to interpret as an Interactive Spectacle. This is an intermediate space lying between face-to-face and online engagement. On the one hand, it amplifies the state of being “isolated together”: or as Debord put it, the Spectacle unifies the separated as separate, the passivity of the mere “spectator” of an unlived life. On the other hand, this space provides a kind of activism without (class) autonomy – one that is rigorously individualised even in its construction of artificial communities – and aimed at meeting the peculiar valorisation needs of digital capitalism. This is a typically ambivalent situation, between the isolation and “labourization” of human activity on the one side, and the (desperate) search for community by this neopeople of individuals on the other. And neopopulism, with all its strengths and its weaknesses, exemplifies this circumstance well, giving it an initial, rudimentary, political form that, at a certain point, can take to the streets. Which brings us back to the theme of community, as can be seen every time there is a real mobilization (say, from the NoTav movement to Gilet Jaunes; on the other hand, the Arab Spring or the current anti-racist mobilization in the States are more complex cases). If we reject technological determinism, the difficult task becomes determining how social relations shape and are shaped by peculiar “social” technologies able to subsume those capabilities that are particular to humans. This is where the question of Big Tech comes into the picture, which is now taking advantage of the pandemic crisis to restructure production and reproduction. But I should stop here.

NDW: Since writing “Neopopulism as a Problem” you have produced a subsequent analysis of the effects of the pandemic on the conjuncture you described. We hope to soon have this article translated and published on this site, but can give is a brief preview of how-or if-you see the pandemic shifting the balance of class forces?

RS: The COVID pandemic is perhaps the first social crisis on a truly global scale. It accelerates trends that are already underway, it reveals hitherto hidden social pathologies, and acts as a catalyst of deep and contradictory reactions. The pandemic’s most important impact – beyond its deadliness, which fortunately seems to be decreasing – is closely linked to the framework of existential insecurity that is now a structural feature of global capitalism. Here I am referring to the increasing disconnect between capital’s systemic reproduction and the social reproduction of the human species. In particular, the coronavirus could trigger a second phase within the global crisis that opened in 2008: indeed, all the signs of this are already there. This would also entail – for those who can afford it – the passage to a keynesianism that is no longer only financial, but rather ultra-competitive and selective, and so functional to the inter-capitalist conflict unfolding in the realms of finance, industry and geopolitics. Secondly, the pandemic has dramatically highlighted a widespread (if differentiated) crisis of political command, forcing governments (and scientific communities) into contradictory reactions, from denial or skepticism to surprise, panic and control (it’s interesting that the benchmark for the West seems to be the Chinese government’s ability to intervene!). Finally, we will certainly have an intensification of capitalist restructuring through new technologies that will make many jobs superfluous, that will deskill others, all the while reshuffling the hierarchies of management and control and reconfiguring technical roles. As a consequence, profound changes for the worse are in train not only for the proletariat, but also the middle classes.

As for social reactions, here we have phenomena that in part intersect with the neopopopulist dynamic, while also dislocating it onto a new terrain by revealing new fault lines. It seems to me that the most interesting element is the widespread perception of the need for a defence of community, a demand for sovereignty over life that profoundly undermines the neoliberal individualisation of risk. Certainly, here the state is looked to for protection, with all the contradictions that this entails. At the same time, this demand has challenged the centrality of the economy; indeed, in some (still isolated) cases, it has sought to separate the reproduction of the human species from the reproduction of capital (for example, through spontaneous strikes in “essential” factories). This is also important to the extent that capital is shown to be increasingly destructive, for humans as well as the natural environment. In this way, this demand prefigures what we could call the “party” of the human community, as opposed to the party of valorisation – a small yet still significant confirmation. At the same time, the policies enacted to contain the virus exacerbate fractures within the body of the proletariat and of the lower middle classes, fractures that have no immediate possibility of recomposition: between workers who are “protected”, and those who are not; between generations; between men and women; between races (as is evident in the United States). And yet a potentially positive shift is also underway, as the decisive scale of questions shifts from the national to the international stage. There is a growing gap between bottom-up pressures and institutional organizations representing the losers of globalization: from the predominantly political-institutional ground, interest is shifting to the functioning of society, etc. Nobody can predict what will come of this. It could be the harbinger of a second wave of neopopopulism, one that might see some of its ambivalences resolve in an increasingly proletarian direction, while others serve to radicalise its nationalist dimensions, setting both on a collision course. None of this means, in my opinion, that the possibility exists in either the short or medium term for a proletarian reemergence on an autonomous, class basis. Beyond any particular circumstances, the big problem for the proletariat in moving forward beyond neopopopulism lies in the difficulty of creating a general movement that, in starting from a particular terrain, is able to make one specific problem vital for the broad spectrum of the exploited. Something, then, with at least implicitly political contents, along the lines of what was attempted by the Gilets Jaunes – and just how difficult this is can be clearly seen with the anti-racist mobilization in the United States. Nor can we exclude the possibility of a war of all against all, should some national contexts implode for economic, geopolitical or social reasons. There is great disorder under heaven ...

Thanks again for the opportunity provided by this interview.

[1] Raffaele Sciortino and Steve Wright (2017) “The Spectacle of New Media: Addressing the Conceptual Nexus Between User Content and Valorization”, in Briziarelli M. & Armano E. (eds) The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism. London: University of New Westminster Press, 81-94.Hello, World!