Theses on the Category of the People

By David Payne, Alexander Stagnell and Gustav Strandberg

1. The ‘people’ as a collective political figure and ‘critique’ as a task for thought are commonly understood to be at cross purposes. It is possible to index how historically the people constitutes a limit category for critical thought. At the same time that the people is one of the unthoughts of the history of critical thought, critique is often understood as an act, a mode of thinking, that cannot be collectively exercised by a people; the people are thoughtless, without reason, unreasonable. While in modernity the task of critique has been tied to the furtherance of the idea of emancipation, the people (both as a category and, perhaps, as a mode of collective experience) stands as an object of critique and the other of emancipation. Whether this be because the people need to be saved from themselves,1 for which the enlightened critical thinker takes on the self-appointed role of emancipator, or because for the oppressed to exercise self-determination they must first be extricated from both the ideological caprice of popular spontaneism and discourses of a chosen, elected or exceptional people, in order then to be rerouted within a more emancipatory efficacious idiom, such that the onus is placed on a form of collectivity that does not take the people as its starting point.

There is sufficient reason today to want to retrace the curious relation between the travails of critical thought and the appearing of the people. Such a retracing would have to consider the following points:

(i) The task of critique, which is none other than the insignia of modern thought and the touchstone of emancipatory political practice, is nested within a crib of categories that are assumed to have as their source the individual cogito. Freedom and autonomy; thought and reason; reflexivity and self-consciousness. Man reaches maturity once he has disencumbered himself of needless external forms of authority and support, and is capable of self-legislation: autonomia. The age of mature judgement is conterminous with the ‘age of critique’, ‘to which now everything must submit’.2 Only then do freedom and thought coalesce in the manner that natural providence had intended. This is what is meant to live in an enlightened age, famously articulated in the opening lines to Immanuel Kant’s answer to the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’, a text which goes on to argue that man’s natural inclination to ‘think freely’ finds concrete expression in the public use of reason.3 But the ‘public use of reason’ is peculiarly understood by Kant; it means not the general exercise of reason by a public, it rather designates the public submission of free thoughts by individuals whose very possibility for thinking publicly derives from a detachment from all positions and offices regulated by an authority outside of oneself, which owing to external pressures and commands, restricts the free and critical expounding of opinion. Whence, literally, the bookish image of Kant’s critical figure: the exemplar of the scholar, divested of interests, motivated by nothing other than the will to knowledge, comes to exercise his critical faculties through the art of written discourse, submitting his own thoughts to the test of public scrutiny of a community of readers, to the anyone and everyone of a cosmopolitical order that exists only as a focus imaginarius.

(ii) The event of the critical turn in modern thought, for which Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason marks its self-conscious beginning, parallels the advent of modern mass politics, the revolutionary period of the late eighteenth century, onto which the ‘people’ as a collective subject enters the stage. The tropes of the ‘Copernican revolution’ and the ‘tribunal of reason’ (a tribunal that would be nothing without its tribune), with which Kant adorns his prefatory remarks to his magnum opus – perhaps as a minimal concession to popular tastes – would at least mark this concurrence, were it not for the fact that the significance of the philosophical ‘revolution’ and the ‘tribune’ runs in a different direction from their modern political valences. Indeed, within the tracks of this apparent parallelism, there is on the side of the critical thinker, a space of distance and disagreement, and deep-seated ambivalence, about the people.

(iii) In Kant there is, we can say, an attendant attraction and repulsion to the collective figure of the people. The onrushing events of the French Revolution appear as a spectacle, an experience bordering on the sublime. For Kant the spectator, the masses on the streets index an historic irruption serving as a sign of man’s progress (though significantly, not from the viewpoint of the masses themselves, but from the point of view of the disinterested interest of the onlooker, the ‘I’ exercising reflective judgement). At the same time there is the overriding concern that these unprecedented events of the unleashing of popular revolutionary sentiments might themselves establish a dangerous precedent. A people rebelling against the existing constitutional order, even if overthrowing tyranny and bringing into existence a Republican constitution (Kant’s own preferred option), is, for Kant, akin to tearing itself apart, unbinding the very form that establishes the unity of a people, and thereby setting in motion a process of unforming or deforming (Unform), thereby liquidating the people as such. A people is nothing if not consubstantial with its constitution; the latter is the ‘form’ to the brute matter of the disorganized and unruly Pöbel.4 The people stand in relation to the constitution as human sensibility relates to the formal categories of the understanding; the form exercised by the understanding and its categories over sensory impressions brings the ‘rabble’ of ‘common experience’ into some kind of regulated order, saving human cognition from ‘utter indifferentism’, ‘confusion’ and ‘chaos’.

“In Kant there is, we can say, an attendant attraction and repulsion to the collective figure of the people. The onrushing events of the French Revolution appear as a spectacle, an experience bordering on the sublime.”

Theoretical and practico-political reason dovetail on this point. (Axio)logically, the constitution must come prior to the people, in that it forms the people; without form, the people are nothing but indistinct, confused, obscure: unenlightened. Kant will place his faith (for which his own philosophy leaves so much space) in the benign and rational autocrat, to bestow to the people what they need, and what they would choose to will were the masses in a collective position to overcome their self-incurred immaturity and exercise reason. The decisions made by the self-legislating one of the autocrat are more favourable than those to which the ‘many-ones’ of the demos assent. While autonomy becomes indistinguishable from autocracy, democracy is but the defiling of the faculties; the madness of reason. Here, Kant gives voice to a certain critico-theoretical prejudice, to whit it is man, in the singular, and not men in the plural, who thinks. The ‘People’, which would claim to speak in one voice (united, indivisible), is a (necessary) transcendental illusion (see thesis 5) prey to despotism and dogmatism. It does not exist except by the sole virtue of the constitution that binds it together.

Sergei Eisenstein, Strike, 1925, still

(iv) The Kantian ambivalence surrounding the people –which at once enters onto the historical stage as a political force in its own right but is decreed as having no right beyond the constitution forming it—opens up a fundamental torsion in critical thought, one which can be traced through Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, up to and including the Frankfurt School.5 But the ambiguity of the Kantian critical gesture also has a genealogy preceding it, namely the Rousseauian paradox (already and equally present arguably in Machiavelli) of how a ‘people is made into a people’.6 Not ‘what is’ or ‘who are’ a people (the empirical question) but what conditions and operations must be presupposed for a people to become one (the transcendental question). This question abides today. Whence thesis 2:

2. The People is not an accomplished fact but a fact to be accomplished

There is the empirical statement: there are peoples. Peoples whose identities are ideologically reproduced as given through state authorized practices, ceremonial rituals, symbolic artefacts, sporting endeavours, international economic competition. There is the speculative supplement to this statement: the circulation of peoples, the codification and organisation of peoples into territories, ethnicities, language communities, sports teams, topographies, etc. does not exhaust the people as a political category (or operator), which remains in excess of any of its historical determinants, ideological machinations, and state apparatuses. Another people is yet to be made, putting into question the predicates used to identify its innumerable existing ideological representations, unmaking the bonds that augment the elements comprising a ‘People’ and forging new connections that make the transitory and haphazard appearing of (an)other people irrupt in and through political action. Which is to say, the enduring political and emancipatory interest in the category of the people is not maintained through the existence of the reproduction of established ties (as facts to be preserved in spite of ‘external pressures’ and ‘forces’, such as globalization, migration flows, capital flight, monolinguification, etc.), but as a pressure that is itself internal of any representation of a people, questioning the forms of exclusion that otherwise nurture it as a real abstraction.7 Here two figurations of the people appear, both of which in their own way demonstrate the principle that a people is never an accomplished fact. There are peoples for which the modifier ‘British people’, ‘Jewish people’, ‘French people’, etc., is used to bound a people to a territory, a nation, a set of iterative customs and ritualized practices, to a language-community, and symbolic attachments. The adjective operates to qualify who belongs to a people, and who does not belong; it is to mark and indemnify differences, as if these differences were natural and essential to a people. In truth, their factical givenness are a result of a series of ideological, performative and disciplinary practices, which, through the reproduction of the associative bond in everyday life, become naturalized and objectified; meaning that even in discourses that would want to see the identity of peoples as generally accepted facts, unassuming in their obviousness, inconspicuous in their givenness, there is, in spite of their apparent obviousness, a continual need to re-establish and re-produce the bond meant to gather a people as people.

“To speak in terms of indistinction breaks with the founding logical principles of identity and difference, as well as breaking fundamentally with the chauvinism of national exceptionalism.”

On the other hand, there are peoples that are not defined in and through their particularity, i.e. what is proper to them, what is their singularizing trait, but rather on their commonness, on their indistinction.8 To speak in terms of indistinction breaks with the founding logical principles of identity and difference, as well as breaking fundamentally with the chauvinism of national exceptionalism. An idea of the people that does not secure for itself a mark of distinction, by virtue of the identity that binds it into ‘one’, a whole, separated from ‘others’, but that blurs and muddles the distribution and assignation of persons, positions and places.9 The emancipatory wager is to think a people that is exclusive of exclusion, a people that paradoxically appears by virtue of its non-identity and indistinction. Whence thesis 3:

3. Modern emancipatory experience is tied to the principle of universality. The category of the people, as a possible carrier of this message, is riddled with ambiguities with respect to the relation, dialectical or otherwise, between the universal and the particular. Only a collectivity that excludes (by resisting) exclusion, that abjures its own identity by virtue of becoming non-identical to itself and with itself, breaks from the aporetic relation of the particular and the universal. The people is one of the names that has the capacity to function in this way.
There are peoples among other people. Many ‘ones’, defined in and through the particularity of their own history, traditions, practices. By force alone —conquest, war, invasion, colonization, imperialism— the particularity of a people imposes itself as the people, the cultivated, enlightened, fraternity, using others as their disposable resource – labour, slavery, wealth, land: all subject to expropriation and subordination. The generalization of a particularity leads to the obliteration of other particulars, to the reign of barbarism in the garb of civility and civilizing missions. The universalization of the particular is but the particularization, and thus retardation, of the universal; a simple will to power.

Auguste Raffet, Attack and take of the Crête-à-Pierrot (4 - march 24, 1802). Original illustration by Auguste Raffet, engraving by Hébert, 1839.

There are also peoples beneath People. Infra Dignitatem. Beneath dignity, contemptuous, uncultivated, barbaric, improper, people without station or position. Those who are excluded from either being or becoming part of the people, non-identical to it, or are only acknowledged conditionally. Those who are everything, precisely because they are nothing; the Internationale is an abiding reminder of this emancipatory axiom. The emancipatory possibility of the people as a political category coheres around these heterogeneous elements, the caput mortuum. The trace of the universal emerges through determinate negation, that is, from the excluded parts that venture to ex-clude exclusion, to ex-propriate the expropriators.

The obvious difficulty is when, as moments of the same process, the two abovementioned images of the people coalesce. When, for example, in Revolutionary France, 1789-94, the masses (typified by the sans-culottes), without either stake or station, took to the streets, to abolish the ancient regime and help establish the glorious republic in pragmatic unity with their so-called bourgeois masters.10 Only for the republican zeal and democratic ferment of the early conventions to transmute and ossify into a state apparatus wielding political and military power, engaging in war and conquest abroad (in the name of national exceptionalism) and suppressing democratic tendencies at home (1830, 1848, 1871) . The ideas stamped upon the revolutionary republic, exported and transmitted to other regions, through war and conquest, bolstered by the myth of the national exceptionalism of a people and buoyed by revolutionary revelry. But, these ideas – expounded by the masses of France, weaved into the state constitution – were far from possessions over which a providential people and the French state, as the organon of the people, had exclusive ownership. Taken up by other (colonized) peoples, i.e. indentured workers, slaves, under the political jurisdiction of the French Republic, the ideas of a free and equal citizenry were mobilized against the French Republican state in the spirit of the republican and democratic ideals that had found expression on the streets of Montmartre and on the march to Versailles; to break with Republican France in order for another people to establish a republic of its own. Such was the curious situation in which a fleet of Napoleon’s ‘revolutionary army’ found themselves when they arrived on the shores of Saint Domingue in 1802, who thought that their mission was to unfurl the flag of the First French Republic on its land in order to remind the rebellious inhabitants on whose side justice, freedom and equality were actually placed; to suppress what they assumed was a ‘counter-revolutionary’ struggle by ‘illiterate’ ‘barbarous’ slaves in its colony in order to reassert its own moral authority and, fundamentally, to protect its economic interests. Instead, what the army heard rolling around the mountains was the Marseillaise sung by the black slaves themselves, both in defiance of their colonial subordination to a so-called ‘enlightened’ people of the occident and in praise of the power of the ideas that could be harnessed in the convocation of another people; persons who, prior to the onset of rebellion were, as CLR James writes, ‘trembling in hundreds as individuals’ but who would ‘transform into a people able to organize themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day.’11 In hearing the revolutionary songs and sentiments fill the summer air, sourced through the mouths of the barbaric wretches, members of the French army (many of whom were Polish emigres conscripted into the French army, and with thoughts of their own popular uprising in their minds) deserted. They chose the side of the black Jacobins against the country of Jacobinism. Not, then, in the name of the state-authorized people of France, but in the name of another people, a Republic, to-come, on the shores of a colonized outpost. Heterogeneous elements, a rough outline and jumbled up picture of the masses, the existence of which insists because of its inconsistency; a counter-public or counter-people that comes to be by virtue of its resistance to the imposed and projected unity bound to state power, national exceptionalism and cultural arrogance. For this reason, its emancipatory valence rests on the possibility of a gathering together of everything and anyone that exposes not only the facticity of a people to the contingency of its own fiction but also to the immanent splitting of the people as a phenomenon and political category, between ‘one’ and ‘other’, homogeneity and heterogeneity. The people not as an accomplished fact, but as a fact that must be accomplished, in opposition to the empirical indications that reduce the real existence of a people to the facts of heredity, language, heritage, custom.

François-Claudius Compte-Calix (1813–1880), Madame de Lamartine Adopting the Children of Patriots Killed at the Barricades in Paris during the Revolution of 1848.

Saying all this, we must not make this easy for ourselves, by turning a blind eye to the fact that the irruption of a radical people in antagonism with relations of oppression and orders of domination, bring to rest emancipatory struggle. Lest we forget these sobering words from the pen of Jean-François Lyotard: ‘proud struggles for independence end in young, reactionary states’.12 The inner dialectic of the binding-unbinding of a people is interminable.

4. Politics cannot do without the figure of the people. But increasingly people are told and feel that they can do without politics. There is an increasing disconnect between politics as a field of practice, which plays with empty representations of the People, and the people or masses as the collective subject that play a transformative role in the field of political practice.

‘Political’ representatives of our formal democratic institutions peddle the ‘people’ as an empty abstraction. They do so out of grudging acceptance that political authorisation is borne from the demos of the people, and not from their own individual will: ‘the people voted them in office and can as quickly vote them out’. Oh, the fig-leaf of representative democracy! The trouble is that everyone knows at least three things about our elected officials: (i) they know not what the people want; (ii) they want the people to identify with what they think they know about them and (iii) this knowledge is harvested from areas external, not immanent, to the people, more often than not serving the interests of capital, party apparatchiks, and the self-serving careers of the political representatives themselves. Whence the unfortunate dialectical reversal that abounds: the elected political figure, who is nothing without the people, by hook and by crook, turns the whole logic on its head, thereby making the people into nothing other than the rhetorical operator that permits the whole system, which profits from –by impoverishing and immiserating – the masses, to chug along relentlessly, unopposed and indirectly supported by the democratic will. And since everyone knows it, the curtain, which once kept this not so hidden secret concealed from view (for sake of democratic legitimacy), has been raised, and the big lie of representative democracies – its founding axiom, no less — namely that popular sovereignty is the material, if not final cause, of modern democracy (that the wants of the people can be known and frictionlessly processed and administered), has been outed. The outing of one big lie has caused a thousand lies and deceptions to bloom. The age, perhaps, of political cynicism and hard-edged realism has produced a surfeit of chancers, opportunists, and impostors.

With the curtain raised, and the mise-en-abyme laid bare, today a virtue is made out of the spectacle itself. Baseless assertions and irreverent refutations, bombast and bluster. No longer is it a question of knowing, of laying out the facts correctly; epistemic rectitude is replaced with the wavering lines of affective inducement, a circumstance from which the demagogue and populist prosper: ‘no one knows what you want (trust no one who promises you a way out of this plight). At least you can be assured that I feel your rage and anger, your built-up resentments. I understand you. And while I will not provide any solutions, I will allow you to wallow in your own fits of emotional angst and confirm your sense of political torpidity.‘ To which the people reply: ‘We know you do not know what we want, we just want something (no, anything) more than we have presently. Our demands are barely clear to ourselves; years of the systematic expropriation of public services and decades of politicians preaching the credo of ‘no alternative’ have narrowed our political imaginations to the point of complete incredulity. Cut us into the deal, make us (somehow, anyhow) the beneficiaries of the rigged system. We have given up on transforming it, all possibilities lain in waste. We expect nowt from you other than to make your interests temporarily cross with ours. By whatever chicanery, mode of deception, it matters not one jot. Let us ride on the back of your self-serving interests; we shall happily collect any of the morsels that drip from your plate’.

José Clemente Orozco (1883 - 1949), The Demagogue 1946.

This disparaging image of the people, the people prey to populist jargon, where the rhetoric of the people are flogged to an inch of its life, only for its ever dwindling power to be exhumed and redeployed to serve the system contorted through its own contradictions, is a sign of the times rather than a sign of the endemic problems with the people as such. Which is to say, what the people might become, rather than the role to which it has been reduced, once it is consigned as spectator on the stage that had once been erected for it to play out its epic dramaturgy, is yet to be decided. Having said all this, it is as a linguistic sign and not as any ‘real existent’ that ‘the people’ shows up its congenital ambiguity. Whence thesis 5:

5. The idea of the ‘people’ incubates within itself, in critical-Kantian vocabulary, a ‘transcendental illusion’ (see thesis 1). The people is not itself a stable referent, and as a term does not have a stable referent. It is an idea to which no object of experience corresponds. This must be the starting, but by no means end point, for thinking the appearing of the people today.

There can be no objective knowledge surrounding what the people want, what they desire, what needs they have. To those who think the art of psephology, focus group, phone-ins, are in any way beneficial in approximating the knowledge of the desiring people, and thereby assuaging the yawning chasm between the representative and the represented, then to them three further things should be pointed out: (i) a sample of a few thousand opinions in periodic polling (which at least has the merit of adhering to scientific protocols of ‘representivity’) or a self-selection of individuals airing their thoughts on radio shows (which does not, often having no other purpose than to make the radio host sanctimonious, to ‘entertain’ rather than to ‘inform’) does little to alter the fact that they are symptoms of the spectacle of what Rosanvallon has simply called ‘unpolitical democracy ’,13 where collective action and the masses on the streets have been substituted for the passively active citizen-consumer. Actually existing democracy is not only the Schumpeterian hell of a competition between parties vying for votes as if there were a monetary transaction between clients and providers, but a competition between opinion polling agencies who, armed with their differing methodologies, chasing the next commission and research grant, keep the 24-hour news cycles chuntering about a popularity contest between mediocre political parties who have a tenuous connection to the ‘people’ they are meant to serve (on the Right, a tenuousness link that plays on jingoistic-tub thumping and nationalist appurtenances as a way of hiding its narrow class interests and equally on the parliamentary and social democratic Left whose originary connections to the working masses has become increasingly remote); (ii) knowledge of opinion is not the same as having knowledge of the people (of their interests, their needs, or, at a stretch, their hopes). Sociologically, at least, the category of ‘class’ (and the related notion of ‘class interests’) will, as an analytical datum, always have much more going for it than the nebulous abstraction of the ‘people’. The working class structurally bound to the exploitative relations and expropriative conditions of capital(ism) can be presented unmediated by ‘opinion’. Even if it has become increasingly hazardous and foolhardy to infer any political direction from clearly defined material interests, the point is that whether a worker at a warehouse says that they might vote for a far-right party or not is not what speaks of their interests; what does is their structural position within the relations of capitalist production, for which material and objective knowledge is possible. This is the abiding explanatory strength of Marxism, even if this strength is compromised with respect to how far these scientific investigations translate into effective political prescriptions. The whole issue is quite different with the people and its tribune. From where is talk about the people’s interests sourced, given that the category comprises of a variegated manifold, a barely consistent category?

“Sociologically, at least, the category of ‘class’ (and the related notion of ‘class interests’) will, as an analytical datum, always have much more going for it than the nebulous abstraction of the ‘people’.”

If anything, recourse is made to the ‘national’ interest, a shibboleth for the statesman, civil servant, member of parliament. But not only is the national interest an example of a sleight of hand performed by political representatives, often to hide underneath the flag the gaping divide separating state from the people, it is also no synonymy for the people (see theses 3 and 4). The point is that the ‘people’ is a category, a peculiar phenomenon, for which knowledge is not serviceable. (iii) there is no knowledge of the ‘people’ (neither demographics nor ethnographics); to assume so is to treat the people as a purely empirical phenomenon, which it is not. It is to ‘conflate the people’ as an idea with real people as an empirical datum. There is an unbridgeable divide between the two orders. It is for this reason that ‘the people’ has rightly been understood by some as ‘unfoundable’ (introuvable).14 The bridging of this gap commits what Immanuel Kant defined as a ‘transcendental illusion’.

The camera obscura sketched by Leonardo da Vinci in Codex Atlanticus (1515), preserved in Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan (Italy)

The Kantian lesson surrounding transcendental illusion runs as follows: do not conflate ideas of reason with an object of experience, the orders of thinking and being must not be understood as rectilinear. An idea has no object for which experience can corroborate. It can be thought but not known; it involves an act of invention not discovery. Here we can say that the people is an idea without a corresponding object of experience; it is on point of fact of this, that gives the idea of the people its genetic indetermination. A linguistic sign lacking a real referent consubstantial with it. Basic questions: What is a people? How many persons does it take for a people to become a people? What is the qualitative or quantitative difference between a crowd, the mass, the people? What do the people want? Whenever answers to such questions are proffered, one has to be attentive to their speculative thrust; drawn into decisions that while affecting the order of concepts leaves untouched the being of the people; for, its being does not stand independent from the act of naming. To be more precise, since the idea or notion is not without real existence (it is not without material effects), it is the idea that shapes and supports the people as it appears as a people, and not a people that stands above and before its naming. The idea of the people has a constitutive, and thereby performative, function in the gathering of heterogeneous elements into the material existence of a ‘one’. It is precisely for this reason that the ‘people’ is prey to transcendental illusion. By necessity the convocation of a people, supposing as it does a people as an addressee (even if it is a people to-come or a people that comes to be precisely at the moment of the address), violates the limits of Kantian critical thought. This is because, practico-politically, the term, ‘the people’, is employed to incarnate within the actual an idea that is without any determinate object. The trouble is that while Kantian critical thought is aware of a certain inevitability about the committing of transcendental illusion, its inevitability does not make it any less illegitimate. Only the regulatory, and not the constituent use of Ideas, is permitted: the ‘as if’ structure, the focus imaginarius of an end that serves as a guide without arrival. Here the ‘legalism’ of Kantian critique, and the implications he himself drew from this notable insight are insufficient with regards to political reason. Not only does politics by necessity commit transcendental illusion, by in this case conflating the Idea of the people (that corresponds to no determinate object of experience) with a conditioned appearance of the people, politics sustains itself in and through the commitment to, and amplification of this illusion. Politics cannot abide by the limits that the critical philosopher circumscribes, because it must force into existence, give concretion to, what otherwise has no right to exist; the product of the imagination must be made material.

The critical philosopher’s conceit, the ‘as if’ horizon, is not operative in political action. One does not, with a dose of irony and detachment, act ‘as if’ one were addressing, or were a part of a people. One identifies with the fragile appearance of what is named as such, and out of its conditioned and contingent appearing a logic of necessity is unraveled therein: ‘We the people demand that our claims are met otherwise there will be reprisals, i.e. civil disobedience, general strikes’; ‘we will take our struggle to the bitter end‘; ‘you are either with us or against us’ etc. Take a standard constative statement: ‘the people have decided’. To such a formulation, no end of critical questions can be posed: what people? A particular people, if so which one? Is it the whole of that particularity which has decided or a subset thereof, and if so who? On or by what authority is that subset able to speak for a people beyond it, and if it speaks for just itself then, to return to the first question, what constitutes it as a people? Notwithstanding these critical questions, the statement, politically, stands. It stands due to matters of exigency (i.e. the urgency of politics to force itself into the world), as well as to the ends that politics submits (i.e. to transform the present state of affairs, to inscribe onto the social fabric what it prescribes). Immanent to a political action, the appearing of the people has a material and authorial presence, even if it is a fragile appearing that is condemned to disappear once more.

6. The people is an underdetermined category whose recent reemergence in political discourse is a symptom of a concomitant underdetermination at the level of social forces.
Our conjuncture is not short of self-serving nominal designations. Whether we understand the times in which we live as bordering on a ‘populist moment’, as ‘neo-‘ or ‘proto-fascist’,15 as the unleashing of democratic expression that promise to spill over beyond the political regimes that otherwise contain them. Not so much the masses on the march, or the irrepressible multitude unleashed on the global stage of history, but a splintering, fragmentation of the collective subject of political action into an open series of contradictory forces. We are far from the event of the revolutionary rupture of an overdetermined situation, which Louis Althusser described as the condensation of social forces into an emancipatory class.16 If the category of the ‘people’ makes its presence felt today, it does so because its polysemanticity cuts through the multiple designations by which our present has been saddled. To think that the people stands as the privileged signifier that provides symbolic unity to what is a heterogeneous and disjunctive set of social and political tendencies is the wrong way to look at things. The ‘people’ may be the common root subtending the fasces of fascism, the populus of populism, the demos of democracy. The fact that it bridges these contending tendencies says nothing about its conjunctural significance, only its semantic latitude. Whence its underdetermined character. An underdetermination that bespeaks of its equivocity. The equivocity of the people is nothing unique to this political category. Every name and word that furnishes the lexicon of modern political experience is both mired and buoyed by the unmooring of its sign from a determinate field of concrete referents: ‘Equality’, ‘Freedom’, ‘Justice’, ‘Revolution’, ‘Democracy’. The leaves of the entire lexicon of political discourse have been thrown with abandon into the crosswinds of political forces today. It does not matter whether this is adjudged to be ‘progress’ or ‘regress’. We are beyond both, because even the compass of these navigatory points are contingently, and thereby unreliably, calibrated.

7. The underdetermination of the category of the People does not preclude its function as the point of overdetermination in emancipatory politics, neither though does it guarantee its political efficacy as an emancipatory name. Its political valence remains undecidable.
It is not the fact that the name of the ‘people’, which echoes around the public sphere from all sides, is exposed it to its own void as a transformative political category. The innumerable statements that flow freely from the mouths of politicians of all hues reads like a list of ceremonial adornments: ‘Let the people decide/the people have decided’, ‘We must listen to the People’, ‘Who will speak up for the People?’, ‘We the People’, etc. As advanced above, the free and general circulation of this name bespeaks of its underdetermination. It speaks to its underdetermination owing to a general flaccidity and looseness in referential content: the multifarious and contradictory uses made of it are not brought into any point of unity. Having said this, and precisely owing to its underdetermination, what is first exposed is the lie of any substantialization of the people. The people is a term that designates no unifying substrate. It has no ultimate and substantive determination. And, in fact, precisely by virtue of being an ‘underdetermined’ term, it can equally constitute the point of over-determination, in the Freudian sense of the dreamwork as resulting from a condensation of a multiplicity of unrelated mental and cathetically charged elements into one dream image.17 Under- and over-determination are thereby two processes by and through which the name of the people is itself effected, either manifesting itself in a disparate set of spurious elements that remain isolated and distinct from one another (underdetermination) or in how the name of the people becomes the possible point of unity around which the appearing of the masses, and the heterogeneous demands that are carried along within it, find a minimal point of consistency. The moment of overdetermination is precisely the moment of the revolutionary upsurge of the masses on the march, the gathering instance of (an)other con-figuration of the people. This political task becomes an immanent critical issue of our own present.

8. Today discussions surrounding the ‘people’ on the Left have become tied to Populism. A decision on the question of Populism (i.e. whether it is good or bad, an effective or ineffective strategy) commonly serves as the grounds on which the category of the ‘people’ is judged. The Faustian gloss that accompanies talk of a ‘populist temptation’ ends up conflating the problem of populism with the problem of the people tout court. The destinies of each do not intertwine, though their paths have crossed. While populism cannot do without the people, the people can be thought without populism.

The crisis of emancipatory politics (yes, still, one of the crises surrounding our conjuncture) is not only a crisis surrounding the fragmentary and uneven development of capitalism in the age of neo-liberalism, but also, politically, it is a crisis surrounding the naming and assignation of an emancipatory subject. With the figure of the proletariat (a name that sustained emancipatory political subjectivity for over 150 years) no longer it seems occupying the central position of augmenting revolutionary and emancipatory change, who today is to take on this role? It is said by some that presently we are living in a populist moment,18 convoking ‘the people’ as both its principal political referent and addressee. Alternatively, a politics critical and resistant to the ‘populist temptation’ is in search for an alternative name (e.g. ‘the multitude’, ‘the Indignados’, ‘the precariat’, ‘the 99%’, etc.) around which emancipatory demands can coalesce, as if the figure of the people was sutured to populism.

“The people is a term that designates no unifying substrate. It has no ultimate and substantive determination.”

Here let us remind ourselves of a lesser commented passage from Lenin’s State and Revolution, who himself reminds his own reader of an underappreciated and misunderstood line from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire. Marx claims, and Lenin emphasizes, that the smashing of the bureaucratic-military state machine is “the preliminary condition for every real people’s revolution” (Lenin’s emphasis).19 Significant, Lenin claims, because Marx did not speak simply of a ‘proletarian revolution’, but spoke in terms of the less class determinant category of the ‘people’. The reason why Lenin draws attention to this formulation is for both theoretical and conjunctural reasons. Theoretical, because Lenin rightly wishes to counter the simplifying and puritanical belief, present among reformists and adventurists alike, that there exists a basic antithesis between a purely ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian’ revolution; conjunctural, because strategically Lenin recognised that any effective destruction of state apparatuses would, given the precarious balance between class forces in Russia, require a united effort between ‘the mass of the people … the very lowest social strata, crushed by oppression and exploitation’. The ‘mass of the people’ is itself an instructive formulation – Lenin does not just say ‘the people’ or the ‘mass(es)’. He brings the two together: (in the genitive form) ‘the mass of the people’ should be interpreted not simply in majoritarian terms (i.e. the majority of the people). What it indicates is an interior difference within the people itself (see theses 2 and 3). Here we are dealing with the mass – the common lot, the disavowed, subjugated part – that belongs to the people, who must leave the ‘imprint of their own demands, of their attempts to build in their own way a new society in place of the old’, drawing ‘the majority into the movement’.20 In Russia (just as was the case in China under Mao) this meant a ‘free alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry’.

Isaak Brodsky (1883-1939), Lenin in Smolny in 1917, 1930.

In times where people seek to make choices too easy for themselves, it does well to be reminded that the category of the people has played an important role within the Marxist tradition, and is not just the lackey of the populist. Louis Althusser once advised a comrade from the Italian Communist Party, Maria Antonietta Macchiocchi, that ‘as long as you can’t answer the question: what today comprises the people in a given country (today, because the composition of the people varies historically; in a given country, because the composition of the people changes from place to place), you can’t do anything in politics.’21 Politics thus depends on the availability and operativity of the people. How does this statement, which attests to the necessary entailment between politics and the people in spite of its vacillating appearance, match up with the claim advanced by Ernesto Laclau, and popularized in recent years, that ‘populism is the royal road to thinking the ontological constitution of the political as such’?22 A shift and a leap is effected from the people as a collective political subject to populism as that which— what in fact is it? an ideology, a form of strategy, a style???— constitutes the popular bond augmenting the identity of the people. Laclau’s formalism is overwrought. It ends up in the untenable position of claiming that all transformative politics are ultimately (more or less) populist, in form if not content: politics=populism. Why? Because, for this political theorist (who spent his formative years drawing out the implications of the political meaning (and historical content) of Peronism in his native Argentina), for a politics to radically transform the social space, it must: (i) construct a popular identity out of a heterogeneity and plurality of demands that have no necessary point of convergence; (ii) this construction of a ‘popular will’ or ‘people’ is not self-sustaining but depends on the presence of an antagonistic frontier, the positing of an ‘outside’ or an ‘other’ that conditions the interiority of the people’s identity, and (iii) it must identify itself as an insurgent force against the sclerosis of existing institutional order.23 Very well; is it any wonder, though, that at such a level of generality all politics, which retains a reference to the people –nay, any politics –becomes redescribed as populist? Once more, we enter into the night where all cows are black. The absolutization of populism (which, lest it not be forgotten has specific historical and contingent conditions of emergence) is both the eclipse of populism (in its political specificity), and the eclipse of the variegated and differentiated appearances that a politics of the people has, and will have, taken. Here, it must be insisted that the claim ‘the people must be formed’ (a claim to be gleaned from Marx, Lenin, Althusser, Machiavelli and Rousseau) is not coextensive with and reducible to populism, which remains but a specific (and historically situated) way in which the forming of the people comes to pass. Thus: to think (with) the people, but all the while resisting the temptation of populism. Certainly, this requires from us a leap beyond the discursive confines that presently organize what is possible in our own political present.

David Payne and Alexander Stagnell in conversation with Sven-Olov Wallenstein about their, and Gustav Strandberg's, coming anthology "The People, Populism in Critical Thought", at Östra Station Restaurant, February 2021.

David Payne is an editor of Site Zones.

Alexander Stagnell has a PhD in Rhetoric from Södertörn University. He is a senior lecturer at the Rhetoric Department at Södertörn, and is presently researching ‘Post-Communism’ Communism.

Gustav Strandberg has a PhD in Philosophy from Södertörn University. He is a senior lecturer at the Philosophy Department at Södertörn, and is presently part of a critical investigative project into progressive cultural policy initiatives in the Northern European welfare states, from 1930 until the present.

Payne, Stagnell and Strandberg are co-editors of the volume Populism and the People in Contemporary Critical Thought (London:Bloomsbury Press), scheduled for publication in early 2022.

1 D H Lawrence, “And so it goes on, with the saving of the people. God of justice, when wilt thou teach them to save themselves?, ‘When wilt thou teach the people….’, Complete Poems of D H Lawrence, London: Wordsworth Editions, 1994.

2 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Tr. Pluhar, London: Hackett, 1996, Axi

3 Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Political Writings, tr. H.B Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Tr. Pluhar, London: Hackett, 1996, Aix

5 For a more extensive presentation of the fraught relation between ‘critical thought’ and ‘the people’, please see the authors’ extensive introduction to the forthcoming anthology, Populism and the People in Contemporary Critical Thought, London: Bloomsbury Press, Forthcoming.

6 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, tr. Maurice Craston, London: Penguin, 1968. p59.

7 For a good account of this dis-figuration, please see: Roberto Esposito, ‘In the Reverse of the People’, Politics and Negation, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019. pp118-28.

8 Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, tr. Walter Kaufmann, London: Vintage, 1974. §271 and §284.

9 The work of Jacques Rancière goes in this direction. See in particular: The Names of History, tr. Hassan Melehy, Minnesota: Minnesota Press, 1996 and Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, tr. Julie Rose, Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 1995.

10 George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

11 C L R James, The Black Jacobins, New York: Vintage Press, 1989. p ix.

12 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend : Phrases in Dispute, tr. Georges Van Den Abbeele, Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 1988, p181.

13 Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. p256.

14 Pierre Rosanvallon, Le peuple introuvable : histoire de la représentation démocratique en France, éditions Gallimard, 1998.

15 For an indication of this, please see Éric Fassin’s “The Neo-Fascist Moment of Neo-liberalism’, in Open Democracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/neo-fascist-moment-of-neoliberalism/ and Chantal Mouffe’s ‘The Controversy over left-wing populism’, https://mondediplo.com/2020/05/14populism.

16 Louis Althusser, ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, For Marx, tr. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, 1988.

17 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Vol 5 of the Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. James Strachey, London: Vintage, 1975.

18 Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism, London: Verso, 2019.

19 V I Lenin, State and Revolution, Moscow. 1976. p47.

20 Ibid. p48

21 Louis Althusser and Maria Antonietta, Letters from Inside the Italian Communist Party to Louis Althusser, London: Verso, 1973. p5.

22 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, London: Verso, 2004. p67

23 Ibid. See also: Ernesto Laclau, ‘Populism: What’s in a name?’, Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Francisco Panizza, London: Verso, 2005. pp47-8.