Leninism in the Age of Populism
A Response to Armoise and Levi’s Conception of the Worker’s Party
by J. Ryder and P. K. Gandakin
Too often has it happened that, when history has taken a sharp turn, even progressive parties have for some time been unable to adapt themselves to the new situation and have repeated slogans which had formerly been correct but had now lost all meaning—lost it as “suddenly” as the sharp turn in history was “sudden”.
V.I. Lenin, On Slogans, 1917
The revolutionaries seek to change the world. This admirable conceit carries the seed of its error: changing the world, the revolutionary is at risk of forgetting that he belongs to it. Having declaimed proudly of heaven thereafter, he, like the priest, can only offer the same pathway to salvation: devotion preceding death.
The rest of us must struggle on Earth.
What Does it Take to Win?
Lessons From LFI
Every generation of the left inherits the same temptation: to retreat from politics when politics clashes with the ideal. The recent Prometheus Magazine piece The Populists and the Workers’ Party is only the latest example of this impulse. The authors, Fiedia Armoise and Amanda Levi, argue that the populism of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s ‘La France Insoumise’ (LFI) party is indicative of a broader strategic dead end for socialists.
Instead, the authors propose what they argue is a more “classical” vision of a workers’ party rooted in “independent” organization of the working class. In their critique, they emphasize what they deride as the “leader plus internet” model of politics associated with contemporary left-populist movements.
Armoise and Levi’s article should be commended for its clarity of prose (an especially rare virtue on the left), and the seriousness with which they approach the topic. Yet what is presented in their argument as a sober return to Marxist orthodoxy is in reality something much simpler: a short-sighted aversion to engaging with the fraught terrain of modern politics itself. By treating the workers’ party and populism as counterposed, the authors fail to understand that populism is not a mode of politics antagonistic to Marxism, but a means of politics that characterizes social conflict in general.
For Armoise and Levi, La France Insoumise represents the supposed liquidation of socialist politics into charismatic leadership, populist rhetoric, and digital mobilization. Here, the assumptions from which the authors operate tend to obscure rather than elucidate. What the success of the populist moment offers the revolutionary movement is lessons for analysis. Instead of critically studying populism as a social phenomenon, however, the authors dismiss Mélenchon and LFI as a deviation from the pre-ordained path. Through such a narrow lens, the authors lose sight of the essential question Mélenchon and LFI offer us: what does it take to win?
Whether or not ‘populism’ can be found in the canonical Marxist lexicon is irrelevant for our purposes. Populism is an analytic term that highlights certain distinctions characteristic of political practice. The drawing of frontiers in broad strokes between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is the starting-point of all political conflict, and the rule, consequently, of political action.
LFI was not built as a nostalgic recreation of the twentieth-century socialist party. It was built as a vehicle capable of contesting power under the conditions that actually exist in modern France. Rather than organizing itself strictly along the institutional lines of the communist parties of old, LFI sought to assemble a broader political bloc capable of disrupting the establishment that had dominated French politics for decades.
Its strategy was straightforward: construct a political frontier between the oligarchic bloc of finance, technocracy, and neoliberal governance on the one hand, and a newly articulated political bloc drawn from the fragmented components of the working class and its potential allies on the other. In doing so, LFI brought together voters who would never have been unified by the narrower language of party or class identity alone—precarious workers, students, segments of the professional class, immigrant communities, public-sector workers, and those simply alienated from the entire political system; each organized on the basis of their mutual alienation from a particular political conjuncture.
This is precisely what the populist approach emphasizes: the construction of a majority where none previously existed, and the success of this approach is difficult to deny. Within only a few years of its founding, Mélenchon’s movement transformed itself into the central pole of the French left, winning nearly twenty percent of the presidential vote last cycle and positioning itself as a viable opposition to the neoliberal center. Mélenchon and LFI are considered among the favorites to win France’s upcoming presidential election next year.
This narrative is interesting not just because Melenchon has succeeded, but because his success represents a relatively novel attempt to solve an age-old problem: how to disrupt the static political configurations characterizing Western liberal democracies, particularly in the modern period, where most election cycles are closed circuits between ghastly neoliberals and the far-right exclusively. What is most remarkable about LFI is that, for its supporters, it not only represents a rejection of the old way of doing politics, but also–and here is the element lacking in the equivalent case in the U.S–a successful new way of doing politics.
In general, the authors pose the question in purely conceptual terms, leaving aside the connection to practice. They write:
[LFI’s structure and decisions are] defended with the rhetoric of efficacy. The movement is presented as more effective than a party, without its internal debate, factional strife, and tedious bureaucracy; it is focused purely on action and taking power.
Criticizing this model, the authors correctly point out that it locates directive power in a closed stratum of parliamentarians and intellectuals. But they do not ask what the conditions must be or what forces the party is able to organize and mobilize, such that it really is effective. Or, posed differently, there is no answer for why, despite the clear flaws of the LFI, it is yet able to function as the political expression of the working class in a fuller and more expansive sense than the socialists and communists are in this period. They do not ask why the democratic structures they propose do not effectively represent the working class in the political sphere, given that the working class is given the choice between options.
Why, for example, has LFI successfully captured the concept of “action” and “efficacy”? Why is the ability to take power identified with LFI rather than this allegedly immortal yet practically amorphous and absent communist party of the working class our authors speak of? The authors’ critique does not attempt to understand what the rise of populism means in relation to the means of organization of the proletariat, nor the structure of modern class or political struggle. Instead, its flaws are simply presented to the reader abstractly.
What a breath of fresh air Lenin is, in contrast! Let us see what he has to say about this question. In his study Guerrilla Warfare, Lenin writes:
In the first place, Marxism differs from all primitive forms of socialism by not binding the movement to any one particular form of struggle. It recognises the most varied forms of struggle; and it does not “concoct” them, but only generalises, organises, gives conscious expression to those forms of struggle of the revolutionary classes which arise of themselves in the course of the movement. […] In this respect Marxism learns, if we may so express it, from mass practice, and makes no claim what ever to teach the masses forms of struggle invented by “systematisers” in the seclusion of their studies.
Therefore, the revolutionary question is not: Where does populism fail?, but: Where do we fail, and what can we learn from the logic of populism? The Party and its tactics are purely operational. The role of the Party is clear, and clearly delimited: it is the political expression of the class, aimed at seizing state power. Questions of ideal structure, of democratic rights, of deliberation, are relevant only insofar as a democratic fighting Party is necessary to seize state power.
Mélenchon’s project—whatever its limitations—has been one of the few serious attempts in contemporary Europe to construct a political vehicle capable of doing precisely that. To reject this experiment outright, as the Prometheus critique is so quick to do, is not to defend socialist strategy. It is to ensure it remains ossified and artificial. It is to retreat into a form of politics that remains permanently satisfied with being ‘correct’ while the right continues to win. This ground cannot be conceded.
Leninism or Fetishism?
Despite Armoise and Levi’s evocation of Vladimir Lenin, it is he more than anyone who introduces this ‘populist’ element as his original contribution to communist politics. In other words, if, as Gramsci puts it, Marx is the theorist of communism, Lenin is its politician.
In What is to be Done?, for example, Lenin emphasizes that the communists defend all strata and political tendencies, including liberalism, against Tsarism, with the intention of building the largest possible unity within all possible allies of the revolutionary movement against the increasingly isolated fraction clinging onto state power. His demand for the British communists to enter the stream of social democratic and electoral politics—not because those arenas were ‘pure’, but precisely because they were not, because they were, despite that, the political mode of production of the millions—is nothing more than a demand to fight with the masses, to rally the masses within their struggle and organize them as such against the ruling class.
Armoise and Levi similarly attempt to apply Lenin to the case, but unfortunately come up short. Their examination of Lenin’s 1920 Speech on the Affiliation to the British Labour Party contains in miniature the essential error with which they approach the question of politics. The authors write:
By 1920, however, Lenin instead called Labour a “thoroughly Bourgeois party”, as opposed to a “real working-class political party”, by which he meant a party with a revolutionary programme. This classification is better, but it has its own problem – one of the terms becomes entirely superfluous [our emphasis]. A “real working-class political party” is here synonymous with communist parties (or whatever you call a “good” party), which is really limiting because it becomes impossible to describe a workers’ party as anything but a revolutionary workers’ party. So rather than describing the class character of such a party, it describes its program.
Having shown us that Lenin speaks “superfluously,” we learn that the authors do not understand the essential distinction being drawn. It may be the case that you have identified the most correct line, the ideal min-max program, the perfect internal structure and that, as such, you have no need for anything more. But, for the revolutionary party, the question of class character can never be rendered redundant or second to the question of the abstract line. Lenin, in this text, is not demanding the British communists adopt the correct program. He is not demanding they adopt the ideal organizational model. He is criticizing the British communists for an error that the authors here similarly do not understand, that a proletarian party can only be a proletarian party if it actually represents the proletariat.
Let us read what Lenin actually says in the text quoted by Armoise and Levi. He writes:
We expressed this in all our resolutions, for we always emphasize that we can consider a party to be a workers' party only when it is really linked up with the masses and fights against the old and quite corrupt leaders [our emphasis], against both the Right-wing chauvinists and those who, like the Right Independents in Germany, take up an intermediate position. We have asserted and reiterated this a dozen times and more in all our resolutions, which means that we demand a transformation of the old party, in the sense of bringing it closer to the masses.
In the account offered by Armoise and Levi on the revolutionary party, we hear no mention of bringing the party “closer to the masses,” or “link[ing] up with the masses”, or the “position” that the party plays in the whole of political conflict in society. Instead, we are told that there is no difference between a true workers’ party and a party that has got the program right (i.e., an activist circle self-styled as communist has said the correct words in the correct sequence is no different than the Bolsheviks in 1917 and in fact is ahead of the populists such as Melenchon or Bernie and their millions of allegedly deluded, proletarian followers—very flattering!). It is difficult to imagine a parody of anti-Leninism more on the nose than that which dismisses the actual participation and support of the proletariat to the revolutionary proletarian party as a mere superfluity—an error so fundamental that it seems to figure less as a point of dispute and more as a dividing line between genuine revolutionaries and the activists.
Populism is not an ideology, it is a political logic—a way of constructing a collective political subject against a shared enemy. Modern democratic politics increasingly operates through this logic because social identities are fragmented and cannot be reduced to a single, conveniently structured class position. In the classical industrial capitalism of history’s past, the working class possessed a degree of objective social cohesion (and isolation) that allowed socialist parties to structure themselves around clearly definable interest groups and sectors.
The classical workers’ parties of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not emerge from theoretical clarity alone. They emerged from mass social institutions—stronger trade unions, socialist clubs, workers’ newspapers, cooperative societies—that structured everyday life. Without those institutions, the working class does not necessarily become a political actor; it becomes an amorphous demographic category, as it has done in our post-industrial American socio-political landscape. The factory itself organized workers into a shared experience of exploitation and collective struggle. We must finally come to understand that we no longer live in the world of industrial capitalism.
The working class today exists not as a unified industrial bloc but as a dispersed social formation: service workers, the gig economy, public sector employees, precarious professionals, segments of the middle class caught in downward mobility, upward mobility, and even sections of the high-salaried upper strata; all containing a broad swathe of opinion, both progressive and reactionary. In the absence of dense class institutions, politics does not disappear. Instead, it structures itself around hegemonic projects—alliances of otherwise disconnected interests fused together through shared narratives of struggle and success. . This is precisely the void populism fills. The refusal to engage in this process does not preserve socialist purity. It simply leaves the construction of ‘the people’ as a political subject to the right–a gap that they have hitherto been able to exploit to much gain.
In this highly stratified environment, political subjects cannot be discovered—they must be constructed; populism is the mechanism of that construction. It is the discursive process through which disparate grievances—economic precarity, housing crises, racial injustice, imperial war—are articulated into a common antagonism, on the basis of the creation of a new and more progressive culture. This is not a deviation from class politics as our comrades at Prometheus would like you to believe; it is how class politics must (and do) operate in practice.
In fact, it has always been the role of the revolutionary party to give self-consciousness to the proletariat and therefore articulate it as a political class. If the party is unable to fulfill this function, we are unable to cohere the proletariat, no matter how many slogans or structures we appeal to. In doing so, the party cannot impose its own ideals or preferred methods of organization on the masses, but must build and develop on the proletarian struggle as it is. The virtue of the populist movement, despite its extensive flaws, is that it has been able to organize and mobilize the proletariat in the period of the internet and the erosion of civil society.
Take, for example, the authors’ demand with regard to Party democracy. They write:
Just as in the idea of a democratic republic, the workers’ party ought [our emphasis] to be an organisation where the membership, not the leadership, is sovereign. It is the membership which grants the leadership its democratic mandate through proportional representative democracy, expressed by a sovereign congress which elects standing leadership and votes on the most important issues.
Party democracy here is not, as it is with the Leninist concept of democratic centralism, centered around the question of maximizing mobility and decisiveness as an organization. Instead, it is posed purely moralistically, as a question of “ought” and as a question of the “idea of a democratic republic”. But the question of “representative democracy” in general, which the authors seek to apply to the revolutionary party, properly belongs to the level of abstraction of political society in general.
The Party, in other words, does not prefigure the future society, but fights for it. It is less important that the correct model of democracy be applied internally than that the Party is placed in a fundamentally democratic relation to mass practice and effectively formulates the latter’s demands for proletarian democracy. Our goal is not to practice democracy within our cloister, but to win democracy and socialism for the world.
In this sense, Armoise and Levi’s prescriptions read as simple utopianism. They prescribe the formation of the correct and just society—where every individual has a vote and deliberates, where no decisions are alienated to leadership—and then seek to achieve it by reproducing it in miniature. Worse than the utopians, however, our left-communists seek to reproduce not the economic form but the political form of democracy, which means that they do not merely sequester themselves from the movement in the agrarian co-op but actively attempt to substitute the political action of the masses with the strictures of their utopianism.
We say this is a matter of standpoint because no doubt the authors themselves would not agree with this characterization. And yet it is the only identifiable orientation in their text. Their criticisms begin with the picture of the ideal, preferred structure that they contrast with the real. This is not necessarily bad; this is often the first step of criticism. But it does not elevate beyond that. When Lenin instructed the left-communists to form the party and contest state power electorally, they replied: What about the problems and flaws of electoralism? When he seized the State, they replied: What about the problems of managing a proletarian state in backward economic conditions? Now, when confronted with the real activity of proletarian struggle, they can only throw their hands up and say: What about the problems of this form or mode of struggle, where does it deviate from the ideal? But the first and most essential principle of Marxist criticism is that our critique does not attempt to subsume the world in our preferences, but begins our analysis with the world. And, insofar as the authors do not cognize what is valuable and progressive in populism, and then critique it from that standpoint—from the revolutionary question of how to advance and extend this mass action—they fall into sterile idealism.
It merely says: this, this new thing, is flawed, and ergo wrong, and ergo the old is right. But the authors do not, and perhaps cannot, pose the more pressing, revolutionary question: Why have the old modes of party politics, unified currently by LFI, failed to play their role on their own? Why haven’t the political parties that structured themselves according to the model of the democratic republic, if that is truly the revolutionary form of proletarian organization, not supplanted LFI or similar tendencies through their vitality? It is simple to identify the flaws of capitalist society; what is revolutionary is to identify where it actually breaks.
Leader Plus Internet Equals Victory
Perhaps the most revealing part of the anti-populist critique is its hostility to what it calls the “leader plus internet” model of politics. The phrase is meant as an insult, but it describes with remarkable accuracy how contemporary political mobilization actually works (so much so that parts of the original essay almost read like defenses of the model).
Mass political communication no longer flows through party newspapers or trade union halls, despite some of our comrades’ best wishes. It flows through digital networks—platforms where narratives, personalities, and symbolic antagonisms circulate at enormous speed. Under these conditions, political leadership becomes a focal point of collective identification.
The irony, of course, is that the contemporary American left has just witnessed the success of precisely the political model being criticized. Zohran Mamdani’s rise did not occur as a result of DSA’s internal democratic structure, nor through the decentralized proceduralism that dominates its many activist spaces (although some of our friends in the DSA enjoy indulging in this fantasy). It occurred through a populist campaign capable of articulating a broad social coalition around a clear political narrative, embodied by a relatable leader, and disseminated through the digital networks that now structure modern political communication. In other words, precisely the ‘leader plus internet’ model our comrades now tell us to rally against.
This is why figures like Zohran have been able to succeed where countless decentralized activist networks have failed. His victory was the result of a clear antagonistic message—the masses of people versus the elitist system—combined with a political figure capable of embodying that message and broadcasting it across the digital public sphere in a way that could resonate with the progressive masses. Zohran embodies the ‘leader plus internet’ theory, yet our comrades at Prometheus want us to abandon it, for no less than a completely insufficient alternative: formal democracy. What we must come to understand is that elections are not seminars or societies; they are struggles for hegemony.
Zohran’s campaign demonstrated something the American left has struggled with for decades: that socialist politics can escape subcultural marginality when it is presented through a political formation capable of resonating with a prominent, disgruntled, and culturally articulated social demographic. His message was not delivered through the labyrinth of internal structures that dominate so much of our myopic left organizations. It was delivered directly to millions of people through digital media, public confrontation with political elites, and a style of campaigning that made socialist politics legible to voters who had never previously encountered it.
Yet what is remarkable is how quickly this lesson has been forgotten. Within the DSA, the very organization through which Zohran’s politics were forged (not as a result of its bureaucracy but its vision), his victory is often celebrated rhetorically while the strategic logic that produced it is quietly rejected. His campaign is treated as an inspirational anomaly rather than as evidence of a political method that now must be generalized. The populist articulation that allowed him to win is praised in hindsight while simultaneously being condemned in theory.
In a recent online thread regarding this article, for example, one of the authors of the piece, A. Levi, clarified that she rejected the populist element of Zohran’s mayoral victory. Instead, she argues that it only served the purpose of “mirroring the anti-democratic bourgeois state” and doesn’t “serve our longer, strategic goals of establishing radical democracy”. Yet, in the same thread, Levi also states that she “think[s] Zohran's victory was a victory for the class only insofar as it helped build up DSA, the party of the class, so that one day it can overcome and defeat populism as a tendency.”
In this statement, our comrade Levi has tasked us with embracing quite the contradiction. We are told that we must at once understand that Zohran’s populist victory was nothing more than mirroring the “anti-democratic bourgeois state”, but also simultaneously that, actually, it did succeed in building DSA, the representative of our class—and that one day enough of these populist victories may amalgamate to defeat populism itself once and for all. This orientation seems to begin with a wrong-headed assumption of what the role of populism in political strategy is in the first place. To say that Zohran’s victory did nothing but build the DSA, which our critics themselves are here claiming is the “party of the class”, is to say that Zohran’s victory did nothing except exactly what we wanted it to do. That, perhaps, this populist electoral win built our base and asserted our will as a stamp on the American bourgeois state should not be so simply forsaken, but should rather be considered the main order of business at this juncture of American socialism.
Of course, many of us at Geese Magazine are the first to point out that we must push Zohran’s administration to increasingly expand socialist democracy, something he has not always chosen to do. But it is precisely the strategy of populist electoral victories that, as our comrade Levi has pointed out, builds our organizations, and gives us the ability to push for this expansion to begin with. Surely, we cannot understand our strategy to be that of reluctantly tolerating populist electoral wins from the democratic-socialist camp only as a precursor to building enough power that we can then negate the populism that got us to that stage. Surely, instead, we should embrace left-populism as the vessel through which our influence and growth acquire potential for expansion to begin with.
It becomes clear on closer inspection here that Levi’s repudiation of Zohran’s victory does so on superficial terms only, while simultaneously outlining how its strategic logic is exactly what has propelled our organizations into positions of higher reach and influence, the key task of our juncture.
This superficial rejection of the strategic logic that made Zohran’s victory possible reveals the deeper problem confronting the contemporary left: an inability to distinguish between the goal of sustaining the internal life of its organizations and sustaining the actual struggle for power in society. In this sense, such an inability should be understood as a product of intentional design rather than an honest mistake: the logic of the subculture we have created has become circular, with many amongst us becoming content with the goal of sustaining our social circles rather than vying for real hegemony.
The authors write:
The ‘left-populist moment’ idea also imposed an immediacy to political action. Therefore, a lot of populist theory came to be focused less on proposing a holistic strategy, and more on a tactical question of what kind of electoral rhetoric should populist party leadership pursue in this “left-populist moment”. Tactics and messaging are put before creating long-lasting structures and organising masses in a conscious, strategic way.
Here, we cannot help but feel like the question is being simply ignored. The dichotomy posed between “tactics and messaging” and “long-lasting structures and organizing masses” is completely debilitating. Lenin’s lesson is that tactics are not independent of strategy. Messaging is not independent of organization. Each tactic is merely a real, concrete moment of a strategy. That a strategy—such as a democratic republic within the working-class organization—can be proposed without any applicable tactics is a flaw in the strategy, not in the concept of tactics itself.
The same applies to messaging, rhetoric, slogans, etc. The idealist standpoint imagines that history is the pure movement of unfolding ideas, with no part for human practice. The mechanical materialist position does not refute this position, but inverts it: it imagines that the rhetorical and ideological also exist in a non-causal relationship to the rest of society, purely external; the role of intellectual and political practice is dismissed tout court. Mechanical materialism imagines that the intellectual, discursive, and ideal elements of society exist in a separate sphere from true, material activism. What we find instead is that intellectual practice is a practice like any other, with its own objective structure, functions, and so on. The role, in this context, of slogans and ideas is to represent, at the level of ideology, real linkages and alliances between classes in politics.
The clearest rendition of such an analysis is found in Laclau’s On Populist Reason, which examines populism as a political logic that cuts across ideologies as a characteristic of political practice rather than, as the authors Armoise and Levi assume, as a distinct social ideology in its own right. Laclau asks us to attempt to understand the role slogans, both significant and insignificant, both specific and general, play in political articulation. He writes:
A first step away from this discursive denigration of populism is not, however, to question the categories used in its description—‘vagueness’, 'imprecision', and so on—but to take them at face value while rejecting the prejudices which are at the root of their dismissal. That is: instead of counterposing 'vagueness' to a mature political logic governed by a high degree of precise institutional determination, we should start asking ourselves a different and more basic set of questions: 'Is not the “vagueness" of populist discourses the consequence of social reality itself being, in some situations, vague and undetermined?' And in that case, ‘wouldn’t populism be, rather than a clumsy political and ideological operation, a performative act endowed with a rationality of its own - that is to say, in some situations, vagueness is a precondition to constructing relevant political meanings?’
To put this in the register of strict Leninism, we might say: Is the value of the slogan of “peace, land, and bread” not in what it represents, but precisely in what it fails to represent? Or, in other words, is not the power of the slogan that it provides a minimal level of unity around which all the relevant social forces of revolutionary Russia could effectively identify themselves with and rally around? Had another three terms been added to the list, even if those were all well and good terms (say, on internal party democracy), the party may have been more formally correct. But it would no longer have been able to function as the center for the broadest possible unity across the revolutionary classes, but would have, like countless other left formations, merely proven itself to be especially cogent about certain problems with contemporary forms of mass politics. In other words, it would’ve failed.
And what about the focus on political action and populist discourse in LFI? Does it not represent a frustration with the incapacity of the traditional left, which has continued to supplant questions of political saliency with those of theoretical fidelity and organizational purity? Is it really a sin that the working class seeks an agent that will fight effectively for it? Does it not signify the felt problem that communists have largely abandoned the field of politics and failed to represent a real social pole in the great questions of the day, in each individual country? That does not mean that populism, nor LFI, necessarily possesses the right or even a replicable approach. But it does mean that criticism which begins with the flaws of this model posed abstractly, rather than in relation to the question of the tasks and organization of the actual proletariat–in relation to what can be learnt, advanced, and productively critiqued–is necessarily ‘superfluous.’
The problem is that the authors do not approach the question from the standpoint of the Leninist revolutionary, but of the moribund political activist. Their demands reflect the demands of that stratum: an increased liberalism within the party, increased control of the political class over the question of political administration and direction, and increased status to the party activist. That these interests are not equivalent to the interests of the proletariat is precisely why the modes of political organization of the proletariat in the modern day do not conform to these demands. After all, the French worker already not only possesses democracy, but also liberalism. They have already been given the right to criticize and deliberate, to form their own organizations that follow their own prescribed structures, and to vote for their own leadership. They come to the workers’ party not to seek the rights they already possess—not to reproduce the alienated form of democracy of society in the activist hall—but to utilize that political system for their own gain and victory.
What is being defended instead by the activist is something far narrower: the internal logic of left organizations themselves. The hostility to populist leadership reflects less a principled objection to political centralization than an attempt to universalize and preserve the internal factional culture of a particular milieu—one in which politics is experienced primarily through caucus negotiations, chapter votes, and procedural equilibrium. It must be acknowledged that politics does not operate on the terrain of such left subculturalism. It operates on the terrain of mass persuasion and political leadership.
The reason for this is simple: power does not develop horizontally. The modern state is a centralized apparatus capable of coordinating economic policy, military force, legal authority, and ideological production. Confronting such an apparatus requires political organizations capable of acting with comparable coherence. Populist movements understand this instinctively. They construct leadership, concentrate narrative authority, and build majoritarian political coalitions. Anti-populist socialists often respond to this with horror—as though the mere existence of leadership were a betrayal of socialist democracy (much like our anarchist friends). But history has shown us that politics without leadership does not become more democratic; it becomes marginal.
The hostility to populist leadership found in the Prometheus piece ultimately reflects a deeper tendency within large segments of the contemporary left: the belief that political power must be diffused across a landscape of decentralized organizations, internal caucuses, and endlessly negotiated coalitions. Within DSA, politics often appears less as the construction of a hegemonic project capable of winning society than as the perpetual management of internal factions. Strategy becomes subordinate to procedural equilibrium, and the horizon of political imagination rarely extends beyond the next internal vote.
But factional pluralism is not the same thing as building political power. The state does not function through consensus decision-making. Capital does not coordinate its interests through open assemblies. Reactionary movements do not hesitate to concentrate authority when doing so allows them to advance their political objectives, as they have done so effectively under the Trump regime. Why, then, should socialists uniquely bind themselves to an organizational form that fragments their own capacity for action?
The anti-populist position ultimately asks the left to believe that power can be conquered without centralization, leadership, or narrative coherence. It imagines a socialist politics that can defeat the most powerful institutions in human history while remaining permanently dispersed. History offers little evidence for such optimism. What it shows instead is that every successful transformative movement—from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks to the anti-colonial revolutions of the twentieth century—understood a simple truth: political power must be fought for and won before it can be exercised.
Populism must be a tool through which we can articulate a political frontier in which we can construct a hegemonic project capable of mobilizing national majorities rather than speaking only to self-selected ideological minorities. To build movements that can not only protest the existing order but actually replace it.
