Overview

In The People Are Not One, Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn dismantle the central illusion of contemporary left politics: that ""the people"" can serve as a coherent subject of emancipation. Against both right and left populisms, they argue that this fantasy of unity obscures real class antagonisms and traps socialism in a dead-end politics of moral appeal and electoral maneuver. Through a sustained critique of left-populism, post-Marxist theory, and Democratic Party-oriented socialism, Tutt and Varn show how the collapse of mass politics, alongside debates over the professional-managerial class and the atomization of working-class life, has produced a strategic impasse on the left. What follows is not a lament but a provocation: a call to abandon populist shortcuts and rebuild socialist strategy on the terrain of class struggle as it actually exists-uneven, divided, and politically unformed. The People Are Not One is a manifesto for a post-populist left willing to confront fragmentation head-on and begin the long work of reconstructing class power.

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9789526545981

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Reviews

Writing in the great Marxist tradition of class analysis associated with thinkers such as Nicos Poulantzas, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Mike Davis, Tutt and Varn detail the dangers of a left populist political strategy that seeks to displace class struggle (and the struggle of the oppressed in general) by subsuming all workers within a political matrix dominated by the petty bourgeoisie or middle class. This is a work for our time; one that is ultimately as significant in its implications for the fight against so-called right populism as in its opposition to left populist strategies. John Bellamy Foster, author of Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx ""The left populism that emerged from Eurocommunism via Gorz, Laclau and Mouffe, and so on, has proved to be a dead-end for the left: mere branding opportunities for left-talking political careerists. By deprioritising class it has given up the working class to the right-populists. Daniel Tutt and C Derick Varn attempt to engage the theoretical arguments, and to think seriously about what reconstructing a working class socialist movement (or a socialist labor movement) could mean. An important project."" Mike Macnair, author Revolutionary Strategy: Marxism and the Challenge of Left Unity

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