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La brecha y los cauces. El momento populista en España y Estados Unidos
«Un estudio fascinante sobre estos tiempos tumultuosos, lleno de perspicacia y con un relato histórico, que subraya que el momento populista no es una aberración pasajera. Es fundamental para entender esta época de agitación».
Owen Jones
En estas páginas, Jorge Tamames relee a Karl Polanyi, Ernesto Laclau y Chantal Mouffe para analizar la historia política reciente de España y Estados Unidos. Así rastrea la evolución de los partidos y movimientos de izquierda desde los primeros días del neoliberalismo en la década de 1970, pasando por la crisis financiera de 2008 y el ciclo de protestas posterior a 2011, hasta la actualidad. La brecha y los cauces ofrece una mezcla necesaria de ideas teóricas, históricas y prácticas para los interesados en el potencial radical del populismo de izquierdas.
«Las herramientas teóricas que Jorge Tamames maneja con precisión permiten entender la irrupción populista —y la nube de levantamientos, estallidos e intervenciones materiales y discursivas a la que ha dado lugar— a partir de las grandes transformaciones económicas de la segunda mitad del siglo xx, y en concreto de aquella «liberación» de la sociedad de mercado que nos legó un ideal utópico, presentista y despolitizado que hoy, en la hora más paradójica de la globalización, no deja de agonizar a la vez que se presenta bajo su forma más pura».
Del prólogo de Pablo Bustinduy
«En medio de una plétora de libros centrados ansiosamente en el ascenso de la derecha reaccionaria, La brecha y los cauces nos muestra la luminosa y esperanzadora cara del fracaso del neoliberalismo».
César Rendueles
Owen Jones
En estas páginas, Jorge Tamames relee a Karl Polanyi, Ernesto Laclau y Chantal Mouffe para analizar la historia política reciente de España y Estados Unidos. Así rastrea la evolución de los partidos y movimientos de izquierda desde los primeros días del neoliberalismo en la década de 1970, pasando por la crisis financiera de 2008 y el ciclo de protestas posterior a 2011, hasta la actualidad. La brecha y los cauces ofrece una mezcla necesaria de ideas teóricas, históricas y prácticas para los interesados en el potencial radical del populismo de izquierdas.
«Las herramientas teóricas que Jorge Tamames maneja con precisión permiten entender la irrupción populista —y la nube de levantamientos, estallidos e intervenciones materiales y discursivas a la que ha dado lugar— a partir de las grandes transformaciones económicas de la segunda mitad del siglo xx, y en concreto de aquella «liberación» de la sociedad de mercado que nos legó un ideal utópico, presentista y despolitizado que hoy, en la hora más paradójica de la globalización, no deja de agonizar a la vez que se presenta bajo su forma más pura».
Del prólogo de Pablo Bustinduy
«En medio de una plétora de libros centrados ansiosamente en el ascenso de la derecha reaccionaria, La brecha y los cauces nos muestra la luminosa y esperanzadora cara del fracaso del neoliberalismo».
César Rendueles
328 pages, Paperback
Published October 13, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 10, 2022
Un ensayo muy potente sobre populismo que se toma el tema con la seriedad necesaria y sirve también como una suerte de manual para hacerlo mejor. No es la intención del autor, pero se hace difícil no aprender y anotar ideas tanto en la crónica que hace del ciclo 15mero como de las campañas de Sanders o la propia traición de la socialdemocracia. Lejos de querer ajustar cuentas creo que hace un ejercicio bastante honesto con la figura de Podemos y da al menos algo de esperanza sobre futuras brechas.
September 2, 2021
Interest in left populism is, thankfully, surviving the eclipse in its fortunes. This is measured by set-backs in Greece, Spain, the termination of Corbyn’s leadership of Labour in the UK, and Sanders’s failure to secure the nomination as the Democrat party candidate for President in the US in 2020.
This is a comprehensive list, and some might think it is time to declare the experiment a failure and move on to something else. The case for doing so would be stronger if it could be shown that left populism was what its critics claim to be – an opportunistic effort to trick one’s way into a position of political influence over the unsophisticated masses. But in this account Jorge Tamames searches for deeper roots in the idea of the ‘double movement’ which he adapts from the work of the maverick Austro-Hungarian socialist active in the mid-20th century, Karl Polyani.
Polyani was an historian of social and economic crises. He saw these as reoccurring periodically in capitalist societies because of the tendency of markets to shake of the restraints which came from being embedded in social structures. This first movement away from social control provoked a second movement on the part of society which sought to contain the turbulence which market forces generate and return to some sort of predictable order.
Tamames argues that it was a crisis of exactly this nature that shook the neoliberal capitalist system in the period around 2008. Neoliberalism had been working since the 1970s to break out of the strictures imposed by the Keynesian post-war order. The ‘embedded liberalism’ of these decades, which functioned through state intervention in national economies, powerful public services and influential trade unions, was overthrown piece-by-piece as markets came to assume a superior role in shaping society.
The 2008 financial crisis and recession that followed exposed the contradictions inherent in the markets which had become disembedded from the purview of society, triggering the second of the double movements in which efforts to regain control were spontaneously contrived. But it could not be assumed that this would involve a simple return to the old forms that operated during the years of the liberal-democratic dispensation. The double movement kick-back comes in two distinct versions, both with a clear populist logic. On one had there is right wing authoritarianism, invariably tinged with xenophobic nationalism; on the other a turbo-charged attempt to reinvent a more inclusive democracy which would be better at expressing the ‘true’ will of the people.
Seen in this way left populism resists being dismissed as a trivial event from which we can now move on. Tamames sees in this Polyanian moment in which society necessarily attempts to reassert itself the basis for testing the ideas that have come from the efforts of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who attempted to elaborate a theory of left populism orientated towards strategic intervention in the political mainstream. He undertakes this task through a close analysis Podemos in Spain, and the campaigns initiated by Bernie Sanders in the US.
In both cases the central problem for the left populist is how they contend with the parties with the long-standing claims on embedded liberalism – the Democratic party in the US and the Socialist party (PSOE) in Spain. Some militants had believed they would simply be swept aside as the new politics of the post-2008 era began to reveal themselves, allowing the left populist movements to become the hegemonic political forces. However, the trajectory in both Spain and the US suggests that was never going to be the case and a more nuanced understanding of the hold of centrist reformism on mass politics needs to be developed. The current status of the Sanders movement – still vibrant but a subordinate component of mainstream democratic politics – and Podemos as a junior partner in a PSOE-led coalition – suggests that the outcome of the necessary engagement with the liberal-social democratic tradition will decide whether left populism really has a future.
On that point a study of the struggles of the Corbyn movement in the British Labour party, carried out as meticulously as Tamames has done with his US and Spanish case examples, would add new insights to the current predicament of left populism. Perhaps the key point to understand is the fact that centrist reformism of the Labour party variety, though in deep trouble, is still managing to function as the chief obstacle to the emergence of a radical democratic politics adequate to the challenge of the unravelling epoch of neoliberalism.
This is a comprehensive list, and some might think it is time to declare the experiment a failure and move on to something else. The case for doing so would be stronger if it could be shown that left populism was what its critics claim to be – an opportunistic effort to trick one’s way into a position of political influence over the unsophisticated masses. But in this account Jorge Tamames searches for deeper roots in the idea of the ‘double movement’ which he adapts from the work of the maverick Austro-Hungarian socialist active in the mid-20th century, Karl Polyani.
Polyani was an historian of social and economic crises. He saw these as reoccurring periodically in capitalist societies because of the tendency of markets to shake of the restraints which came from being embedded in social structures. This first movement away from social control provoked a second movement on the part of society which sought to contain the turbulence which market forces generate and return to some sort of predictable order.
Tamames argues that it was a crisis of exactly this nature that shook the neoliberal capitalist system in the period around 2008. Neoliberalism had been working since the 1970s to break out of the strictures imposed by the Keynesian post-war order. The ‘embedded liberalism’ of these decades, which functioned through state intervention in national economies, powerful public services and influential trade unions, was overthrown piece-by-piece as markets came to assume a superior role in shaping society.
The 2008 financial crisis and recession that followed exposed the contradictions inherent in the markets which had become disembedded from the purview of society, triggering the second of the double movements in which efforts to regain control were spontaneously contrived. But it could not be assumed that this would involve a simple return to the old forms that operated during the years of the liberal-democratic dispensation. The double movement kick-back comes in two distinct versions, both with a clear populist logic. On one had there is right wing authoritarianism, invariably tinged with xenophobic nationalism; on the other a turbo-charged attempt to reinvent a more inclusive democracy which would be better at expressing the ‘true’ will of the people.
Seen in this way left populism resists being dismissed as a trivial event from which we can now move on. Tamames sees in this Polyanian moment in which society necessarily attempts to reassert itself the basis for testing the ideas that have come from the efforts of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who attempted to elaborate a theory of left populism orientated towards strategic intervention in the political mainstream. He undertakes this task through a close analysis Podemos in Spain, and the campaigns initiated by Bernie Sanders in the US.
In both cases the central problem for the left populist is how they contend with the parties with the long-standing claims on embedded liberalism – the Democratic party in the US and the Socialist party (PSOE) in Spain. Some militants had believed they would simply be swept aside as the new politics of the post-2008 era began to reveal themselves, allowing the left populist movements to become the hegemonic political forces. However, the trajectory in both Spain and the US suggests that was never going to be the case and a more nuanced understanding of the hold of centrist reformism on mass politics needs to be developed. The current status of the Sanders movement – still vibrant but a subordinate component of mainstream democratic politics – and Podemos as a junior partner in a PSOE-led coalition – suggests that the outcome of the necessary engagement with the liberal-social democratic tradition will decide whether left populism really has a future.
On that point a study of the struggles of the Corbyn movement in the British Labour party, carried out as meticulously as Tamames has done with his US and Spanish case examples, would add new insights to the current predicament of left populism. Perhaps the key point to understand is the fact that centrist reformism of the Labour party variety, though in deep trouble, is still managing to function as the chief obstacle to the emergence of a radical democratic politics adequate to the challenge of the unravelling epoch of neoliberalism.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews