Unpacking ‘authoritarian populism’ and rural politics: some comments on ERPI

ABSTRACT

This paper provides an overview of work published under the auspices of ERPI, which remains somewhat elusive as a coherent intellectual and political project. I comment on several matters including lack of distinction between the ‘agrarian’ and the ‘rural’, issues of (spatial) scale and temporality and of identifying agrarian and rural classes, the costs as well as possible benefits of embracing the ambiguities of populism, and instances of ‘resistance’ to ‘authoritarian populism’ that are reported and proposed. The overall conclusion is that ERPI requires a more consistent, sharper and fuller class-based approach.

KEYWORDS:

• ERPI project
• authoritarian populism
• rural classes
• rural politics

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Ben Cousins and Jens Lerche, as ever, for useful discussions and comments, also to two thoughtful anonymous referees for the Journal, all of whom are absolved from the failings of the final product.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The conference papers can be found at https://www.tni.org/en/search/language/en?search=ERPI.

2 How ‘an anarchist lens can help better understand contemporary rural and agrarian politics and the challenges of making emancipatory change.’ (17).

3 See https://www.tni.org/en/page/erpi-opendemocracy

4 Franquesa (2019, 541) also applies a ‘dialectic between revolution and counterrevolution’ in the longue durée of Spain’s modern political history.

5 An implicit reference to the major issues contained in notions and experiences of liberal democracy comes in Monjane and Bruna on the PROSAVANA programme in Mozambique, a joint undertaking between the Mozambican, Brazilian and Japanese governments. Assessing the campaigns of resistance to PROSAVANA by ‘civil society’ in the three countries, they suggest that ‘Despite its controversies, the democratic system in Japan is operating at a much higher degree than in Brazil or Mozambique’ (2020, 89). Also illustrative is Beban et al’s report of the crackdown on any independent journalism in Cambodia given that ‘freedom of the press’ is so often asserted as one of the pillars of liberal democracy, and was mandated in the ‘liberal peace’ of the 1991 Paris Peace Agreement and the new Cambodian Constitution; that ‘freedom’ included the broadcasts of the US government funded Radio Free Asia (Beban, Schoenberger, and Lamb 2020, 99–100).

6 Which is not to deny that analyses of election results can be productive. A positive example is Carolan’s follow-up survey of former Obama voters in Colorado who switched to Trump in 2016 (Carolan 2020), and his explanation in terms of the ‘colour blindness’ of liberal political culture in the USA.

7 And concerning terminology: ‘authoritarian populism’ or ‘populist authoritarianism’ (e.g. Beban, Schoenberger, and Lamb 2020): is there a difference? If so, does it matter? It should as struggles, actual or prospective, between ‘authoritarian’ and non- or anti-authoritarian (progressive) populism are at the core of ERPI’s ‘framing statement’ and explored most fully by Borras (2020), on which more below. Differences between ‘populist’ or non- or anti-populist authoritarianism do not provide the same space for analytical and political exploration.

8 Many ERPI papers begin with various characterisations of ‘authoritarian populism’ which do not need to be listed for the purposes of this commentary. Carolan (2020) prefaces his article with useful observations about the dangers of conflating some of the traits identified as ‘authoritarian populism’.

9 Andrade provides a cogent analysis of the compromised macroeconomic policies of the Workers’ Party presidencies in Brazil from 2003 to 2016, the fetishism of ‘Lulism’ as ‘progressive’ (or ‘pro-poor’) populism, and the (re)formations and manipulations of Brazilian capital, including its powerful agribusiness, during that period. There is, however, nothing on rural (class) constituencies of support of ‘Lulism’, and indeed her principal explanation of Bolsanaro’s victory is the ‘conservatism’ of the ‘informal working class’, manifested again once its gains from welfarist redistribution under Workers’ Party governments were eroded (2020, 9–12, 24). Among ERPI authors published to date Andrade is probably the most sceptical of the claims for ‘progressive’ (‘pro-poor’) populism, both for theoretical reasons and drawing on the experience of ‘Lulism’ in Brazil.

10 See also the strategic contrast between ‘family’ farmers in Western Europe and ‘peasant’ farmers in Central and Eastern Europe sketched by Mamonova and Franquesa (2019).

11 On these themes see the important text by White (in press).

12 ‘The decline of the peasantry as a political factor’ is briefly noted in Bello’s account of the Philippines but mostly concerns serious conflicts within and between the country’s communist parties which undermined their capacities for rural organisation/mobilisation (Bello 2019, 113).

13 Indeed dispute between materialist and discursive interpretations of Thatcherism marked the debate around Stuart Hall’s formulation of ‘authoritarian populism’; see, for example, the critique by Jessop et al. (1984).

14 Kalb (2011) provides a sophisticated theoretical review of material and ideological/cultural dispossession, its dynamics, forms, varieties of experience, and effects.

15 A useful warning against the common temptation to ‘foreshorten’ analyses of politics – perhaps encouraged by a focus on elections? For an interesting discussion in relation to the British Labour Party’s strategy in 2019, see the third of Jeremy Gilbert’s commentaries on the general election of that year (2020).

16 As Ferguson and Li (2018, 3) rightly observe, many in the countryside pursue ‘mixed livelihoods which may have little to do with agriculture’.

17 Webber (2017a) provides an overview of Bolivia’s agrarian structure from 1952 to 2005, and a fuller account of the limited land reforms and their politics after 2005 (336–345). Tilzey’s analysis largely parallels (or follows) that of Webber (2017a) and Webber (2017b). There is a number of recent articles in the Journal of Agrarian Change and Journal of Peasant Studies on the peasantries of Ecuador and their responses to the agrarian policies of the Correa governments between 2006 and 2017, notably that of ‘food sovereignty’; see, inter alia, the illuminating article by Soper (2020) and the references therein. One wonders where her three examples from the Ecuadorean highlands of specialised (indigenous) petty commodity producers of broccoli, milk and quinoa would fit in Tilzey’s schematic of agrarian classes. Surprisingly Roman-Alcalá (forthcoming) uses the residual term ‘non-elite’ to refer to all exploited and subordinated groups, perhaps to avoid what he might see as a straitjacket of class terminology?

18 A tension central to the Marxist tradition and that provides much grist to the mill of its critics. Political practice is rarely informed by any ‘pure’ forms of class consciousness and interest on the part of exploited and oppressed classes.

19 Wright’s legacy is considered by Burawoy (2020) who designates Wright’s ‘two Marxisms’ ‘class without utopia’ and ‘utopia without class’, and Riley (2020) who criticizes both Wright’s and Burawoy’s versions of a ‘Marxist sociology’.

20 The Journal of Peasant Studies publishes many articles on ‘alternative’ experiments in (small) farmer production and marketing, for example, van der van der Ploeg, Ye, and Schneider 2012.

21 See van der Ploeg’s illuminating analysis (2020) of the Dutch ‘farmers’ protests’ of 2019 deploying a reactionary populist discourse and spearheaded by ‘entrepreneurial’ (i.e. capitalist) farmers and their agribusiness allies, who were nonetheless able to generate some support from ‘peasant’-type farmers committed to agroecology and ‘the defense of the rural world’.

22 Exemplified in the class-based (but not ‘economistic’) ethnographies, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, in Kalb and Halmai, eds (2011).

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Henry Bernstein

Henry Bernstein is Adjunct Professor at the College of Humanities and Development Studies (COHD), China Agricultural University, Beijing, and Professor Emeritus of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.