The People Are Not One

Ralph Leonard

November 9, 2026

There is no proletarian socialist movement today. And there hasn’t been one for a very long time. So in its absence, what you will inevitably have is different flavours of petit-bourgeois democratic discontents. Populism, whether in its leftist or rightist flavours, is really a farcical reenactment of the revolt of the Third Estate. The People vs The Elites. The ignored and despised against the arrogant powers that be. Populism almost always takes the form of a plebeian nationalism. It proclaims to represent the ordinary, productive citizens who are the nation, whose interests and desires have been betrayed by a detached, corrupt establishment that monopolises power, sells off the country and has no care for the popular will and whose interests are antagonistic to those of the people.

Both ‘left’ and ‘right’ flavours of populism converge on this basic framework but diverge on their political ends. For instance, according to the ethnocentric and paranoid wing of right-populists, the establishment are, to quote Brecht, in the process of dissolving the people and ‘replacing’ them with a new one through mass immigration and multiculturalism.

The People Are Not One, written by Daniel Tutt and Derick Varn, two notable Millennial leftist intellectuals and podcasters, and published by Revol Press, is exclusively concerned with left-populism. It is rather apt for their pamphlet to come out now and for it to be read in the midst of the wave of left populists represented by Zohran Mamdani and the boost the DSA has gotten from it.  On the other hand, as I am writing, the riots engulfing France and the other Gen-Z revolts around the world express popular discontents with things as they are. Whether it's tailing the Democratic Party or ‘spontaneous’ mass protests and rioting, the left populist mode puts all its cards in the activities of ‘the people’ en toto.

Despite being a very lean book, or more accurately, a pamphlet, at just 80 pages, it is densely packed with theoretical analysis. It does what many inferior books would take 300 pages to do: account for how the Left has come to adopt the populist mode of politics and thus take on its limitations. Both Tutt and Varn clearly demonstrate how adroit they are with the nuances and subtleties of the post-Marxist tendencies that have come to the position of left-populism.

Even though populism arose as a reaction to “liberalisms abstraction of the working class into a cultural category,” it is ultimately a “refuse of bourgeois politics” and is a substitute in the absence of mass politics and the decline of organised labour in the face of automation and the withering away of socialist parties. Instead of ‘the working class’ or ‘the proletariat,’ ‘the people,’ as thinkers like Ernesto Laclau have advocated, have become the new subject through which leftist politics are to be facilitated in the wake of the reality of these developments.

Socialism then becomes a matter of a duel: the people vs the elites, or the 99% vs the 1%, the exploited vs the billionaires. Left-populism doesn’t challenge the terrain of capitalist politics, but reinforces it. In fact, it becomes subordinate to it, which inevitably leads to class collaboration or subordinating the working class to the demands of petit-bourgeois democracy. After all, doesn’t capitalist politics in general always appeal to ‘the people’? Isn’t this the memory of the bourgeois revolutions still imprinted in our politics? Of course, every capitalist politician will say that they represent the will of the people, and their policies are in the interest of society as a whole. They don’t say, “Actually, I represent the elites and the capitalists against the interests of the people.” Indeed, Varn and Tutt note examples of establishment parties using the populist mode like FDR railing against “economic royalists” to advocate for the New Deal. Populism is built into the fabric of capitalist politics.

The gravamen of their argument is that populism “obscures real class antagonisms by projecting a false unity of ‘the people’” that “reduces the working class to an abstract moral category,” which undermines the “work of building a genuine class consciousness and solidarity.” Out of the failures of left populism, our authors argue, a reconstituted socialist politics should take heed of what the old historical Marxist socialists got right and adapt it to our moment to get us out of this political impasse and stagnation.

Tutt and Varn rightly describe left populism as “conceiving class conflict in terms that ultimately serve liberal interests” and “reducing the working class to an abstract and manichean symbol rather than a historically concrete social force.” They trace the history of populism in the United States back to the late 19th century, as represented by the Populist Party and its figurehead William Jennings Bryan. In reaction to America's post-Civil War industrialisation, populist parties arose to express the disaffection of individuals from a wide range of occupations, from artisans to shopkeepers, with the centralisation of economic power, political corruption and proletarianisation that was happening before their eyes. It was the last cry of small capital before being gobbled up by big capital. Its unclear and vague vision and incoherent politics were its Achilles heel. Which meant that it would eventually be swallowed up by and into the Democratic Party, despite the populist’s pretensions to stand for the disaffected hoi polloi against the venal elites.

The models Tutt and Varn pick for socialists to learn from are from the apogee of the Second International: the American Socialist Party led by Eugene Debs, and the German SPD, then the biggest and most influential Marxist party in the world. Both did something that populism couldn’t. They had a clearer theoretical understanding of the conditions of capitalist society and had a coherent politics with the final goal of overcoming capitalism. This politics was based on the class independence of the working class against the capitalist parties, whether "conservative" or "progressive," and the fusion of civil-social and political power. They built up an extensive network of social and cultural institutions, a society within a society, so to speak, by and for the proletariat that would bolster the solidarity and consciousness of the class in its efforts to emancipate itself.

Although Debs’ Socialist Party never got more than 6% of the vote in a presidential election, they do represent the high mark of American socialist politics. American socialism since hasn’t come close. So for Tutt and Varn, it is a model for a potential socialist movement in America to get started.

This doesn’t mean our authors are nostalgists. They are perfectly aware that the world of Debs, Kautsky and Lenin is not our world. Any effort to reapply the merger thesis, where the socialist intelligentsia and the workers’ movements fuse into one and the same movement, would have to grapple with the realities of class fragmentation from the two streams of atomisation and lumpenisation that fuel working class alienation today and are a serious threat to the “presentation of the social and political interests of the wider class,” and the problem of intellectuals that are prone to be beholden to NGOs and liberal civil society organisations.

Unsurprisingly, one can’t talk about left-populism without bringing up the professional managerial class (or PMC): The bêtes noires of many people on the left and beyond because of their reputation for being the inventors and popularisers of “wokeness,” which has had baleful effects on the left as well as diverting a potential socialist politics to the ends of progressivism, which, despite some ‘radical’ gesticulating, just means capitalist politics. Unlike the Ehrenreichs who coined the term, they, I think, correctly, see the PMC as “strata” within the petit-bourgeoisie that do mental labour and not as a “class” in a Marxist sense. Though, conversely,  I will push back slightly on this to state that the PMC is not a singular strata but is itself composed of multiple strata. So-called “wokeness” is a PMC ideology. But so is anti-wokeness. Many of the purveyors of anti-wokeness also come from the PMC. They too are products of “elite overproduction” and use their culture war grievances to launch insurgent disruption and carve out their own market share against the woke PMC who use identity politics and DEI to solidify their institutional control. The war over ‘wokeness’ is in large part an intra-PMC civil war.

Even though they believe this strata poses problems for socialist politics, they critique populists who have a simplistic “PMC vs the workers” class struggle mindset. Now, they don’t want to dispense with the PMC entirely. One can’t. In any socialist movement there will inevitably be PMC types involved — some “class traitors” will be needed. If they critique left-populists for subordinating themselves to capitalist politics, which means tailing the Democrats, they also critique the communizer tendencies for verging on populism in their own way, despite their own criticisms of populism, for their reliance on spontaneous movements and “subtractive politics.” This is very pertinent with the recent riots in France since you will get some callow leftists who will romanticise these riots — excuse me, “revolts” — with the spectre of 68 in mind, especially as they seem to be unencumbered by any organised political party. But as was the case with the George Floyd riots in 2020, mass protests can absolutely be diverted into capitalist politics. You won’t get anything close to socialism out of them. Instead, you’ll just get bourgeois ‘law and order’ from the bonapartist state.

Which then raises the question of how Marxism fits into all this? They object to Musa Al-Gharbi’s portrayal of Marxism “as the predominant ideology animating the vanguard of the upper middle class” where it is “stripped of its foundational principles“and becomes an “ideology that affirms rather than challenges the imperative of subjective authenticity.” But isn’t Al-Gharbi correct, at least as things stand? For a lot of ‘Marxists,' Marxism is something that affirms rather than challenges: it functions as an all-encompassing economic ‘theory’ that provides simple answers and resolutions rather than raises challenging questions. In actuality, it becomes an elaborated faux ‘scientific’ rationalisation of what are basically petit-bourgeois and technocratic demands. Actually existing Marxism has tragically become an ideology for the wannabe administrators of society rather than its emancipators. Though Tutt and Varn are right to state that Marxism might offer a “non-elite and non-managerial form of politics.” The problem is it doesn’t at the moment, but that doesn’t mean it cannot do so again as it once did.

Populism emerges from the absence, the void, of a socialist politics. Following from the late Mike Davis, they see three barriers to a “constructive socialist strategy”: the ideological hegemony of liberalism, the question of maintaining solidarity in the face of bourgeois politics and not allowing ills like identity politics to sow discord within the movement and the “necessity of our movement to adequately address imperialism and international solidarity with the global working class.”

I want to raise a few issues. Of course liberalism is ‘hegemonic.’ It is the ‘common sense’ of our bourgeois society. Not just of the middle classes and the high bourgeoisie, but also the working class. One should be careful of not falling into straight-up anti-liberalism, let alone illiberalism (though Varn and Tutt don’t do that). This liberal common sense is going to be useful and shouldn’t be dispensed with, especially when realising that the capitalist society we live in goes against the liberal values it proclaims, usually in the form of the bonapartist-imperialist state, which is not subordinate to society but administers it from on high. It is in fact the prelude to a socialist politics. One can only overcome the ‘hegemony’ of liberalism by reaching and demonstrating the limits of liberalism concretely in practice. Though liberalism is by no means the end point, it will inevitably be our starting point.

It is good that they raise the question of imperialism and internationalism, especially now with the Third Gulf War (which intriguingly, despite being unpopular, hasn’t provoked an anti-war movement unlike the wars of the War on Terror) and the afterlife of the student protests against the democide in Gaza. Though it would’ve been interesting to see an analysis of how left populism sees and grapples with the question of imperialism and how it differs from a Marxist and proletarian socialist approach. Mamdani as a left populist came into power in New York with the support of the Palestine solidarity activists in part because of his stances against the democide in Gaza and how US aid to Israel is detrimental to the interests of the American people and should be directed to domestic priorities, though beneficial to the elites (a sentiment echoed by another left-populist, now newly minted US Senator, Abdul El-Sayed). For some of Mamdani’s supporters, Gaza became a symbol of their own disaffection with the ‘system’ that has no future for them, which he translated into ‘hope.’ But already there are fractures within this segment of his support base and alienation caused by his triangulation. But such is the case with capitalist politics.

In any case, the trouble with invoking ‘our movement’ in this sense is that there is no ‘movement’ in any real sense that is in a place or has earned the right to do such a thing. Truth is, we are starting from ground zero. We are in a pre-political moment. We are at the stage where it is necessary to build new civil society institutions, where the working class can organise for itself, which is going to look like anarchism initially, before we can even talk about a ‘party.’ To paraphrase Chris Cutrone, such a movement must develop into something between the Church and the gangs in that it becomes impossible for the state to extinguish the movement through repression because it is that deeply rooted in society.

There is no easy or quick shortcut. The struggle to reconstitute international socialism is a long-term project that will take decades to come to fruition. Many of us who are still young will be very old on an optimistic timeline, but probably dead once that happens. Do we have the patience for that? To struggle for something that we will probably never see the fruits of?

Tutt and Varn have intelligently and exquisitely demonstrated the limits of left-populism. The deficiencies, defeats and failures of Sanders, Corbynism, Podemos and the rest show it won’t lead anywhere productive for the left. It will be the same for Mamdanism (as some of his fans are starting to realise) and the rest of the post-Bernie left populism that is currently experiencing a high with their victories in the US mid-term elections. Now more than ever, an independent working class party for socialism is as necessary as it has ever been. Of course, we can’t download wholesale the apogee of the strategies of the Second International onto our time. But we can adapt it for the 21st century. It’ll be different, but it will rhyme too.

They aren’t the only ones to have come to this conclusion. Indeed, The Campaign for a Socialist Party is premised on this. The real issue is not whether left-populism has failed or is a useful vehicle for socialist politics, but where to go next? This question has been active for years even if many are only arriving at it now. Even though they are fine with various tactics, whether tenant organising or the rank-and-file strategy — not on their own but within a fully developed socialist ecosystem — there is a lacuna in Tutt and Varn’s book regarding the acknowledgement of any projects they feel might be going in the right direction of “rebuilding the institutions of the working class.” In fairness, this is understandable. There is no guarantee that any potential project will succeed, given the mountain of failures in the past. Maybe they don’t want to put their hopes into something that will likely fail and just produce more disillusionment and passivity? Maybe the hegemony of liberalism, the culture war divisions and the decomposition of the working class are so great that they can’t really be overcome or reversed to find a new left. So, in this sense, there is a natural limit to Tutt and Varn’s critique.

The real marker for any socialism is if it can reach and resonate with ‘normie’ working class people, whether ‘native’ or ‘immigrant’ within civil society, the sort of people who barely vote and are more or less disengaged from mainstream politics, and not just be another instance of declassé overeducated petit-bourgeois intellectuals talking to themselves.

We mustn’t forget that capitalism is a global revolutionary project and the modern United States is the highest expression of it. This is why the biggest test for any project of reconstituting socialism is the United States. Can a socialist party numbering in the millions be developed in the core of capitalism and the core of global politics (or ‘imperialism’)? This is the big challenge. A big challenge because it means we don’t just need to match Debs’ socialist party, but surpass it.

A socialist party in the United States is in the interests of the global working class. Not just as spectators, but also as participants, given that the American working class has been and conitnues to be greatly formed by migration, through which it is connected to every continent on earth. Populism in the crisis of neoliberalism in part arose as a reaction to the politics of the ‘Third Way.’ Perhaps we can recover the term third way. That against the two camps of the capitalist parties, there is the possibility of developing a tertium quid, or what Trotsky once called “a third, independent, sovereign camp of the proletariat, that camp upon which, in point of fact, the future of humanity depends.” One that isn’t doing capitalist politics and won’t subordinate itself to it. “Not one man or one penny for this rotten system!" but something else entirely: international socialism. Hopefully it starts soon.